COMMUNICATION WITH THE SPIRIT WORLD OF GOD

-IT'S LAWS AND PURPOSE

 BY Johannes Greber - (chapter from the 1932 original book)

Christ - His Life and His Work   (chapter in book)  

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Christ, His Life and Work (chapter From Greber's book)

 

“There is for us Christians but one God, the
Father, from Whom all things are and to Whom we
shall all return, and there is but one Lord, Jesus
Christ, through Whom all things came into being
and through whom we shall return to God.”
1st Corinthians 8 ; 6.

"WHAT think ye of Christ?” This question
was written in letters of fire, before my
eyes from the day on which had
resolved to join the ministry. It was to
be my duty, henceforth, to proclaim not
only Christ’s teachings to my co-religionists, but also
the truth concerning His person, His life and His work.
Who was Christ? Who had He been before He became
a man? Was He God, or only a Son of God? Was He,
born of woman, a man like ourselves in mind and
body? Was He begotten and born like all other men?

As a child, was He obliged to acquire knowledge, as
are all children? Was He compelled to come, step by
step, to a recognition of God, and to travel the same
road traveled by all seekers unto God, in order to learn
God’s ways and God’s will? Was He exposed to the
temptations of evil, and to all of the fateful
consequences attendant upon His choice, as happens to
all of us daily? Was it possible that He, like the rest of
mankind, might succumb to those temptations? Could
He, perchance, like millions of others, be induced by
the Powers of Evil to forsake God? And if He had been
sent to redeem humanity, wherein did the redemption
lie? What was the explanation of all these correlated
questions?

Consequently, after I had convinced myself at the
spiritistic meetings that God’s spirits speak to men
through mediums, as they had spoken to the early
Christian communities, my first thought was to beg for
full enlightenment on these problems concerning
Christ. My request was granted, to the smallest details,
and that knowledge thenceforth constituted the most
precious possession of my soul.

In what follows, I shall repeat the truths regarding
Christ, His life, and His work of Redemption, as they
were imparted to me by the spirit which taught them:
“You are in search of enlightenment as to the person of
Christ, His birth as a man, His life, sufferings, and
death as a man, and as to the truth relating to
Redemption.

“A few of those questions I have already answered by
telling you of God’s Creation and its later history, as
well as of His Plan of Salvation.

“At that time you were told that Christ is the highest of
the spirits created by God and the sole one to be
created directly; that the rest of the spirit-world came
into being through Christ, and, together with Him,
formed a great spiritual community or kingdom with
Christ as its Head, as God had willed. In this kingdom
Christ was, therefore, in a sense God’s viceroy. Christ
Himself was not God, but only the first of God’s sons,
and owed His power, and His glory and His kingdom
to God. He was but one of God’s creatures and as such,
not eternal like God. It was against Christ’s reign that
the revolt of the spirits headed by Lucifer was directed.
After the defection of a part of the spirit-world and its
fall into the spheres of the Abyss, Christ volunteered to
bring back the fallen spirits to God’s kingdom in
accordance with the plan of Salvation which God had
conceived.

“Christ’s work of redemption was begun immediately
after the apostasy of the spirit hosts had occurred. It
was Christ Who created the stages of regeneration of
which I told you in detail in the course of my teachings
on God’s Plan of Salvation. Thereby Christ became the
creator of the whole material universe, which forms the
ladder for the ascent of the fallen spirits from the
Abyss to the heights of God’s kingdom.

“From the earliest days, after those spirits had risen to
the level of human existence, Christ became the leader
of mankind, and strove to turn men’s thoughts, which
ever tend toward evil, God-ward. As opposed to Him,
the ruling powers of Hell did their utmost to maintain
their sway over men. This led to a mighty struggle
between Christ and Lucifer over the spirits incarnated
as human beings, a conflict which forms the main
theme of what has been preserved to you in the
writings of the Old Testament.

“In this conflict Christ was supported by the good
spirit-world under His command, many of the spirits
volunteering to become mortals, in order that they
might, by preaching the truth and by setting the
example of righteous living, lead men unto God.

“One of the celestial spirits whose incarnation on earth
was permitted was Enoch, who proclaimed to his
contemporaries the true God and the right path to a
knowledge of Him. Moreover, he particularly taught
them of communication with God’s spirit-world with
which he himself was in daily contact, for in his day,
almost all were given to communicating with evil and
had been led into idolatry of the most abominable kind
and into all manner of depravity.

