Episode:Jesus—The Way, the Truth, and the Life (Part 3)

From Symmetry of Soul


Although the gospel of the kingdom never fails to bring great peace to the soul of the individual believer, it will not bring peace on earth until man is willing to believe this gospel wholeheartedly and to establish the practice of doing the Father's will as the chief purpose in living the mortal life.

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Keywords: Urantia, Jesus, Christ, Altruism, Holy Spirit

Summary by Kermit

6. The Necessity for Leaving

In section six of Paper 180, Jesus provides additional explanation of the events immediately about to transpire, that his apostles might not stumble into serious error. Jesus explains that, in keeping his new commandment, the apostles will be rejected by the authorities, which is tantamount to rejecting him, demonstrating how these same authorities know not the Father

Jesus then specifically tells his friends that in order to send the promised helper, he must leave behind his material body and be restored to his former place on high. And when the spirit teacher does come, the apostles will be enabled to clearly distinguish between sin and righteousness, and judge wisely in their hearts concerning them

This spirit will not speak of himself, but will declare to them that which the Father has revealed to the Son, and even show them things to come. Things to come (i.e. facts ahead of you). Commentary: In the presence and flow of the SoT, the believer can apply an eternal perspective to the current factual context and thereby infer future factual conditions, in this way “telling us of things to come”. We had an interesting discussion here concerning some of the qualities of father deity experiences of being given an implanted message to proclaim v. the mother deity experiences of objective recognition and realization of innate and self-evident truth resident in the Holy Spirit.

Even now the apostles are unable to grasp what he is telling them, so he attempts again to get them to understand what is happening, by speaking plainly to them of their impending sorrow over his departure, turning to rejoicing by his returning, briefly in person and later in spirit. However, because of the apostles’ inability to give up their long-nourished ideas of the Jewish concept of a glorious material triumph of the Messiah, they did not understand the Master’s words.

Paper 194. The Bestowal of the Spirit of Truth

Commentary: A technical clarification was made here concerning the time lapse between the events at the end of Paper 193 and the events described at the beginning of Paper 194. Without going into the details, suffice it to say, instead of these two events following immediately the one after the other, there is a period of 9 days intervening between the two events.

As a group of believers were engaged in prayer, they all became aware of a strange presence in the room. With a new and profound sense of spiritual joy, security and confidence, these disciples felt a strong urge to go out and publicly proclaim the gospel message AND that Jesus had risen from the dead. And led by Peter, they went forthwith to the temple to bring these messages to the people.

Interestingly, the first act of these disciples in response to the coming of the Spirit of Truth was to stumble into the error of substituting some of the facts associated with gospel (Jesus’ resurrection), for the gospel message itself (the fact of the fatherhood of God, coupled with the resultant truth of the sonship-brotherhood of men).

These spirit-infused men then seized upon this opportunity to yield to their feelings of triumph over the forces which had sought to destroy their Master, and fell back on their personal association with Jesus and their thrill with the assurance that the Master still lived, their friendship with him was intact and the spirit had come as promised.

The new joy, power, and glory experienced by these believers reminded them that the Master had told them the kingdom would come with power. All in all, it’s no wonder the new gospel about Jesus began to eclipse the former message of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

1. The Pentecost Sermon

After forty days of hiding, The hereto for, frightened apostles emerged from their forty days of hiding, surcharged with their new spiritual endowment of insight and power, boldly preaching the new message of a risen Messiah to the thousands of visitors in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost.

Peter delivered an impassioned appeal, resulting in “winning more than two thousand souls for the kingdom”. Seeing the great power of this new message to move people to believe in Jesus, and vindicate their former devotion to him, they were led to expand its proclamation.

Pentecost, being a great festival of baptism, was the perfect occasion for large numbers of Jews and believing gentiles to submit to baptism. We are here reminded that by so doing the baptized believers were not disconnecting themselves from the Jewish faith.

Commentary: Another discussion here about the caution to be exercised concerning phenomena associated with this powerful manifestation of the SoT. We are reminded of the mindal domain of the Divine Minister and the reservoir of horizontal mindal phenomena available for us to experience without necessarily leading to upward growth or progress.