Episode:Jesus—The Transition Years (Part 2)

From Symmetry of Soul


There can be no lasting religious peace on Urantia until all religious groups freely surrender all their notions of divine favor, chosen people, and religious sovereignty. God alone is spirit sovereign. Only when God the Father becomes supreme will men become religious brothers and live together in religious peace on earth.

Listen to the broadcast

Keywords: Urantia, Jesus, Urmia, Sovereignty, Religion

Summary by Kermit

134:4 Sovereignty—Human and Divine

We completed this first section of the midwayers’ restatement of Jesus’ Urmia presentations on the “Kingdom of God” and the “Kingdoms of Men”. This text consists of several short paragraphs on which we spent considerable time discussing their meanings and implications for current times.

The brotherhood of men is founded on the Fatherhood of God. We discussed how this brotherhood is a family—more than the horizontal relations among spiritual siblings, but a vertical relationship with a divinely loving spirit Father. Such a family requires the freewill choice of participation of its members, and requires those members to love ALL of our Father’s children. Brotherhood, or brotherly love derives from the choice to allow the Father’s to flow through each of us. Can you begin to love your spirit siblings independent of their world view?

Reference to the “divine government” means that which rules our heart, the temple within. Our choice is between self and the sovereign God. (We have a great bad example of the dangers of self-assertion). The virtue of humility must be cultivated to enable you to cooperatively subordinate your self to the sovereign God. Divine sovereignty is the foundation of the Kingdom of God, and because God is spirit, His kingdom is spiritual, not material or merely intellectual, i.e. it is ABOVE the mind. As the collective consciousness begins to become aware of the false-liberty lure of the Lucifer Manifesto, individual freewill choice is demanded. Do we not have an emergency when religion and religious thought is discarded by so many supposedly thinking people because of the fairytale stories of “the old time religion?”

The major obstacle to the brotherhood of man today lies in mankind’s almost complete ignorance of the fact and nature of “spirit.” The philosophical history of mankind discloses that only in the last 2600 years has the distinction between body and mind been recognized. The differences among the terms mind, soul, and spirit are still obscure to the great majority of material mortals. Current thinking equates the “potential for pleasure” with spirit. Thus, to contemplate the “spiritual” is misunderstood as seeking the experience of pleasure (2nd LoM). How many UBook readers even recognize that spirit is a substance? There were so many other facets of this topic discussed that I cannot possibly present or even mention all of them in this review. You really must listen to this program or re-listen to it. Only during the second time listening carefully did I appreciate many of the truths revealed here.

Thoughts discussed for reflection:

  • The apostles inability to understand Jesus when he used the term spirit.
  • How spirit is above consciousness (mind)—superconscious.
  • The need for humility as an antidote for the mind’s tendency to aggrandize self in place of spirit.
  • The need for genuine reflection to logically recognize mind, spirit (a divine influence—something unity-like), and soul as existing, for our experiences to be understandable.
  • The necessity of cultivating worship as a technique for progressing in the realm of mind, soul, and spirit.
  • How is the revelation “excellent”?, Is it a superior “religion”? or just a better set of information about everything?
  • Religion—meaning of the word—to bind back(up) out of the mind to the spirit that is above it.

As we take note of the challenges we find in recognizing the spirit sovereignty of God the Father let us not fall into despair. So many hurdles remain to be surmounted in this recognition and practice, let alone the obstacles to human brotherhood that will remain after the Father’s sovereignty is established. However, with our enhanced spirit ministries of the last two thousand years, the influence of spirit has begun to accelerate from an arithmetic growth rate to a geometric rate. Along with this increased potential for progress and growth comes the potential for danger. The control and purposing of these highly energetic influences with and by personality is required to avoid actual danger. Herein lies an emergency and this is where the 5th ER can be of great assistance. Human experience is not entirely devoid of spirit, but never think that your relationship with spirit cannot be improved. We will be perfecting this area of our lives for our entire ascension.

Religious peace and brotherhood will only occur when all religions willingly completely divest themselves of all ecclesiastical authority and surrender all concept of spiritual sovereignty. And remember, religious peace is a prerequisite for attaining the much more difficult political peace. Because of the obscurity of the fact and nature of spirit, spiritual sovereignty actually means today, material and intellectual sovereignty. We asked the question, how do we navigate these issues as readers and students of the 5th ER? Let go of false thoughts of religion. What then remains is the connection to spirit given by grace as a child. Recognize the two aspects of sovereignty in play. Ecclesiastical (church or outer life) and spiritual (inner life). God alone is spirit sovereign! Share your spiritual experiences for the mutual edification of believers, not to aggrandize self or convert unbelievers.

The idea of equality of spiritual experience will lead to religious wars unless all religions consent to transfer religious sovereignty to God himself. While the kingdom of God in the hearts of men will help establish religious unity (kindred spirits), the kindred minds (uniformity of ideas) required for the manifestation of the brotherhood of man is much more difficult to establish.

We read from Jesus’ discourse on true religion [155:6.9, p. 1732] a paragraph distinguishing the religion of the spirit from the religions of authority. The religion of the spirit requires only unity of experience, insight, spirit feeling, and uniformity of destiny. The details of this destiny aren’t experienced, but because we have a transcendent relationship to spirit we can point to a common destiny.

The spiritual equality of all men must be accompanied by the spirit sovereignty of God lest these “equal” religionists seek to assert superiority over other religions and escalate to religious wars or at least wars among religionists. Without the universal recognition of the supersovereignty of God the concept of equality can never bring peace. And how prevalent today is the idea that the realization of universal equality (by itself) is the key to peace on earth good will among men? Stop and think that this concept of equality has never been seriously entertained by humankind until fairly recently. Is not this idea of equality without the sovereignty of God an idea that was promulgated about two hundred thousand years ago, and is just now finding dangerous traction?

The Urmia religionists in were able to experience life together in comparative peace and tranquility because they were able to surrender their religious sovereignty and subordinate themselves socially to the unchallengeable authority of their head Cymboyton.