“Unfortunately the result of his efforts was not lasting.
The power of evil was so strong that the nations of
those times became addicted to abominations of which
you of the present age can form no conception. The
highest of the internal spirits made use of human deep-
trance mediums not only for speaking, but also for
purposes of propagation, for just as the spirit of a
medium can use his body for that purpose, so a strange
spirit can enter that body and, through it, propagate, the
corrupt female world of the times considering it an
honor to be thus mistreated at the idol-worship.

"You will find confirmation of this in the Bible, in the
passage relating that the “sons of God came in unto the
daughters of men, and they bare children unto them.”
(Genesis 6:4.) The term ‘sons of God’ refers to those
spirits which had taken a leading part in the revolt
against Him. These are the same spirits of which Job
says: ‘Now it came to pass on the day when the sons of
God came to present themselves before the Lord that
Satan also came among them’. (Job 1:6.) In this case
also it is only the apostate sons of God to which the
passage refers, for Satan, as you know, was the second
son of God. As rulers of the kingdom of Darkness,
these sons of God are not free to do as they like, but
remain subject to God’s sovereignty, and are, at times,
called to account by Him.

“The efforts of Christ and his world of good spirits to
influence a race of men who had become corrupted
almost without exception, were fruitless. It was,
therefore, imperative that the whole existing generation
be wiped out and replaced by a new one. The
destruction was brought about by the Flood, from
which only one family, that of Noah, was saved to
perpetuate a better race of men.

“However, very shortly after the passing of the Deluge,
evil once more raised its head among Noah’s
descendants, as witness the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrha and the family of Lot. The more widely
mankind spread out, the more zealously did men serve
the Devil by idol worship and unrighteousness.

“In order to accomplish His end in spite of the terrible
sway of evil over humanity, Christ strove, long before
His incarnation, to win over at least a small fraction of
mankind to the cause of God, a fraction which was to
be the bearer of the faith and of the hope of salvation
for later generations. It was to be the yeast with which
the whole mass of humanity would ultimately be
leavened, the mustard seed, which in time would grow
into the great tree of the true religion and the search
unto God, and gather all mankind under its sheltering
boughs. Once this tree had attained a certain growth,
the ‘fullness of time’ would have arrived for the
Redeemer to descend to earth as the Son of man, to
complete the last part of His mission of salvation. Not
until then would it be worth while to build the bridge
by which the righteous spirits could cross from
Lucifer’s realm into the kingdom of God, even as you
do not build bridges unless the number of persons
likely to use them warrants their construction.

“The first to be chosen as the leavening and the
mustard-seed of the faith and of the hope of
redemption, was Abraham, a man of unshakable
loyalty to God. Christ communicated with him, at times
directly, at times through His spirits, since Abraham
himself was an incarnated celestial spirit.
“His devotion to God was soon put to a severe test, as
is the case with all to whom God thinks of entrusting a
particularly important mission.

 

“When you build a railroad bridge to be used by freight
and passenger trains, you, also, test its bearing-capacity
before opening the bridge to traffic. If it fails to meet
these tests it is strengthened, and if even then, it proves
unsafe, it is condemned, and a new bridge is built.
Even so, God proceeds in the case of mortals selected
to fulfill tasks of importance to His kingdom. If their
power to endure fails under His tests, and if His efforts
to strengthen them are futile, they are put aside as unfit,
and others are taken in their places. It often happens
that people otherwise fit for God’s great ends must be
discarded because of disqualifying defects for which
they themselves are responsible, but which they persist
in retaining. Many are called, but few are chosen.

“Fearsome indeed was the test to which Abraham was
put when he was commanded to sacrifice his son, for
‘he that loveth his father or mother, his brother or
sister, his son or daughter, or his friend’ more than
God, is not worthy of performing God’s great work.
“Sorely tried though he was, Abraham proved
steadfast, and was rewarded with God’s promise:
‘...because thou hast done this thing, and hast not
withheld thine only son, in blessing I will bless thee,
and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars
of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the
seashore, ...and in thy seed shall all the nations of the
earth be blessed’. (Genesis 22:16-18.) By the seed
mentioned in this promise is not meant Abraham’s
human progeny, for even had this embraced all the
nations of the earth it would not have equaled in
numbers ‘the stars of the heavens and the sand which is
upon the seashore. However, God does not exaggerate,
and what He says is always literally true. Abraham’s
seed was spiritual and would ultimately embrace all of
the fallen spirits, in the sense that his faith in God and
his devotion to Him would little by little extend to all
who had forsaken God. Indeed, it would not have
proved a blessing to Abraham had he had a countless
human progeny which eventually might fall into evil
ways. As a matter of fact, in later days whole
generations of Abraham’s descendants forsook the true
religion and turned to the worship of idols.

