Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Jehovahs Messiah (1971)

About This Lecture

This lecture, part of Neville's group of biblical-reference talks from 1971, examines the figure of the Messiah, Jehovah's anointed one, and relocates him from external history to the inner life of every person. For Neville the prophecies of a coming Messiah are not records of a single past event nor predictions of one future arrival, but a pattern destined to be fulfilled in each individual when God awakens within. The anointed one is less a person met on a road than a destiny carried in every soul.

Working through scripture in his characteristic way, Neville treats the messianic promise as the unveiling of the I AM, the divine identity hidden in man. He returns to the revelation at the burning bush, where God names himself I AM, and holds it beside the messianic texts to show that Jehovah and the Messiah are not two beings but one reality experienced in stages. First there is the creative power one uses, often unknowingly, as imagination; then there is its eventual self-recognition as God. The anointing, in this reading, is the inner experience by which a person discovers that he himself is the one the prophets foretold, the bearer of the divine spirit named in scripture.

The lecture therefore reads the messianic texts as the autobiography of the awakening soul. Neville encourages his listeners to take the prophecies personally rather than historically, to expect the very series of mystical events the scriptures describe to unfold within their own consciousness in due course. He is consistent that scripture is fulfilled not out in the world of dates and places but within the individual, and that the listener is meant to be the stage on which the messianic drama plays. The titles and promises heaped on the anointed one are, for Neville, descriptions of what each person will one day know himself to be.

Alongside this mystical reading he keeps his practical thread firmly in hand, that the I AM addressed in scripture is the same imaginative power by which one shapes daily experience. The God who will be revealed as one's own Messiah is the same consciousness one uses now to assume states and reshape circumstance, so the practical and the prophetic are continuous. To apply the lecture is to live as though the prophecy concerned you directly: to honor your own I AM as the anointed creative power, to use it deliberately to better your world, and to await with confidence the inner revelation that confirms your identity. In practice this dual reading asks the listener to do two things at once. First, to use the creative I AM deliberately in daily life, assuming the states one desires and persisting in them, since the power foretold as the anointed one is the same power one wields whenever one imagines. Second, to read the prophetic scriptures as a description of inner events appointed to unfold in due time, and so to wait for the revelation neither anxiously nor passively but with the quiet confidence of one who knows the outcome is assured. The result is a sustained meditation on identity, asking who Jehovah's Messiah truly is and answering that the figure foretold across the prophets turns out to be the listener's own deeper self, the anointed I AM, awaiting its appointed revelation.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Exodus 3:14, Psalm 2, Isaiah 45:1.