[518] Now this includes a lot of critical consequences. The first is: the moral imperative^a doesn't come from anything else than from our essential being. When I refer to the Ten Commandments, then one could say: "They come from God." But what does that mean? Does that mean that there is a Highest Being who, as all good tyrants do, gives laws according to His wilfullness, or in order to protect himself? That is certainly not an image which is worthy of God, and everybody who has this image of God should resist Him---as one resists earthly tyrants, so one should resist also Heavenly tyrants! "The will of God"---if I use that often mistaken phrase---is our essential being, put against us, in the Commandments and their interpretations by the Sermon on the Mount. None of the Ten Command-

ments is something which is given to us from outside, but each of them expresses the true structure of man in himself and in relation to the others.. There are many consequences which we will discuss next time, with respect to the CONCRETENESS of the law, but I don't go into this in this moment. They all are our essential being put against us, as commandment, as that which ought-to-be^b. It is not only a GOD, who has not power to command anything which is not corresponding to our nature---if He did, and had the power to destroy us, alright!: He might, but He wouldn't really

hurt the center of our being, namely our inner structure, what we essentially are. And in Christianity the idea that the God of the law^c is something ELSE than the God of creation^d, is denied, in very hard fights in the early Church against, for instance, a man whom some of you know from Church history, Marcion,^e whose idea was---this man represented a whole group of people, a whole movement of his time, which put the Creator-God against the Savior-God and made the law, which