“Abraham’s human seed of the second generation,
Jacob and his sons, were led into Egypt, where they
were to settle in the fertile land of Goshen, there to
become a great nation, isolated from the idolatrous
inhabitants of Egypt, and free to uphold the true faith.

“But long-continued worldly prosperity always
endangers a nation’s faithfulness to God, Who,
therefore, permitted the Hebrews, as Abraham’s
descendants had come to be known, to be savagely
oppressed by the Pharaohs and to be held in rigorous
servitude by them.

“It was not God Who instigated Pharaoh to pursue this
course, but the Powers of Evil which had realized that
the Hebrew nation, as the bearer of the true faith, was a
dangerous weapon in Christ’s hands and might be used
by Him against themselves. Hence, its destruction was

determined upon, and since this end was not being
accomplished by the forced labor which the Hebrews
were compelled to perform, the demoniacal powers
suggested their extermination to the Pharaoh by the
simplest and at the same time the most effective
method. Every Hebrew man-child was to be killed at
birth. As a justification for this measure, the Powers of
Hell had filled the King’s mind with the thought that
the Hebrews within his dominions, having already
waxed strong in numbers, might become a source of
danger by allying themselves with the enemies of
Egypt. Evil well knows how to attack men, and the
rulers of men in particular, at their weakest point,
which, with a King is always a fear that his throne is in
peril. Hence Pharaoh fell a ready victim to the
insinuations of the Evil Ones, and began the slaughter
of all of the newborn Hebrew male infants. According
to Pharaoh’s plan, this measure would have resulted in
the extinction of every Hebrew man within a
comparatively short period, and when this had been
brought about, the Hebrew women having become the
wives or slaves of Egyptians, would have been
absorbed by that race and, like it, have fallen into
idolatry. Thus at one blow all the efforts of Christ and
His spirit-world to provide for human upholders of the
true religion would have been nullified.

“But once again it happened, as it happens so often in
Nature and in the lives of men, that the very force
which was intent upon doing evil, promoted the cause
of good, for the moment at which a nation is driven to
desperation by the slaughter of its children on the part
of the authorities, is also the most favorable moment
for persuading that nation to leave the scenes of its
sufferings.

“There was still another and yet more potent reason
why it was high time for the Hebrew nation to be led
out of the land of the Pharaoh’s. During the four
centuries of their sojourn there the Hebrews had
gradually drifted toward Egyptian idol-worship, until
not a few of the members of that race were
participating in the pagan rites. This grave danger to
the religion of the Hebrew people could be obviated
only by an exodus from Egypt, and the present moment
was the most propitious one that could be imagined for
the purpose, since the massacre of their infants was
making the sojourn there a living inferno for the
Hebrews.

“To conduct so numerous, and by nature
unmanageable, a people out of the land, was a task
which called for a great human leader, hence Christ
selected one of His heavenly spirits for the purpose,
and caused it to be born in human shape. The spirit so
chosen was Moses. As the son of Hebrew parents, he
was saved from death by Pharaoh’s daughter, who saw
to it that he was instructed in all of the sciences of the
times, thus equipping him, as a mortal, with whatever
learning he would be called upon to display as the head
of a great nation.

“When he had grown to manhood, Christ spoke to him
from the burning bush and appointed him as the leader
of ‘God’s people’. Moses was called upon to perform,
first of all, two tasks, one of these being to reveal
himself to the enslaved Hebrews as God’s envoy,
charged with the mission of leading them forth from
Egypt. His second duty was to persuade Pharaoh to
allow the Hebrews to leave his realm.

“Superhuman power was conferred upon Moses by
Christ, for the execution of both of these missions, but
the evil spirits, seeing their plans thwarted, appeared in
the theater of war in full force, making use of the
Egyptian sorcerers as their instruments.

