25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will
eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not
life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look
at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and
yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And
which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? 28 And why are you anxious about
clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil
nor spin, 29 yet I
tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if
God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore
do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or
‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For
the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that
you need them all. 33 But
seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will
be added to you.
34 “Therefore do not be
anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for
the day is its own trouble.
When we read gospels we can
understand that the real divine principles can be read very vividly from the
nature. All the principles we can see in the natural and social environment can
be uploaded to the spiritual plane and use it there in spiritual way, to that
extend nature is the first edition of The Bible. So we can abstract many
principles, if we do it very carefully, from our natural as well as social
environment; the above mentioned verses are an example for that fact. Don’t
think that human life is similar to that of the other living creatures and
plants, when we read this or similar parables. As we know, human life is
controlled not only by material environment but by a non-material environment
by which human can influence the former. Both the environments have the same
principles to function.
The processes of imagination
and thought happen in the non-material environment. These processes help us to
process the material world for our requirements like shelter, clothing and food
as mentioned in the above verses. Otherwise, we use very extensively this
spiritual faculty (non-material faculty) to transform material world. In turn,
the processed material world or the world of commodities influences this
non-material sphere destructively, contributing worry, anger, resentment, hate,
envy etc. negatives to this sphere. These affect the human welfare dangerously.
When our faculty of imagination and thought engage in the processing of
material world, it creates material values; that is a truth but not spiritual
values. The values known as spiritual values, some time known as moral values,
are created not in the material environment, in commodities, but in the
non-material one which exists in human beings. So the faculty of imagination,
thought etc. has to be used extensively in the non-material environment to
create spiritual values in order to make possible human welfare to its full
swing. For this purpose Jesus called the people who were busy on Galilee sea
shore to the mountain top, to transform or process human being by processing
the non-material world exists in them, or creating spiritual or moral values in
human beings. Means, bringing people more close to non-material world, known as
kingdom of God.
Look in the verses, when we
begin to think about what to eat, drink and wear, worry also begin to follow. ‘Worry’
is the symbolic representative of all other negatives. Here Jesus advises the
followers to abstract the required principle from the life of birds and plants.
What is that? Each and every member of the animal as well as vegetable kingdoms
has its own offices to function or fulfill.
They not only acquire energy by the form of food from their environment
but execute or fulfill some offices by providing services to their environment.
What they acquire from their environment is what they needed to exist in order
to fulfill their offices that help other members in that system to exist. This
is known as ecosystem. None of them toil, spin, sow, reap and gather to barns,
means they do not gather more than what they needed, they do not participate in
the processing of material world - production of commodities (commodities are, often,
not essential goods). If they had begun to do so, all the ecosystems would have
been sabotaged and utmost destruction would have been the result. But they
exist without encroaching and exploiting one another, maintaining the right
things in relations – righteousness. So they get what they needed to exist.
In the same way we have to
withdraw from the extensive and intensive activities of processing the material
world, producing commodities or material values, that sabotage the balance not
only in the material environment but in the non-material environment also, and
active in the processing of non-material world (Kingdom of God) producing moral
or spiritual values that lead us to maintain righteousness. This fact has been
mentioned in verse 33,
‘But seeks first
the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to
you’.
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