Diagrams for Living

Emmet Fox

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062010407

A beloved teacher and best-selling author offersdiagrams for living to show "how you can came outof limitation and find real happiness. "

Fox has inspired millions of people over the past forty years through his simple, practical guidelines. In Diagrams for Living he presents valuable keys to living a more fulfilled life drawn from the eloquent spiritual wisdom of the Bible.

If we read the Bible literally, cautions Fox, we miss the eternal power and personal relevance found in its symbols, allegories, and parables. "Whether you realize it or not, " he writes, "you are on every page from Genesis to Revelation." Fox shows how to read dramatic biblical stories as symbolic diagrams for living that can "show you how to overcome difficulties and problems, and how to give expression to the deep aspirations that lie hidden in your soul." This power to reveal, inspire, and guide makes the Bible's teachings adaptable to everyone at every stage of spiritual development.

Sensible, contemporary, and full of reassurance, Diagrams for Living offers sage counsel from a gifted teacher.

Chapter 1

Your Wrestling Angel

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

GENESIS 32:24

YOU are an important person with a glorious destiny and you have a wonderful biography written about you. It is a very different biography from the usual kind because in addition to being a personal history in which both achievements and shortcomings are noted, it shows you how to overcome difficulties and problems, and how to give expression to the deep aspirations that lie hidden in your soul. It outlines diagrams for living so that you can take the necessary steps to make your life worthwhile and interesting. This biography of you is called the Bible, and, whether you realize it or not, you are on every page from Genesis to Revelation.

The Bible is written in symbol and allegory. Some people know that; yet they continue to read the Bible in the literal way and consequently miss its message of spiritual power. The veil is still over their hearts, as Paul remarked. What do I mean by “symbol”? According to Webster, a symbol is a “sign of … an idea.” It is not the thing itself but it represents it, as the dove is a symbol of peace, and palms are a symbol of victory. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a real man did not go down from Jerusalem on a particular day, nor did a certain Levite actually pass by. Jesus told the story to illustrate a point. In like manner, the story of Adam and Eve is an allegory to explain great spiritual Truths.

The reason why many people have given up the Bible is that they have taken it literally, whereas the Bible was meant to be taken spiritually. They say, “The story of Jonah and the whale cannot be true.” Of course it is not true, in a literal sense. It is an allegory. Nor is it true that the Prodigal Son was a certain young man who went into a far country and then came back and was wined and dined by his father. These things are parables that come to life and reveal diagrams for living when we have the spiritual key.

Everything in the Bible is significant. All the characters, both male and female, illustrate and dramatize certain states of mind that could and do happen to people in this present day, in New York or Paris or Tokyo. The Bible is not just ancient history: it is a living thing for today.

You can find yourself in the Bible, but there is no guarantee you will be pleased when you do! However, if you do not like the picture you see, you can always change from one Bible character to another. In this great play the actors cast themselves. If they do not like the role they find themselves in, they can change to another because the Bible gives us the key to transforming life.

Just as every character in the Bible symbolizes a state of your soul, so does every incident in the Bible signify something that can happen to you. Abraham moving into Canaan; Jesus at the lakeside; Jesus going up to Jerusalem; Paul on the Road to Damascus—all these represent dramatic, powerful, colorful events in your life today, the things that either age you and give you heartbreak, or lift you up to new levels of joy and accomplishment. They are dramatic, symbolic diagrams for living to show you how you can come out of limitation and find real happiness.

Every name in the Bible has a meaning. For that matter, all names have a meaning. Your name represents the idea of you and your life. The life of every man and woman is a parable of the things that have happened to them since they were born. You were born in Los Angeles or Paris or Berlin, let us say. You went to certain schools and churches. You got such and such a job or entered this or that profession. You married or stayed single. You lived in a particular place and did certain things—good things or bad things, wise or foolish things. Your whole life is a parable that symbolizes the kind of person you are, and your name sums up that parable or represents it. In like manner every name in the Bible has a special meaning, representing certain faculties or conditions of the human soul.

The geography of the Bible is significant, too. Egypt, Palestine, Assyria, Babylon, the Mediterranean—all have symbolical meanings. Every river, mountain, lake, desert, etc. represents certain states of consciousness.

Numbers also are used to convey definite ideas and principles. I should point out that the number six—the six-pointed star of David—represents the Old Testament.Six means labor. The Old Testament was founded on the commandments of Moses, which means hard work. It is an external thing but better than nothing. The New Testament expresses seven, and it is the movement from law to grace. Paul has a good deal to say about grace. When we understand the Jesus Christ teaching we are no longer under the law but are under grace.