“Then began the greatest battle among spirits, ever
fought on earth. On one side was ranged Christ with
His good spirit-world, and Moses as His visible
champion; on the other, Hell with its retainers, the
Egyptian magicians. With the aid of God’s spirits
standing invisible beside him, Moses performed the
greatest miracles which the world ever saw before the
coming of Christ and by which he hoped to convince
both the Hebrew people and Pharaoh of the Divine
nature of his mission. By these signs which took place
before their eyes, God’s people were to be moved to
render obedience to Moses as their leader, and Pharaoh
was to be induced to allow those people to depart.

“At first, and for the purpose of counteracting any
effect Moses might produce upon Pharaoh and the
people, the evil powers accomplished miracles equal to
his, but before long their efforts began to fail the
magicians themselves were forced to admit: ‘This is
the finger of God’.

“Never had such materialization of spirits been
witnessed as that which took place in this battle. On the
part of Moses, a good spirit, disintegrating his rod,
changed it into a serpent; the same thing was done for
the sorcerers by the evil spirits. Entire hosts of spirits
were materialized as frogs at Moses’s command, and at
the command of the magicians, low spirits did the like.
Moses turned the waters of the river to blood, with the
aid of God’s spirits, and with the help of the infernal
powers the same miracle was performed by the
magicians. God allowed the wicked to exert their
powers to the utmost of their ability, in order that, in
the end, He might have the opportunity of showing His
full omnipotence, and thereby, above all, of fortifying
the faith of the Israelites, since this was a life and death
struggle in which the Hebrews, as God’s people, were
the stake. Israel was the firstborn of the true faith;
should it fall a victim to Hell, a long time must elapse
before another nation fit to take that part could arise.

“Christ, God’s First-born, fought against the first-born
of Hell, on behalf of the first-born human upholder of
the faith and of the hope of salvation. Christ was the
victor. God’s destroying angel smote all of the first-
born in the land of Egypt, and thus forced the decision.
Pharaoh and his people were seized with fear, and at
the insistence of his subjects, he allowed the Hebrews
to depart. Traveling in a pillar of cloud, Christ led the
fugitives, and out of that cloud He spoke to Moses,
protecting the people from the pursuing hosts of Egypt.

"The good spirit-world divided the waters of the sea,
and made the waves as a wall on the right hand of the
people and on their left. Putting their trust in Him Who
spoke from the pillar of cloud, the children of Israel
walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea, receiving
their first baptism unto Christ, with full faith in the
‘Angel of the Lord’, who was none other than Christ
Himself. God and Christ led Israel through the desert;
it was at Their behest that the good spirit-world
brought forth water from the rock and prepared manna.

"Hence Paul says, rightly: ‘For I would not, brethren,
have you ignorant, that our fathers were all under the
cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were all
baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and
did all eat the same spiritual food; and did all drink the
same spiritual drink: for they drank of a spiritual rock
that followed them: and the rock was Christ’. (1st
Corinthians 10:1-4.)

“God and Christ, as well as the good spirit-world, gave
to the people whatever advice and instruction were
necessary. It was God Himself Who issued the
Commandments on Mount Sinai.

“The long sojourn in the desert was necessary in order
that the people might be proved, to show whether their
faith and belief in God were strong enough to enable
them to face the perils which would threaten them on
the part of the pagan inhabitants of the country that
later was to come into the possession of the Israelites.
It was imperative that they preserve their religion
intact, since otherwise, all of the work of the past
would go for nought.

“Still another menace to their faith, against which
provision had to be made, was the greed for worldly
belongings and the excessive love of material well-
being, which ever tend to drive men into the arms of
evil.

“Christ resorted to every measure which would
obviate, or at least diminish this danger, taking radical
steps to cure His people of these failings by enacting
legislation by which the Israelites, as the Hebrews
eventually came to be known, were obligated to the
payment of tithes. Furthermore, they had to offer their
first-fruits, or to redeem these with some other
offering, and in addition, they were called upon to
make numerous sacrifices of beasts and fruits such as
burnt-offerings, meal-offerings, peace-offerings, sin-
offerings and trespass-offerings, for which only
unblemished gifts were accepted. When harvesting,
they were forbidden to reap wholly the corners of
fields or to gather the gleanings of the harvest, which
they must leave for the poor and the sojourner, and
every seventh year they might not till their land, but
must let it lie fallow. Every fiftieth year they must
‘return every man unto his possession, and every man
unto his family’. Finally, the taking of interest was
forbidden, thereby forestalling usury at the outset.

