Counterparts are powerful, but they also come with a warning. They must be consistent with Truth at all times. They have to be, if they come from God.
It doesn’t take much to turn a blessing into a bombshell. It could be a tiny oversight, like a missing O-ring in a spacecraft, or an intentional spiking of a drink at a party to render the victim defenseless.
Counterparts are vulnerable too. What gives them their power and adaptability is their consistency to Truth, assuming their Source is divine. But when people insert things that are inconsistent with Truth (even the tiniest thing) and then claim that counterparts support their viewpoint, their conclusions should not be depended on.
We need to keep in mind how the Plan of Salvation works, and use that pattern as we examine different counterparts. In the great Plan there is no focus on man (other than his willingness to let God do His gracious work in and through them). Everything is Christ centered. There is no “me” focus in any part of it. In other words, it’s not how I feel about something that matters or how good I am performing. It’s about what God has asked or stated. Emotions are to be under the control of reason, and reason subject to the Word of God. (But as we learn in What Converted Amun?*, there is a place for good works!)
If we remain consistent here we will not go astray in the use of counterparts and with the lessons they can teach us. And those lessons? What kind of things did Jesus learn two thousand years ago (and it wasn’t because He was also God). He did nothing as “the Son of Man” that we cannot do, using the same helps Jesus used. So we can learn as He learned! And what was the end product of His earthly education as a child and young man (back in those “primitive” days)?
“Christ could have opened door after door of science. He could have revealed to men treasures of science on which they might have feasted to the present time. But knowing that this knowledge would have been appropriated to unholy uses, He did not open the door.” {MM 116.3}
Counterpart study is at least one way this can be achieved. It is based on two principles:
1. Creation reveals her Creator (Romans 1:20, “as in the natural, so in the spiritual…”). Since both nature and revelation have the same Author, they will harmonize. “Since the book of nature and the book of revelation bear the impress of the same master mind, they cannot but speak in harmony. By different methods, and in different languages, they witness to the same great truths.” Education, page 128
2. Counterparts teach about each other. This is a great advantage in learning for we now have means to explore in areas we might not have access to otherwise. “Science is ever discovering new wonders; but she brings from her research nothing that, rightly understood, conflicts with divine revelation. The book of nature and the written word shed light upon each other.” ibid
Counterparts are two dissimilar systems that use similar principles of operation but express them in different ways, or, as it says in the above quote “in different languages”. But there is something else they do–they “shed light upon EACH OTHER.”
* What Converted Amun is a study about conversion using an on-foot approach to the sanctuary, and written in a story format. It is available in manuscript form to those who request it (use the Contact page).
