wind

85:3.4The wor­ship of in­sects and other an­i­mals was pro­moted by a later mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the golden rule—do­ing to oth­ers (ev­ery form of life) as you would be done by. The an­cients once be­lieved that all winds were pro­duced by the wings of birds and there­fore both feared and wor­shiped all winged crea­tures. The early Nordics thought that eclipses were caused by a wolf that de­voured a por­tion of the sun or moon. The Hin­dus of­ten show Vishnu with a horse’s head. Many times an an­i­mal sym­bol stands for a for­got­ten god or a van­ished cult. Early in evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion the lamb be­came the typ­i­cal sac­ri­fi­cial an­i­mal and the dove the sym­bol of peace and love.

85:4.2Many things and nu­mer­ous events have func­tioned as re­li­gious stim­uli to dif­fer­ent peo­ples in dif­fer­ent ages. A rain­bow is yet wor­shiped by many of the hill tribes of In­dia. In both In­dia and Africa the rain­bow is thought to be a gi­gan­tic ce­les­tial snake; He­brews and Chris­tians re­gard it as “the bow of prom­ise.” Like­wise, in­flu­ences re­garded as benef­i­cent in one part of the world may be looked upon as ma­lig­nant in other re­gions. The east wind is a god in South Amer­ica, for it brings rain; in In­dia it is a devil be­cause it brings dust and causes drought. The an­cient Bed­ou­ins be­lieved that a na­ture spirit pro­duced the sand whirls, and even in the times of Moses be­lief in na­ture spir­its was strong enough to in­sure their per­pet­u­a­tion in He­brew the­ol­ogy as an­gels of fire, wa­ter, and air.

142:6.5Je­sus said: “Nev­er­the­less, I de­clare to you, ex­cept a man be born of the spirit, he can­not en­ter into the king­dom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. But you should not mar­vel that I said you must be born from above. When the wind blows, you hear the rus­tle of the leaves, but you do not see the wind—whence it comes or whither it goes—and so it is with ev­ery­one born of the spirit. With the eyes of the flesh you can be­hold the man­i­fes­ta­tions of the spirit, but you can­not ac­tu­ally dis­cern the spirit.”

131:2.9“The Lord is near all who call upon him in sin­cer­ity and in truth. Weep­ing may en­dure for a night, but joy comes in the morn­ing. A merry heart does good like a med­i­cine. No good thing will God with­hold from those who walk up­rightly. Fear God and keep his com­mand­ments, for this is the whole duty of man. Thus says the Lord who cre­ated the heav­ens and who formed the earth: ‘There is no God be­side me, a just God and a sav­ior. Look to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth. If you seek me, you shall find me if you search for me with all your heart.’ The meek shall in­herit the earth and shall de­light them­selves in the abun­dance of peace. Who­ever sows in­iq­uity shall reap calamity; they who sow the wind shall reap the whirl­wind.