“Should the people of Israel observe these statutes, the
danger of their being ruled wholly by worldly
considerations and breaking faith with God out of love
for Mammon, would be brought within reasonable
limits.

“The other danger which threatened the faith was
therefor far greater: this was the idolatry of the nations
with which the Hebrews would be brought into contact
in the so-called ‘promised land’. Their idol-worship
was all the more dangerous, because, like all of its
kind, it consisted of tangible communication with the
evil spirit-world.

“The realm of the spiritual possesses a mystery of its
own in human eyes, and all mystery exerts an
irresistible attraction on men. Ghost-stories are the
ones to which you listen with the greatest attention, and
wherever anything mysterious and spectral actually or
allegedly happens, the crowd will invariably gather.

“On this account the Israelites had, already in the past,
been allured by the mysteries of the Egyptian idol-
worship. Saint Paul refers to this in writing to the
Corinthians when he says: ‘Ye know that when ye were
Gentiles, ye were led away unto those dumb idols,
howsoever ye might be led’. I need scarcely add that
the Israelites did not content themselves with merely
looking at images, for lifeless stone and wood attracted
the people of those times as little as they attract men
today. The allurement lay in the actual communication
with the low spirit-world. The speech by spirits through
images and human mediums, and the performance by
them of other marvelous feats were the factor that
attracted people. It was here that they were told so
much that was mysterious; that they received answers
to their questions relating to their worldly prospects,
and that they heard alleged predictions as to the future,
something that all men welcome eagerly. Added to this,
they were told things highly gratifying to their human
passions, for here vice was elevated to virtue, while
virtue was branded as vice. Whoever once became
addicted to this kind of spirit-communication found it
difficult to desist from the habit.

“As the leader of God’s people, Christ took two
measures to guard his wards from relapsing into
idolatry.

“One of these measures was to give them the
opportunity of communicating with good spirits, as a
substitute for the form of spirit-communication which
had been forbidden by Him. He gave to the Israelites
the tent of testimony, the breast-plate of judgment, and
the good mediums known to you as ‘prophets’, as I
have already related to you at length in my previous
teachings.

 

“As the second measure He commanded them, in the
name of the Lord, to exterminate certain nations into
whose country they were destined to migrate. Of these
nations there were six which had fallen into such
idolatry and abomination that their reformation seemed
impossible, while on the other hand there was every

reason to fear that should they be allowed to live, they
would corrupt the Israelites who had settled among
them.

“The command to exterminate these peoples has led
many of you to look upon the God of the Old
Testament as a cruel Deity and to maintain that the
writers of those portions of the Scriptures were
incapable of conceiving of a Christ-like Divinity, since
otherwise they would never have attributed such
cruelty to the will of God. In this they are mistaken.
One and the same Christ preached the conception of
God which you find in the New Testament, and
commanded the destruction of the peoples which I
have mentioned. In one case as in the other, Christ
appears as the Savior. By consenting to the
extermination of those peoples, He preserved them
from sinking still further into idolatry and depravity,
and indeed gave them the opportunity of working their
way, in a new existence, out of the depths to which
they had fallen. The underlying motive was the same as
that for which, in earlier times, the human race was
destroyed by the Deluge and for which the cities of
Sodom and Gomorrha were laid waste.

“To this motive must be added the even more
important one of preserving religion among God’s
people. When men make war, they do not hesitate to
shoot anyone who tries to induce a soldier to desert, a
measure which you accept as perfectly justified. Was
not God equally entitled to the right of ordering the
death of those who were about to instigate His chosen
upholders of the faith to desert their colors and to go
over to the Powers of Darkness? Again, it was through
God’s people that the hour of the redemption of all
mankind was to be prepared; was Christ, then, to stand
idly by while this work, difficult enough at best, was
being ruined by those who were enemies of God and
instruments of Lucifer?

“You mortals become very tender-hearted when God’s
wisdom and justice demand the destruction of utterly
wicked and irretrievably depraved people, lest they
corrupt millions of others and in order that they
themselves may be brought back into the path of
salvation. Remember, also, that it was God Who did
these things, the Master of Life and Death, He Who
had showed these people un-merited forbearance, even
though they had committed everything abominable in
His sight at their worship, going to the length of
sacrificing their own children as burnt-offerings to their
images. (Deuteronomy 12:31.)

