If we observe Jesus’ words and actions carefully, we discover that he did not live in lack, but in the fullness of the Spirit. His teaching was not one of poverty, but of inner power: the power of one who has overcome the limitations of matter, and that is wealth of incalculable value. Who is richer: the created being or the Creator? Jesus moved among his own with the confidence of someone who had found the source of all abundance. Even though he was, like all of us, a created being, he had united himself with the Source, the Origin of Power. That is why he rebuked his disciples, saying, “You of little faith,” because they were poor in their trust in the power of God already dwelling within them. In God lies the power that all of us long for, and God created us to share it with us. But that creative force—flowing like the waters of a boundless river—is not entrusted to one who lacks integrity, because integrity is the channel through which that power can flow without deviation or corruption.
Centuries earlier, in the days of Elisha, when the prophet was sick and near death, King Joash came to see him. The prophet told him to take a bow and some arrows and shoot toward the east, as a sign of victory over Syria. Then he ordered him, “Take the arrows and strike the ground.” The king struck the ground three times and stopped. Elisha became angry and said to him, “Why did you strike only three times? If you had struck five or six times, you would have completely defeated Syria. Now you will defeat it only three times.” The king not only showed little confidence, but acted in a small, limited, stingy way. He should have struck with greatness, with force, with abundance. For that is how the Spirit of God is: it does not limit itself, it does not measure itself, it does not settle for the minimum.
Jesus lived as someone who appeared to have nothing, yet was full of power. He did not worry about what to eat or drink; if necessary, he could find a gold coin in the mouth of a fish or multiply one loaf into thousands. Why did he do this? To show the immense power of a life transformed by the Spirit. Jesus knew that his possibilities were almost limitless, and that only the body could impose limits if his confidence wavered. He also knew that we could have that same power, if we chose to. That is why he demonstrated it: so that we would understand that the power of God is not outside us, but within the human being who believes.
The official version of the events of Jesus’ life left us with many interpretations. Unfortunately, we were rarely told clearly that these were personal conclusions and attempts to explain difficult events or statements. In other words, many accounts were left open—with full legitimacy—for others to reflect on or discern their true meaning. And since we are analyzing Jesus’ words to his disciples about faith, let us now explore the events in Gethsemane from another perspective: physics.
The human body is made for Earth’s gravity. Our muscles, bones, and nervous system constantly work against that force. That is why, when Jesus asks his disciples to watch and pray, their bodies “pull them downward”: fatigue, drowsiness, the inability to stay awake. Jesus, on the other hand, was sustained by the Spirit: the weight of the spiritual in him was greater than that of the flesh. His complaint then makes sense: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” In physical terms: the spirit tends upward, but the body—adapted to gravity—gives in. In the absence of gravity, the body feels weak and fatigue increases. Although gravity is not the direct cause of fatigue, it creates the conditions that limit the body. In other words, our bodies depend on gravity, but are also enslaved by it.
When Jesus walked on water, he was not exerting a physical force upon it; rather, his Spirit governed his body. His matter was freed, even if only partially, from that subjection. Had he rested his normal weight upon the water, he would have sunk. But it was not the flesh that weighed more—it was the Spirit within him. The human body is adapted to gravity and lives pulled downward. The spirit, however, is not physical and is therefore not dragged by gravity. That is why we say the spirit tends upward—not because it has its own physical impulse, but because it is free from that law. When a person lives only in matter, they fall under the weight of the body, as happened to the disciples who could not keep watch in Gethsemane. In other words, the body leans on gravity to stand, but the spirit leans on the Spirit of God to remain upright. When the Spirit leads, the body itself submits to the spiritual order and ceases, when necessary, to obey gravity. That is what Jesus showed: walking on water or remaining awake in the midst of agony was possible because the Spirit weighed more in him than the flesh.
