© 1996 Ken Glasziou
© 1996 The Brotherhood of Man Library
With Jesus birthday coming up in August, perhaps it is the time to give thought to why one who is, to all intents and purposes, God to his own universe, nevertheless should have had come to this lowly planet as a helpless babe and live among us, unrecognized. Abstracting from UB 120:0.4, we find these statements:
Michael had a double purpose in coming to our planet as Jesus of Nazareth.
First, he was completing the required bestowal experiences demanded of all Creator Sons before they can assume complete sovereignty of their created universe.
Second, he was aspiring to the privilege of representing the maximum authority of the Paradise Trinity that can be exercised in the direct and personal administration of a local universe.
The most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth. (UB 2:0.2)
Your anxieties and sorrows, your trials and disappointments, are just as much a part of the divine plan on your sphere as are the exquisite perfection and infinite adaptation of all things to their supreme purpose on the worlds of the central and perfect universe. (UB 23:2.12)
In undertaking his mission in this way, successful completion meant that he became a Master Creator Son. Of interest to us Urantians is how these tasks were to be achieved. To find out we go to the bestowal charge of Immanuel, the ambassador of the Paradise Trinity, which includes the following:
It appears that Immanuel and Michael had consulted together quite extensively concerning the what, how, and why of the bestowal. Immanuel went on to say:
Your great mission to be realized and experienced in the mortal incarnation is embraced in your decision to live a life wholeheartedly motivated to do the will of your Paradise Father, thus to reveal God, your Father, in the flesh and especially to the creatures of the flesh.
Immanuel then asked Jesus to:
Exhibit in your one short life in the flesh, as it has never been seen in all Nebadon, the transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing human during the short career of human existence.
and to show to the entire universe, the achievement of God seeking man and finding him and the phenomenon of man seeking God and finding him. (UB 120:2.8)
“The transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing human.” In terms of the quality of its attitudinal spiritual content, Jesus’ life on Urantia presented us with an example of what is attainable by you and by me. The key to attainment seems to be contained in the earlier statement, “to be concerned with but one thing, the unbroken communion between you and your Paradise Father” which, for us, should mean unbroken communion with our indwelling Father Spirit.
Much of what we know concerning what Jesus did has always been considered as being beyond the bounds of possibility for mere humans—achievable by Jesus only because of his dual status as both fully human and fully divine. Throughout the ages, followers of Jesus have invariably concluded that, “in real life” many of the attitudes taken by Jesus were unrealistic and impractical—and not what is required from us. Let’s get it firmly in our minds that The Urantia Book tells us otherwise, it really does state, with no reservations, that the example of Jesus, the man, is attainable by God-knowing and God-seeking individuals. It also provides us with a telling commentary:
“Modern, civilized men dread the thought of falling under the dominance of strong religious convictions. Thinking man has always feared to be held by a religion. When a strong and moving religion threatens to dominate him, he invariably tries to rationalize, traditionalize, and institutionalize it, thereby hoping to gain control of it. By such procedure, even a revealed religion becomes man-made and man-dominated. Modern men and women of intelligence evade the religion of Jesus because of their fears of what it will do to them—and with them. And all such fears are well founded. The religion of Jesus does, indeed, dominate and transform its believers, demanding that men dedicate their lives to seeking for a knowledge of the will of the Father in heaven and requiring that the energies of living be consecrated to the unselfish service of the brotherhood of man.” (UB 195:9.6)
Jesus revealed a God of love, and love is all-embracing of truth, beauty and goodness. (UB 5:4.6)
The infinite and eternal Ruler of the universe of universes is power, form, energy, process, pattern, principle, presence, and idealized reality. But he is more; he is personal; he exercises a sovereign will, experiences self-consciousness of divinity, executes the mandates of a creative mind, pursues the satisfaction of the realization of an eternal purpose, and manifests a Father’s love and affection for his universe children. And all these more personal traits of the Father can be better understood by observing them as they were revealed in the bestowal life of Michael, your Creator Son, while he was incarnated on Urantia. (UB 3:6.7)
Then follows this sentence—which certainly provides food for thought and maybe some self-examination:
“Selfish men and women simply will not pay such a price for even the greatest spiritual treasure ever offered mortal man.” (UB 195:9.7)
That spiritual treasure is, of course, the life that Jesus led for us on Urantia. Very briefly, we have covered what might be expected from a Creator Son in his bestowal life. Next we take a look at some of the ways by which the task was achieved. First, some attitudes that Jesus adopted:
Jesus had great difficulty in getting them to understand his personal practice of nonresistance. He absolutely refused to defend himself, and it appeared to the apostles that he would be pleased if they would pursue the same policy. He taught them not to resist evil, not to combat injustice or injury, but he did not teach passive tolerance of wrongdoing.