“When making war upon other peoples the Israelites
were commanded to conduct themselves humanely.
‘When thou drawest nigh unto a city to fight against it,
then proclaim peace unto them). (Deuteron 20:10.)
They were forbidden even to injure fruit-trees when
laying siege to a city and were commanded to build
their siege-works of the wood of trees bearing no
edible fruit.

“Moses received his first foretaste of the danger of
idolatry on the occasion on which his followers began
their worship of the golden calf. Soon afterwards, also
when they approached the land of Moab, ‘the people
began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab;
for they called the people unto the sacrifices of their
gods; and the people did eat, and bowed down unto
their gods’. (Numbers 25:1, 2.) The harlotry here
alluded to was part of the pagan ritual and was
demanded by the demons through the mediums as
particularly pleasing to their gods. It formed an
important part of the religious ceremonies, as it does
among all heathen races.

“Armed with the weapon of idolatry and its attendant
abuses, the Powers of Evil in the days that followed did
much harm among God’s people and thereby, to the
work leading up to the Redemption. Whole generations
of the Lord’s chosen race subsequently forsook the true
God, almost without exception, a transgression for
which terrible vengeance was later exacted from them.
Christ on His part sent the prophets, in an effort to win
them back to the good cause, these prophets, the
mediums of the good spirit-world being hard put to it
to maintain a successful fight against the influence of
the demons’ mediums, or Baal’s prophets. Most of the
true prophets were incarnated celestial spirits, although
in their life as mortals they were quite as much exposed
to evil as was the rest of mankind, but thanks to their
efforts they succeeded in preventing, at least, the
complete eradication among the generations which
were to follow of the belief in the true God and in the
Redemption.

“The time finally came when a great part of humanity
was ripe, at all events insofar as its desire went, to
accept a belief in Christ’s act of redemption, and to
cross the bridge which He was destined to build over
the gulf dividing the realm of the Abyss from the
Kingdom of God. Countless human souls stood
waiting, eager to cross.

“At last the fullness of time had come when under
God’s plan of salvation, the Redeemer was to appear.
“Shortly before Christ was born upon earth, He sent a
herald to prepare for and proclaim His coming. This
herald also was a celestial spirit, Elijah, the same spirit
which at a time when idolatry was at its worst, had
gone upon earth on Christ’s behalf and had fought
victoriously against the tools of the Forces of Evil.
After accomplishing his mission he had been taken
back to Heaven without having suffered the pangs of
earthly death. Now, as Christ’s precursor, he was born
as a mortal for the second time as the son of Zacharias,
and bore the name of ‘John’.

“Even before John’s birth the incarnation of God’s
Anointed was foretold. The archangel Gabriel who had
announced to Zacharias that he was to be the father of
a son who would be the forerunner of Christ, was
entrusted also with the message of the coming of the
Redeemer.

“Gabriel was sent to a virgin named Mary, living in
Nazareth, who had been chosen to be the Mother of the
Savior.

 

The Human Birth of Jesus.

“Generation and birth within God’s Creation follow
immutable laws. The union of the sperm of the male
and the female is in every instance imperative, a law to
which there is no exception.

“Human propagation can, therefore, come about only if
the germ of the male unites with that of the female.
Hence no discarnate spirit, celestial or infernal, can
beget offspring without employing the human body and
the human sperm.

“You interpret the Biblical account of the conception
of Christ as though a spirit from Heaven had begotten
the Child in the virgin’s womb without the aid of a
human body. This is an incorrect interpretation and
gives countless people, believers and unbelievers, good
ground for denying, or at any rate for doubting, the
way in which the Son of God became a human being.
Here we have an instance in which the marvelous and
the unusual, although at the same time the normal,
borders closely upon the unreasonable, and hence the
incredible.

“I will tell you the whole truth of the matter, for I know
that you can understand it.

“When a deep-trance medium’s spirit has left his body
and a strange spirit has entered, that spirit is capable of
using the organs of the body in precisely the same way
as they can be used by the medium’s own spirit.
Consequently a strange spirit, good or evil. which
occupies the body of a male medium, is capable of
begetting offspring with a woman. Did I not, when
speaking to you of the idolatry of ante-Deluvian times,
particularly call your attention to the carnal intercourse
had by the evil spirits with the daughters of men, by
whom, according to the Bible’s own testimony, they
had children? If this is possible for evil spirits, should
it not be equally possible for the good ones? If the
fallen sons of God could beget children through human
mediums and so corrupt mankind, ought not the true
sons of God be able to do likewise on behalf of
mankind’s salvation?