That is what Jesus tried to show his disciples in Gethsemane. They fell asleep under the weight of the body, but the spirit within him was awake, free, not dragged downward. The spirit does not bow to gravity, and when it lives within us, it is capable of lifting even this body that deteriorates—making it float or walk upon the waters of a lake as if on solid ground. In Gethsemane, the disciples may have felt exhausted not only from physical fatigue, but also from all they had done with Jesus before. They had been healing the sick and freeing people from oppressive spirits, and that kind of work is not like carrying bags or working with one’s hands; it is done in the spirit, not in the flesh. The weariness of moving in the spiritual realm is not measured in calories, but the body still feels it, because it is not accustomed to sustaining itself on that plane.
Science explains it differently: when the body’s relationship with gravity is altered—whether by excess or by absence—fatigue appears. Likewise, when we move intensely in the spiritual realm, the body reacts, because it is not designed to live permanently outside the weight of the earth. Perhaps that is why the disciples slept so deeply. It was not laziness; it was that the flesh weighed more than the spirit in them. They were making a spiritual effort within a body adapted to gravity, constantly pulled downward.
When the body is subjected to a lack of gravity or to forces greater than usual—what are called G-forces—something within it changes. Muscles, nerves, and blood must adapt to a different pressure, and that effort is felt as fatigue. In other words, it is not gravity itself that exhausts us, but the work the body must do to adapt when that force is absent or intensified. That may have been what happened to the disciples. It was not indifference; it was the body responding to a force that was not its own—the spiritual one. When manifestations of the Spirit occurred in them, the force of the earth loosened its hold, momentarily slipping beyond gravity’s reach. That imbalance between body and spirit produced deep sleep: the sleep of one who touches the eternal and returns to the dust.
I know this is possible: the Spirit can overcome gravitational force. When the Spirit leads, gravity loses its dominion. What is heavy becomes light, what falls is sustained, and the body obeys another law—not the law of the earth, but the spiritual law of heaven. Jesus lived this as well. That is why he could walk on water and remain firm when others collapsed under fatigue.
Does this not also prove the alteration described in ancient books about Adam and Eve? They lived in a spiritual state, free from gravity and physical limitations. But when they transgressed, they were transformed: they received skin and organs, and their bodies became heavy, subject to time and dust. It was a profound change: from a spiritual state to a physical one.
The Book of the Life of Adam and Eve recounts that upon leaving the Garden, they were terrified and fell face down to the ground. They must have felt intense fear at not understanding what was happening to their bodies. Yet their fall may not have been due only to fear, but also to the first exposure of the human body to gravitational force—or, in physical terms, a sudden gravitational coupling while embodiment was still in process.
Adam and Eve were the only ones who underwent a direct transformation and embodiment, a passage from the spiritual to matter. And in the same way, the final generation, when this material cycle is completed according to God’s design, will experience a similar transformation—but in reverse: from matter back to spirit. Not even Jesus went through that first experience; he, like all of us, was born into a fully formed human body, under the earthly condition inherited from them.
What happened to the disciples in Gethsemane reflects that same tension. By moving intensely in the spirit, their bodies experienced moments of loosened gravity, producing overwhelming fatigue. Jesus, more accustomed to that state, could sustain himself without collapsing. But they, like us, felt firsthand what it means to stand between two states: the spiritual that rises and the physical that falls. That is why balance is so important. Seen this way, Gethsemane becomes a miniature echo of what happened in Eden: the human body is not made to sustain the spiritual permanently unless it is completely transformed. And that plane has not yet been reached.
According to the Book of Adam and Eve, when they were transformed, they received skin and organs they had not had before, and began to notice that their eyes, strength, and appearance were no longer as they had been in Eden. One could say they underwent a “physiological reprogramming,” like an astronaut, but far more radical and permanent. Just as the absence of gravity causes wrinkles, bone loss, or muscle wasting, in Adam and Eve the shift from spiritual to physical caused visible deterioration: aging skin, tiring organs, bodies subject to corruption.
