Episode:Jesus Goes Public—Precaution and Preaching (Part 9)

From Symmetry of Soul


Jesus crushed their spirits. No sooner would the Master do something to cheer the souls and gladden the hearts of his apostles, than he seemed immediately to dash their hopes in pieces and utterly to demolish the foundations of their courage and enthusiasm. As these bewildered fishermen looked into each other’s eyes, there was but one thought: “We cannot understand him. What does all this mean?”

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Keywords: Urantia, Jesus, Crushing Words, Disappointing Deeds, Truth and Salvation

Opening thought: Urantia mortals have varying concepts of the miraculous, but to us who live as citizens of the local universe there are few miracles ... The appearance in and on your world, by apparently natural processes, of a divine Son, we regard as a miracle—the operation of universal laws beyond our understanding. Jesus of Nazareth was a miraculous person. [120:4.5]

Note: Justin Armstrong filled in for Andrea Barnes this week.

Summary by Brad

Commentary After Review

Our rebellion-scarred world is difficult for bestowal sons who incarnate here, but it’s also challenging for us! Can you properly see yourself through this life, the beginning of the ascension career, by objectively founding your rugged self-control? Don’t count on your animal-origin wits alone to serve you well. We have an inner life we can share with a fragment of God, and that inner life will always serve us well no matter how dark the outer-life environment may get from time to time.

The Thought Adjuster is not some magical, mystic voice in your mind; it is more akin to a catalyzer of growth and a focalizer of the Holy Spirit’s influence. That is: the Thought Adjuster aids true insight. And just to the extent you can focalize your mind on your own with no aid from your Thought Adjuster, you are that much closer to being enough “alike” to a Thought Adjuster to actually fuse with yours. We discussed how the Planetary Prince’s corporeal staff exhibited the varying degrees to which someone can achieve true insight without the aid of a Thought Adjuster (remember that none of them had achieved fusion yet and their Thought Adjusters had been temporarily detached from them). Some of them did quite well (Van), others did poorly (Nod).

We also explored how we must supply favorable conditions to be grown. Personality can harmonize whatever is provided to it, but we must do our part to supply it things to be harmonized! Thought Adjusters “crave” to be under this harmonizing influence of personality, which they finally secure when fusion occurs. The Adjuster desires this kind of “eternity wrapper” that conveys that certitude of existence. Listen to the archive for more details.

145:4 The Evening After

After the healing at sundown, the apostles experienced enchantment, bewilderment, and ecstasy. Maybe that sounds fun at first blush, but upon reflection a serious student of the 5th ER should see this as very problematic. Why? To the apostles, Jesus’ divinity (his Deity-like-ness) was being proven via outer-life doings like a massive healing. But the outer life is not where you should find proof of divinity. Do you and I have these same problems today that the apostles had back then? If some person fulfilled all your material wishes and desires, wouldn’t the animal in you say “let’s crown this person shaman/king and let them rule over us.” And do we casually say “ahh, this moment is divine” when we just have passing, fleeting, pleasant feelings?

We also noticed the word “intoxication” describing the apostles’ condition here. They had been poisoned in their inner lives by this event. The apostles had spiritualized material issues and poisoned their inner lives. They needed detoxification. Jesus’ detox regimen was not very quote-unquote “nice.” Not very animal-origin-like. But Jesus truly loves his apostles and he would not make their intoxicated state even worse by indulging in “nice” behavior. He demolished “the foundation of their courage and enthusiasm” because those foundations were false. See [157:4.1] for a summary of how Jesus frequently “dashed” the apostles’ false hopes. Can you learn from the apostles' mistakes here and set a guard on your inner life‏‎, avoiding spiritualizing material issues?

We read that 2 years of direct association with the Master, face to face with an incarnated Creator Son, resulted in little progress for the apostles: “We cannot understand him. What does all this mean?” Is your relationship with the 5th ER really any different? Let's be honest. How long have you studied the Urantia Papers without aggressively challenging your preconceived opinions, settled ideas, and long-standing prejudices? It is all too easy (and natural) to be dragged along by the spiritual gravity of some epochal revelation without doing the hard work yourself. It's better to assume all of the 5th ER is opaque at first. It's better to assume you don’t understand any of its meaning to begin with. Be a truth seeker, not an affirmation seeker.

Many in the Urantia Book movement often speak of taking their salvation for granted. This is only safe if you hunger for truth and thirst for righteousness; you must be aware of the state of your soul! Your soul must be saved. It is not self-saving. This is one of those pernicious common misconceptions floating around the Urantia Book movement today, and in fact it's one of the principles of the Lucifer rebellion. Watch out for it.

SoS recommends taking the 5th ER very precisely. It's best to not throw around words like “love” in some cheap sentimental way, even if it's a popular social usage today. Remember: as fearful grasping animals we all want to believe we possess more than we really do and maintain some screen of false illusions of success. To be genuinely humble takes a lot of courage.

145:5 Early Sunday Morning

Note the necessity for Jesus to undertake his 7 bestowals. It’s one thing to theorize about human suffering on Salvington, it’s another to personally and directly acknowledge, experience, recognize, and realize that suffering in an incarnation. Somehow human suffering is divine in the evolutionary process; the Supreme has it there for a reason.

Jesus had a lot to reflect on after the healing at sundown. Jesus knew he must not be ruled by his human sympathy, or even worse, define religion in terms of it. Can you rise to the challenge as well? Can you do better than zealously identifying sympathetically with the physical distress and material difficulties around you and how you might help out?

  • Are you devoted to religion first, or to social justice first?
  • Are you religious or only alligious?
  • Is your inner life bound to eternity or is it bound to time?

At times Jesus superficially appeared to be cold-hearted, but we know he was not. Can you try on Jesus’ form of apparent cold-heartedness, which in reality is him being religious?

The 5th ER reveals that instances of healing were not a spirit of healing, but a science of healing. Can you avoid having your primitive sensibilities offended when it is revealed that a Master Physical Controller was at work conducting a healing in some scientific way? When it's not some vague, fuzzy spirit magic? There's no such thing as magic.

The word danger in the 5th ER usually should be considered very literally: potential domination. A “real danger” suggests one's inner life could be dominated by something it ought not be dominated by. This is why Jesus appears to not be very “nice” when he refuses to falsely minister to physical needs.

Remember: God gave you free will. The gift of salvation is offered freely, but you must by your own free will receive it. God will not force salvation upon you; that’s not how the evolutionary domain was designed by Him.

We end this long arc by seeing that Jesus was not a man of sorrows, but that the men around him often were sorrowful! Jesus simply would not do what they thought he ought to do (free food and healthcare, a perennial favorite of the ease-seeking animal-origin self).

And so off they went on the first preaching tour... reluctantly.