>© 1998 The Brotherhood of Man Library
| To Drink the Cup | Volume 5 - No. 3 — Index | Human Sources of The Urantia Book. The Evanescent Mesotron |
The Urantia Book (UB 169:4.3-13).
You learn about God from Jesus by observing the divinity of his life, not by depending on his teachings. From the life of the Master:
The finite can never hope to comprehend the Infinite except as the Infinite was focalized in the time-space personality of the finite experience of the human life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus well knew that God can be known only by the realities of experience; never can he be understood by the mere teaching of the mind. Jesus taught his apostles that, while they never could fully understand God, they could most certainly know him, even as they had known the Son of Man. You can know God, not by understanding what Jesus said, but by knowing what Jesus was.
Except when quoting the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus referred to Deity by only two names: God and Father. And when the Master made reference to his Father as God, he usually employed the Hebrew word (Elohim) signifying the plural God (the Trinity) and not the word Yahweh, which stood for the progressive conception of the tribal God of the Jews.
Jesus never called the Father a king, and he very much regretted that the Jewish hope for a restored kingdom and John’s proclamation of a coming kingdom made it necessary for him to denominate his proposed spiritual brotherhood, “the kingdom of heaven.”
With the one exception—the declaration that “God is spirit”—Jesus never referred to Deity in any manner other than in terms descriptive of his own personal relationship with the First Source and Center of Paradise.
Jesus employed the word God to designate the idea of Deity.
He employed the word Father to designate the experience of knowing God.
When the word Father is employed to denote God, it should be understood in its largest possible meaning.
The word God cannot be defined and therefore stands for the infinite concept of the Father.
The term Father, being capable of partial definition, may be employed to represent the human concept of the divine Father as he is associated with man during the course of mortal existence.
Jesus never claimed to be the manifestation of Elohim (God) in the flesh. He never declared that he was a revelation of Elohim (God) to the worlds. He never taught that he who had seen him had seen Elohim (God). But he did proclaim himself as the revelation of the Father in the flesh, and he did say that whoso had seen him had seen the Father. As the divine Son he claimed to represent only the Father.
He was, indeed, the Son of even the Elohim God; but in the likeness of mortal flesh.
To the mortal sons of God, he chose to limit his life revelation to the portrayal of his Father’s character in so far as such a revelation might be comprehensible to mortal man.
To the Jews, Elohim was the God of gods, while Yahweh was the God of Israel. Jesus accepted the concept of Elohim and called this supreme group of beings God. In the place of the concept of Yahweh, the racial deity, he introduced:
the idea of the fatherhood of God.
the idea of a world-wide brotherhood of man.
He exalted the Yahweh concept of a deified racial Father to the idea of a Father of all the children of men, a divine Father of the individual believer. And he further taught that this God of universes and this Father of all men were one and the same Paradise Deity.
As regards the character of the other persons of the Paradise Trinity, we shall have to be content with the teaching that they are altogether like the Father, who has been revealed in personal portraiture in the life of his incarnated Son, Jesus of Nazareth.
Although Jesus revealed the true nature of the heavenly Father in his earth life, he taught
little about him. In fact, he taught only two things:
that God in himself is spirit.
that, in all matters of relationship with his creatures, he is a Father.
On this evening Jesus made the final pronouncement of his relationship with God when he declared: “I have come out from the Father, and I have come into the world; again, I will leave the world and go to the Father.”
But mark you! never did Jesus say, “Whoso has heard me has heard God.” But he did say, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
To hear Jesus’ teaching is not equivalent to knowing God, but to see Jesus is an experience which in itself is a revelation of the Father to the soul. The God of universes rules the far-flung creation, but it is the Father in heaven who sends forth his spirit to dwell within your minds.
Jesus is the spiritual lens in human likeness which makes visible to the material creature Him who is invisible. He is your elder brother who, in the flesh, makes known to you a Being of infinite attributes whom not even the celestial hosts can presume fully to understand. But all of this must consist in the personal experience of the individual believer.
God who is spirit can be known only as a spiritual experience.
God can be revealed to the finite sons of the material worlds, by the divine Son of the spiritual realms, only as a Father.
You can know the Eternal as a Father; you can worship him as the God of universes, the infinite Creator of all existences.
The text of UB 169:4.12 of The Urantia Book tells us that, through its revelation of his life, we are enabled to “see” Jesus. This “mind-vision” can only come because of a thorough familiarity with that life and the way Jesus lived it. When we do acquire that familiarity, it becomes possible to experience a revelation of the Father to our souls.
The big advantage of knowing the life of Jesus comes because, in virtually any situation that we find ourselves, we can ask our Thought Adjuster, “What would Jesus do?” And since we already have a pictorial representation of Jesus’ life stored in the memory banks of our minds, we facilitate the Thought Adjuster’s ability to communicate an answer.
We are blessed with this gift. Its effectiveness is in our own hands.
God’s forgiveness is made actually available and is personally experienced just in so far as he forgives his fellows. (UB 170:3.4)
| To Drink the Cup | Volume 5 - No. 3 — Index | Human Sources of The Urantia Book. The Evanescent Mesotron |