Wrinkles and sagging skin are not only a matter of age or genetics. Day after day, gravity pulls us downward, stretching the skin, straining tissues, wearing down what was once firm. The material body is destined for that fate: to be pulled down, to be corrupted. But the spirit has no wrinkles. It does not sag, stretch, or wear out. Why? Because it is not physical and is not subject to gravity. That is the great difference: while the body deteriorates, the spirit remains intact. For this logical reason, God promised us strength and vigor amid the natural wear of the human body and the effect of the earth’s force upon us, saying: “Blessed are those who do not follow the counsel of the wicked… They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season and whose leaves do not wither. Whatever they do prospers.”
This renewal is possible because we live more in the conditions of the spirit than in the elementary state of the physical body, which deteriorates quickly. The Spirit within us is like the waters of the river that keep our body—the tree—strong and its leaves green. Green leaves are symbols of spring and summer: renewal, movement, and energy. The Spirit renews and sustains the body, keeping it full of vigor while we live. It does not eliminate aging or death, but it gives freshness and strength even amid decay.
What we see in astronauts offers a clue. When a body moves in the absence of gravity, its physiology changes: blood redistributes, the heart deconditions, muscles and bones weaken, and upon returning to Earth there is fatigue, dizziness, and immense effort to readapt. If that happens in months, what must it have been like for Adam and Eve to move from a spiritual body—without gravity—to a physical body, heavy and pulled downward? It is not difficult to understand their lament, or why they said, “What is this body compared to the one we had before?”
After leaving the Garden and feeling the heaviness and darkness, Adam said to Eve, “What is this body we are in now? Before we were luminous, but now we are covered with weight. Is this the death God warned us about?”
According to this tradition, the Lord had made them fit to live in the Garden, and when they had to leave due to the breaking of the Covenant, He altered them to make them fit to live in a material world, for the Garden was a portion of God’s domain on earth, and that is spiritual. To make them fit, He covered them with skin. The text says: “When I learned of your transgression, I deprived you of this bright light. Yet in My mercy I did not turn you into darkness, but made you a body of flesh and gave you skin that can endure cold and heat.” This shows that God was acting in mercy so they would not become eternal darkness.
When Scripture speaks of their nakedness, it does not mean a lack of clothing as we imagine today. Nakedness meant the withdrawal of the divine light that had clothed them. They had been dressed in God’s glory, and upon transgressing, that light departed and they were left naked. God did not kill animals to make garments; rather, an alteration of their bodily state occurred: from a spiritual, non-biological body to an animal, material body subject to hunger, fatigue, and gravity. In other words, they moved from the spiritual domain to the earthly one.
Had they not been transformed into a physical condition, they would have suffered the eternal death of the fallen angels, who are not dead in a mortal sense but live in perpetual spiritual separation from God’s light. In this body, however, we have the opportunity to return to the Creator and undergo spiritual transformation—to return to our origin and recover the immense power we lost.
Our lives can reach unimaginable levels through the power of the Spirit, but to do so we must overcome evil in everyday life. That is not impossible, because God gives us a new spirit, with power and the will not to harm ourselves or others when we make peace with Him.
Jesus was not the only one who lived a life transformed by the Spirit; Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Deborah, and others also showed clear signs of that transformation and of God’s power. Yet Jesus received the special task of teaching us how to live it and showing us that we too could experience it. Thus, when he said, “I and the Father are one,” he was not proclaiming himself God, but pointing to the spiritual unity every human being can recover through reconciliation. A similar expression appears in the Book of the Life of Adam and Eve, where Eve recalls her creation and says, “O Lord, he and I are one, and You, O Elohim, are our Creator.” This does not mean that Adam or Eve were God, but that they shared the spiritual unity with which they were created. God created us from His Spirit so that we might participate in His unique nature. Just as He drew His son from His Spirit, He drew Eve from Adam’s spirit so that together they could experience a unique and complete union. The creation of our first ancestors was the product of God’s immense love.
The restoration of the spiritual body is not a myth or a metaphor. It is the fulfillment of the law of heaven within us: the moment when gravity ceases to dominate and the body once again obeys the Spirit. That will be the day when the cycle of embodiment is closed and creation itself—together with us—returns to being light, as in the beginning.