“Now you will understand the human origin of Christ
without the need of any further explanation from me.
The human medium was Joseph, to whom Mary was
betrothed. Spirits of God had already repeatedly
announced to Mary through Joseph, as their medium,
the coming of the Redeemer. Such spirit-messages
were nothing out of the ordinary; on the contrary, the
Jewish people were thoroughly familiar with
communication with the spirit-world. This is evident
from the account in the Scriptures of the appearance of
the angel to Zacharias, who when he left the temple
was not able to speak, by which the people knew that
he had been visited by a messenger from God. (Luke
1:22.)

“Hence Mary was not alarmed when it came to pass
that a spirit entered Joseph as its medium and brought
her the Divine tidings, but she was greatly troubled at
being addressed as being ‘highly favored’, by which it
was indicated that she would become a mother. This
was beyond her comprehension, as she had never had
relations with any man and, therefore, had no reason to
expect motherhood. But ‘the angel answered and said
unto her, A Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the
power of a Most High shall overshadow thee;
wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall
be called the Son of God’. The spirit then told what
was about to happen, although this is a point on which
your Bible is silent. It announced that as soon as it had
left the medium’s body, a very high Spirit from Heaven
would enter the same, and by this Spirit she would
become a Mother by the law which obtains throughout
Nature. And Mary replied ‘In my own eyes, I am a
servant of the Lord. Let it be with me as you have
said’. (Luke 1:38.)

“After Gabriel had departed out of the medium and
before Joseph had awakened from his mediumistic
sleep, Christ Himself entered his body and through
Him Mary conceived under the same law that governs
conception in all women. His spirit entered the body of
the embryonic Child during the last moments of the
Mother’s pregnancy, or at that stage at which the
incarnation of a spirit occurs with all mothers, through
the entry of that spirit into the infant organism.

“That such was the way in which Christ was begotten
was well known to the early Christians, to whom it was
revealed in the same manner as that in which I am
revealing it to you. They knew, therefore, that the
mortal body of Christ was begotten by Him through
Joseph as His medium, by which I mean that the Holy
Spirit which, according to Gabriel’s message was to
come upon Mary, was Christ Himself, Who wished to
perform in person everything that He held necessary to
achieve the Redemption. It was by Him that the most
difficult preparatory work had been taken in hand at
the outset, by Him that God’s people had been chosen
as the upholders of the faith, by Him that they had been
led, taught, admonished, warned and chastised, and by
Him that the high spirits of Heaven had been sent to
earth as prophets. The last step was the begettal of the
mortal vesture into which He was to pass after a few
months within His Mother’s womb, in order that, by
being born as a mortal, He might mingle with mortals
as one of them.

“As soon as Joseph had awakened from his deep trance
Mary related to him the things that had happened. It
was a hard test to which he now found himself
subjected. Was he to believe what his betrothed had
told him? Like all other men, he was but human. Evil
thoughts assailed him fiercely. The Powers of Hell had
but one end in view: to incite Joseph to doubt Mary
and to cast her off, for under the Jewish law, a virgin

betrothed who was found to have relations with another
man, was stoned to death. Evil sought to inspire him
with the belief that Mary had deceived him, and that
she was now making use of the pretext that a spirit of
God had used Joseph’s body while he was in a
mediumistic state. There was nothing in the way of
distrust, jealousy and bitterness to which men are
subject by reason of disappointment, that the Evil
Powers neglected to instill into Joseph, and under their
onsets it seemed as though the burden placed upon him
was more than he could bear. At times he was minded
to put his betrothed away privily. Privily, indeed it
must be, for Joseph, being a righteous man, was
unwilling, in the absence of positive proof that he had
been deceived, to denounce a fellow-creature for an
offense the penalty for which was death. On the other
hand, he was not ready to make his betrothed his wife
as long as any lurking misgivings persisted. Mary’s
sole defense was, that God would reveal the truth to
him in one way or another, for she, also, suffered
unspeakably under his suspicions. Then, during that
very night, an angel of the Lord appeared to the
clairvoyant Joseph, bidding him not to fear. This ended
the conflict within him.

