Commentary on the Book of Job part fifty five

                                          Job 25:1-6

In Mark 9:50, Jesus further taught that "Salt is good...," which means that Christ is the perfect Preservative who can never lose anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14. But when Jesus used the phrase "if the salt have lost his saltness," He did not mean that Christ could ever lose any of His preservative power. He simply meant whatever has no preservative in it cannot be preserved. That part of man which has no preservative in it is his spiritual death which is totally evil and which Christ will cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15.

In the second part of Mark 9:50, Jesus urges His hearers to receive His "salt" while still alive in the flesh and become saved by His grace. Only those saved by grace get to go to heaven. Those saved by God's consuming fire only get to be recreated to live on God's recreated and renewed earth. Revelation 21:1-5.

In Mark 9:44, 46 and 48, Jesus taught that the "worm," which symbolizes total evil, while in the lake of fire "dieth not." All through the Bible, it teaches that sin and evil equal vanity; that is, both total emptiness and excessive pride. This constitutes a perfect description of that which Satan became.

These facts can only mean that total evil cannot equal nothing. Isaiah 40:17. Total evil has to be less than nothing because the idea of nothing happens to be a perfectly good and useful idea in the Mind of God. God uses the idea of nothing every time He creates a good system because He must exclude; that is, consider as equal to nothing, any idea which will not work in that particular system that He is creating. God does not negate any of the ideas He excludes. They might be useful in other systems He intends to create. He simply considers all excluded ideas to be not apt for a particular system that He is creating. He considers all excluded ideas to be equal to the idea of nothing.

The idea of nothing is absolutely essential for the establishment of reality for both God and man. For example, any person with normal consciousness can only identify oneself and become self-conscious by the realization that this particular person can be no other person in the world but oneself. In other words, one must consider all others to be equal to nothing as far as one's own system is concerned. The others cannot be negated. They can only be excluded from one's own system by the use of the idea of nothing.