Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: My Husband (1965)

About This Lecture

Delivered on April 30, 1965, "My Husband" takes its theme from Isaiah 54:5, "For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name." Neville Goddard uses this striking marital image to describe the relationship between the individual and the creative power he identifies as God within, the human imagination. Just as Isaiah portrays the Lord calling back a forsaken wife and promising to redeem her, Neville reads the human story as a drama in which the soul, seemingly abandoned to the hardships of experience, is in fact destined for reunion with its true husband and maker. The language of marriage, far from being mere poetry, becomes for him the most accurate picture of how consciousness and its creative power belong to one another.

Neville draws closely on the chapter's contrast between the names a person gives the divine. In bondage one may cry "my Baal," naming God as a distant lord or master to be feared and obeyed; but at the end of the long day of experience, when darkness gives way to light, the relationship is recognized as intimate and tender, and one says instead "my husband." This shift in naming dramatizes the spiritual maturing of the individual, the passage from feeling ruled by an external power to discovering that the creative source has been one's own innermost self all along. The same God once experienced as a stern overlord is found at last to be the beloved, wedded to the soul in unbreakable union.

Underlying this is Neville's foundational teaching that imagination is God and that the events of scripture are inner experiences rather than ancient history. To call the Maker one's husband is to recognize that the power which forms one's world is not separate from oneself but is the very imagination one uses, day in and day out, to assume states and feel them real. The marriage Isaiah promises is therefore the conscious union of the individual with their own creative consciousness, a wedding that takes place within and is consummated as awakening.

The lecture frames human history and personal suffering as purposeful, a story moving inexorably toward the fulfillment of God's intention to wed himself to humanity. The barrenness and reproach that Isaiah's forsaken wife endures correspond, in Neville's reading, to the seasons of frustration and apparent abandonment in a person's life. These are not signs that the union has failed but stages in a redemptive courtship, the necessary estrangement that makes the eventual reunion meaningful and complete. Nothing in the drama is wasted; even the desolation serves the marriage.

Neville accordingly encourages the listener to read their own struggles in this light, as part of a redemptive courtship rather than meaningless hardship. Practically, this means refusing to interpret difficulty as evidence of being forsaken and instead trusting the inner power as a faithful spouse who cannot finally abandon the soul to which it is bound. He invites his audience to look forward to the inner experience in which the union is consummated and the imagination is known, lovingly and unmistakably, as one's own husband, maker, and very self.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Isaiah 54:5, Hosea 2:16.