And finally, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are particularly significant and have a symbolic meaning that runs through the Bible. Jesus makes reference to this when he remarked, “One jot^* or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

The Bible has a center line, a backbone as it were, that hangs upon two ideas, one in the Old Testament and one in the New. In the Old Testament it is the word ISRAEL. In the New Testament it is the name JESUS CHRIST. Israel in the Old and Christ in the New; one preparing the way for the other, and each complete and summarizing the other. They are major keys in the dramatic diagrams for living found throughout the Bible.

Israel in the Old Testament means a man and it means a nation, but more importantly is used symbolically to dramatize your life. Israel concerns your health, your job, your family, your finances, and your every personal problem. They are the things that are bound up with the story and the unfoldment of the history of Israel in the Old Testament.

The story of Israel began with Jacob, one of the most interesting characters in the Bible. There is something painfully familiar about Jacob. He is so very much like our own dear selves. He is not the saint or the mystic. He is every man, the man in the street, you and me. He was selfish, made many mistakes, and did some outright sinning. But there is much more to Jacob than that, just as there is more to each one of us. In spite of all his shortcomings and mistakes, Jacob was uneasy in error. He was always yearning for the higher thing. He had a real desire to be better. Isn’t that like ourselves? Isn’t that the story of the whole human race? We get off the path, we have our problems, but through it all we know there is something better that we can aspire to.

And so the story of Jacob, as indeed the whole of the Bible, gives real clues to the handling of our life and our problems. We might say they are diagrams for living as we act and react in certain ways. The story of Jacob has all the charm of a fairy tale, yet it deals with cold reality, for Jacob was a real person; and his wrestling with the Angel is a great incident in the history of the human race.

Jacob was uneasy in error and that was his outstanding virtue. There is only one thing that can keep you out of the kingdom of God, out of health, happiness, and true success—and that is lying to yourself and refusing to face up to things. That was not one of Jacob’s faults. He had made many mistakes, but he had prayed many times and had overcome them. Indeed, when Jacob was not doing wrong, he was praying! Does that sound like somebody you know?

The account begins with Jacob starting back for his own country. He had very much wronged his brother Esau. That sometimes happens in families. One brother takes advantage of another. Jacob, with the connivance of his mother, had stolen the “blessing” that rightfully belonged to Esau. Consequently, as Jacob started back with his family and servants and flocks and herds, he feared reprisals from his brother—the most natural thing in the world. Jacob had a guilty conscience.

Symbolically, Esau and Jacob, who were twins, represent the lower and the higher nature. Esau represents the lower, the animal nature that has to be redeemed and overcome by Jacob who represents the higher nature.

You may say, “That is very strange. Jacob was a very mean fellow, dishonest, selfish, cowardly. He was the reverse of everything we mean by a gentleman.” That is true. Jacob was all these things and more. The Bible in presenting its characters does not try to cover up or gloss over the bad points just to give a good impression. That may happen with an author writing a biography of a well-known person. But not the Bible. It tells all about its characters, and it uses them to portray states of the human soul.

Esau means “red,” the red earth. He stands for material man. But Esau was not really a bad sort. He was rough and materialistic. He might raise his fist and punch you in the nose, but you always knew where you stood. He was a rough, obvious kind of fellow.

We are told that the infant Jacob, as he was being born, grabbed hold of the heel of his brother Esau, the firstborn. The heel is always symbolic of the weak point in man. Achilles, the hero of The Iliad, had a vulnerable spot in his heel. He was held by the heel by his mother when she dipped him into the river, the waters of which made one invulnerable. A very convenient river to have! Where her hand held his heel, that spot was not affected by the water, and afterward he was conquered by being wounded in that exact place.

In the Bible, too, the heel stands for a weak spot and everybody has one, or two, or perhaps more. The heel is the part of the body that contacts the ground. Esau’s weak spot was his love of material things, his willingness to sacrifice his inheritance for a mess of pottage prepared by his brother, Jacob.

So Esau stands for your material life, for your concept of yourself as a material being before you come into Truth. I didn’t say before you come to church. I said “before you come into Truth.” It is much easier to come into church than into Truth.

If you identify yourself in a purely human and material way—John Smith or Mary Jones, age forty-five, a father who drank and a mother who didn’t love you, annual salary of $10,000 but unending indebtedness, unable to get about too much because of a weak heart, etc.—then you are Esau.

But Jacob, with all his faults, is the spiritual man. That is why Jacob is the Supplanter, which in Hebrew literally means “one who takes the place of another.” This is symbolized in the Bible account by his catching hold of his brother Esau by the heel—Esau’s weak spot. The spiritual idea supplants the material. It is a story of spiritual development. The material man, Esau, is supplanted by enlightened man who knows he is fundamentally a Prince of God with great potential spiritual power.