He never ceased to warn his disciples against the evil practice of retaliation; he made no allowance for revenge, the idea of getting even. He deplored the holding of grudges. He disallowed the idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He discountenanced the whole concept of private and personal revenge, assigning these matters to civil government, on the one hand, and to the judgment of God, on the other. He made it clear to the three that his teachings applied to the individual, not the state. He summarized his instructions up to that time regarding these matters, as:
Love your enemies—remember the moral claims of human brotherhood.
The futility of evil: A wrong is not righted by vengeance. Do not make the mistake of fighting evil with its own weapons.
Have faith—confidence in the eventual triumph of divine justice and eternal goodness. (UB 140:8.4-8)
Unrealistic and impractical? Maybe, but that is what is asked of us modern, civilized men if we become sincere about following Jesus. Of course, Jesus never intended that we should be passive martyrs enduring all indignities thrust upon us:
“Jesus did not advocate the practice of negative submission to the indignities of those who might purposely seek to impose upon the practitioners of nonresistance to evil, but rather that his followers should be wise and alert in the quick and positive reaction of good to evil to the end that they might effectively overcome evil with good. Forget not, the truly good is invariably more powerful than the most malignant evil. The Master taught a positive standard of righteousness: ‘Whosoever wishes to be my disciple, let him disregard himself and take up the full measure of his responsibilities daily to follow me.’ And he so lived himself in that ‘he went about doing good.’” (UB 159:5.10)
What is it that holds us back so easily from our quest to “be like Jesus?” Is there a way? Well, maybe. The book says, “in every mortal, there exists a dual nature: the inheritance of animal tendencies and the higher urge of spirit endowment.” (UB 34:6.9)
We Urantians suffer from a double deprivation due to the Caligastia rebellion and the Adamic default, and perhaps because of this fact, we are partially crippled by an abnormal amount of an animal-like component of our natures that inhibits the natural expression of the fruits of the spirit. And so “the dead theory of even the highest religious doctrines is powerless to transform human character or to control mortal behavior. What the world needs today is the truth that your teacher of old declared, ‘Not in the word only but also in power and in the holy Spirit.’” (UB 34:6.6)
The preceding quotation from The Urantia Book declares that even the highest religious doctrine is powerless to transform us!! Surely our Urantia Books contain the highest religious doctrine on our planet—yet it is powerless to transform us! It goes on: “The seed of theoretical truth is dead, the highest moral concepts without effect, unless and until the divine Spirit breathes upon the forms of truth and quickens the formulas of righteousness.” (UB 34:6.6)
The bestowal of Jesus has prepared us in two ways to benefit from the fourth and fifth revelations. The book states: “Jesus showed mankind the new way of mortal living whereby human beings may very largely escape the dire consequences of the Caligastia rebellion and most effectively compensate for the deprivations resulting from the Adamic default. 'The spirit of the life of Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of animal living and the temptations of evil and sin. ’ 'This is the victory that overcomes the flesh, even your faith.”’ (UB 34:7.6)
Man goes forth searching for a friend while that very frien lives within his own heart. (UB 3:1.4)
Render to no one evil for evil.
Romans 12:17
The transforming power of that gift is evident in what happened to the apostles. “In less than a month after the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth, the apostles made more individual progress than during their almost four years of personal and loving association with the Master.” (UB 194:2.9)
Regarding the Spirit of Truth, the book states, “the spirit never creates a consciousness of himself, only a consciousness of Michael, the Son. From the beginning Jesus taught that the spirit would not speak of himself. The proof, therefore, of your fellowship with the Spirit of Truth is not to be found in your consciousness of this spirit but rather in your experience of enhanced fellowship with Michael.” (UB 194:2.4)
It is not hard to perceive that we Urantians have been provided with a special means to compensate for our disadvantages by virtue of a transforming power that guides us into effective collaboration with our indwelling spirit of the Father. That power comes from the Spirit of Truth sent to us by Jesus-Michael. But almost two thousand years have gone by and our planet is still in dire trouble. And so we have been provided with a back-up in the form of The Urantia Book that, in turn, has given us a new and fuller account of the life of Jesus. Why?
“Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus anti how he lived it.” (UB 196:1.3)
It is a fact that a phrase such as “doing the will of God” has little real meaning to most Urantians. Neither does the idea of being indwelt by the spirit of the Father. Christians have known from the New Testament that John told us that the spirits of the Father and the Son would come to us and abide with us (Jn 14:23), and Paul taught a similar message (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:14-16). But to most followers of Jesus, God is still “out there somewhere.” The fact of God within them has no real, effective meaning.
Jesus came to Urantia to live as we live and to experience as we experience. He was to live this human-style life in “unbroken communion with the Paradise Father.” To do so, Jesus fixed in his mind what he, as a human like us, conceived to be the nature of God—then he lived that nature.
_ “The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true, beautiful, and good. All these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind as the ‘will of the Father in heaven’.” (UB 196:0.2)
The life and teachings of Jesus, as revealed to us in the book, is the vital knowledge that provides the means of really knowing the mind of Jesus—thereby enabling the Spirit of Truth to make us more conscious of Jesus, which, in turn, enhances superconscious awareness of the activity of our Thought Adjuster in guiding our spiritual growth. Knowing the mind of Jesus provides us with another real advantage. In any real life situation in which we find ourselves, we can consult our memory banks and ask, “What would Jesus do?”—and seek the answer from both our stored memories and with the guidance of the spirit forces available to us. In this way, the bestowal life of Jesus has provided we backward, animalistic Urantians with a transforming power by which we can overcome the greatest handicap to our spiritual growth—our innate, inherited genetic inability to communicate adequately with our Thought Adjuster.
God is love but love is not God. (UB 2:5.10)
Possibly one of the most significant of Jesus’ actions during the bestowal was the change he made to the second most important of the Hebrew commandments. The first of these was to love your God with all your heart and soul; the second to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus changed the latter to “love one another as I have loved you.” That change elevated a concept that could be interpreted in purely material terms and in many different ways to one which must be interpreted purely at the spiritual level.
What did Jesus mean by his injunction to love one another as he, representing God, loved us? The book tells us, “Love, unselfishness, must undergo a constant and living re-adaptive interpretation of relationships in accordance with the leadings of the Spirit of Truth. Love must thereby grasp the ever-changing and enlarging concepts of the highest cosmic good of the individual who is loved.” (UB 180:5.10)
This instruction equates love and unselfishness. And it informs us that it is the Spirit of Truth that does the leading. Last but not least, we are informed that to love another is to want for them, not what appears to be right and propitious for the moment, but that which aligns with their highest cosmic good! Only God can know that! No wonder that Emmanuel’s charge to Jesus included, “you need be concerned with but one thing, the unbroken communion between you and your Paradise Father.”
How then are we earthlings, handicapped by our inherent inability to communicate effectively with our Thought Adjusters, going to cope with loving our neighbor as Jesus loved us? We will not all have the same answer to this question. One possibility is to take note of what happened with the apostles. Four years in company with Jesus and with their own individual Thought Adjusters brought them less spiritual progress than a four week stint with the Spirit o Truth! How do we live in unbroken communion with the Spirit of Truth? The book tells us that the Spirit does not make us conscious of himself. Rather, the Spirit makes us conscious of the presence of Jesus. For most of us, being conscious of the presence of a God of whom we have little personal, intimate knowledge is not easy. In The Urantia Book we find the means to know Jesus intimately, as well as the information that, of all human knowledge, that which is greatest is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
For me, the greatest gift associated with the receipt of The Urantia Book has been the substitution of prayerful communication with a “God out there” for a personal experience of “Jesus with me,” a friend, always by my side, always there, always ready to provide what it takes to advance my spiritual progress, but at the same time always urging me to stand on my own feet and to make my own decisions. If only I could remember that he is always there!
I’ve known Urantia book readers who want to by-pass this phase of living with Jesus, who want only to deal with “the man at the top.” Maybe they have missed that part in the book that informs us that, for all intents and purposes, a Creator Son is God to his universe. (UB 5:3.6) With Jesus birthday coming up, what gift can we offer him? The words that come to mind are from a popular American folk hymn:
“Just a closer walk with Thee;
Grant this prayer, O Lord, to me;
Daily walking close with Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.”
And what greater Gift can we offer the God of Nebadon than ourselves? Happy birthday, Lord Jesus.
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort,
of feeling safe with a person,
having neither to weigh thought
nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are, chaff and grain together;
cettain that a faithful hand
will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping and,
with a breath of kindness,
blow the rest away.
Rex Cole
There is nothing which man can give to God except choosing to abide by the Father’s will. (UB 1:1.2)
Happy birthday, Lord Jesus