In the beginning, Jacob had great faults; but something happened to him—and that is the whole theme of the story. Jacob was changed more completely than any character in the Bible. In the long line from Adam to Jesus, some characters improved tremendously, some deteriorated terribly, but no one changed like Jacob. This is why he is so constructively important for us. He shows us the way for the return to God and freedom and harmony.

When we really know and understand Jacob he becomes the most consoling figure in the whole Bible. There is not a fault that you may have that Jacob did not have in the strongest degree. There is not a weakness you would like to overcome nor a mistake you would like to rectify that could not be found in Jacob too.

But then something happened to Jacob. He had been away from his home in a foreign country. He turned and started back home, full of fear and trembling that his brother Esau would retaliate for the wrong Jacob had done to him. He feared not only for his own life, but also that of his family and servants, and the loss of his vast possessions. He knew that everything was at stake.

What did he do? Turn to God first? No. He did as so many of us do. He began to rearrange outer affairs. He divided up his flocks. He put the handmaidens in front—people who he thought did not matter very much. He put them first in the line of danger. Then he took the wife that he did not care for very much, Leah, and she was put in second place. And then the wife he cared for, Rachel, and his favorite child were put in the safe place. How like ourselves! We try to arrange a cavalcade so that the things that we set store by will be a little safer than the things we think we can spare.

Then he sent servants ahead with presents to appease his brother. He drew up elaborate plans so that all might not be lost. And that is what most people do. They write letters. They see people. They make inquiries; they run around, wearing themselves out. They do the outer things first.

Finally, Jacob, who deep down had a real longing for God, came to his senses. He decided to turn to God. The Bible says, “And Jacob was left alone.” Read Genesis 32:24–32. There are only nine verses, but it is a literary masterpiece. “Jacob was left alone.” Avery telling phrase. When the great struggle comes you will always be alone in facing the problem. That is your test. At that time, seemingly encompassed by the terrors of hell, if you turn to God you are going to meet the wrestling Angel. It is something very worthwhile. You will have taken a great stride forward on the spiritual path, and you will find yourself a new man or woman.

Well, Jacob was left alone that night. Darkness or night is one of the great Bible symbols, meaning trouble and limitation. Struggles always come in the dark night of the soul, in blackness and despair. “And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” Later on we are told it was an Angel, but it seemed at first like a man. Our problems are never sublime. They always affect life here on the human plane. It is only later on when the thing is over that it takes angelic form, and we can look back upon the problem as a bad dream. The struggle lasted all night, symbolic of the fact that sometimes difficulties take a lot of prayer and treatment, until we see the dawn of a new day.

“And when [the Angel] saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of [Jacob’s] thigh.” And the Angel said, “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And Jacob said, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. “Jacob, with all his faults, had a real faith in the power of God. He would not accept anything less. He was almost exhausted, everything gone but his faith in God, but he would not let go.

When the dark hour comes and we have to struggle, seemingly alone, that is the time if we hold fast to the Truth, if we will wrestle with our idea of God—that is the time when we are going to get our closest link with God and take our greatest step forward.

And the Angel said unto him, “What is thy name?” And he answered, “Jacob.” And with that the Angel said, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”

The struggle was over; the problem was solved. Esau, his brother, good, generous soul that he was—rough, tough, coarse, crude, honest—forgave him, and Jacob was safe. But Esau could not have done this either if Jacob had not first met the Angel. Jacob’s grasping the heel of his brother Esau at birth was prophetic of the fact that when Jacob was redeemed, he also redeemed Esau. The soul that is illumined, the soul that accepts God, redeems the body.

More important than this, Jacob knew he would never have to meet that problem again. As a result of this experience he came to realize the unreality of matter and the allness of God—or as the Bible says in its Oriental phraseology, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel.”

Jacob had changed. He had a new name. As soon as you change yourself through prayer, your real inner name changes. Now, it is not simply a matter of changing your name. If you are Bill Brown or Mary Smith, changing your name would only upset the income tax people and the landlord, but it would not change the real you. You do not change the inner man by changing the outer name.

Jacob became Israel, and Israel is one of the most significant names in the Bible. It is the central idea that runs through all the Bible, beginning at the 11th chapter of Genesis with the call of Abraham, and ending with the Book of Revelation.

* The smallest Hebrew letter.

Chapter 2

The Balanced Soul

And God said unto him … thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Is-ra-el shall be thy name. … And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be...