“I realize that this truth, -- and it is the truth, -- will
appear entirely too human and too much in accordance
with the everyday laws of Nature to convince you puny
mortals. It is not marvelous and mysterious enough to
satisfy you. The human act of procreation is something
debasing in the eyes of many, who, as it were, blame
God for making it a part of the order of things. To their
way of thinking, God is wanting in chastity. Wretched
beings that you are, to so misjudge the most wonderful
laws enacted by God’s omnipotence and wisdom, as
exemplified in the procreation, the prenatal life, and
the birth of a child! Christ, the highest of created
spirits, did not find it beneath Him to beget His own
earthly tenement in conformity with the eternally fixed
laws of propagation, in order that He might dwell and
suffer among you. Even though the truth regarding His
human paternity may not be miraculous enough to suit
you, for Him everything was miraculous that happened
according to the sacred laws given by His Heavenly
Father, of which the Preacher says: “I know that,
whatsoever God does, it shall be forever; nothing can
be put to it, nor anything taken from it; and God has
done it, that men should revere him’. (Ecclesiastes
3:14.)

“That reverence is something which unfortunately you
do not feel, and for this reason you account for the
incarnation of Christ by means of ingeniously
concocted theories, which, because of the alleged
miracles they involve, are full of contradictions, and
furnish good grounds to the skeptics for deriding the
first step which had to be taken in order that He might
assume the shape of man.

“Had the incarnation of Christ not followed the laws of
human propagation, He would have differed
fundamentally from other men, and Saint Paul could
not have said of Him that He was ‘born according to
the flesh’. His body would not have come into being
from human seed. Christ became as one of you, even as
regards the generation of His mortal vesture by the
human germ.

“Now, at your request, I shall speak of certain
doctrines of the Catholic Church which touch the
subject I am discussing. As you were formerly a priest
of that church it is natural that you should be
particularly eager to learn which of its doctrines are
true and which are false.

“The Catholic Church teaches that the Mother of Jesus
was free from ‘original sin’. This is true, but not for the
reasons advanced by your former church. Like certain
other mortals who lived before her and who had been
called upon to perform the work of the Lord, Mary was
an incarnated celestial spirit. The same was true of
Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and others of whom I
have spoken. It was true too of John, who foretold the
coming of Christ and in whose shape Elijah returned to
earth. In Mary, therefore, there was incarnated, not one
of those spirits which had forsaken God, but one which
had remained loyal to Him. The sin of that desertion,
of which all other terrestrial beings are the heirs, did
not rest upon her. That is the ‘original sin’ from which
she was free.

“On the other hand the Catholic doctrine that Mary as a
mortal was devoid of all sin, even of the most venial, is
utterly false. There is no mortal who has no human
failings as you call them, but these have nothing in
common with that sin from which Christ meant to
redeem the world, namely, the sin of having rebelled
against God. That is the real sin. All others are human
frailties from which not even Mary was free.
Nevertheless, she remained true to God, as did also
Moses, that high spirit from Heaven, in spite of the fact
that as a man he transgressed on more than one
occasion’ and was punished by not being permitted to
enter the promised land.

“Again the Catholic Church is wrong when it maintains
that Mary remained a virgin even after the conception
and the birth of Christ. She was, thereafter, as little a
virgin is any woman who has conceived and given
birth to a child.

“Only before Christ’s conception was she a virgin; it
was not intended that the Redeemer should be born of
a mother who had conceived and borne other children
before Him. That is the meaning of the words of the
prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and shall
bear a son’.

“It is furthermore contrary to the truth for the Catholic
Church to assert that no more children were born to
Mary after the birth of Christ. On what grounds do you
assume that after the birth of her First-born, she was
willing to waive her right to be a mother, or that Joseph
was ready to waive his rights as a husband and a
father? The fact that Christ had brothers and sisters
who were born after him can in no way detract from
His personality, nor from His life, His teachings and
His work.

“The references in the original texts of the New
Testament to brothers and sisters of Jesus allude to His
own, flesh and blood brothers and sisters, and not
‘kinsfolk’ as the Catholics try desperately to prove.
Had ‘kinsfolk’ been in question, they would have been
called such, and not ‘brothers and sisters’, or do you
suppose that the language of those days had no word
equivalent to your word of ‘kinsfolk’? You surely
cannot maintain this seriously, for in the story of the
visit of the twelve-year-old Jesus to the temple, it is
related that His parents had sought Him ‘among their
kinsfolk and acquaintance’, whence you see that where
kinsfolk are meant, the Evangelist finds the word to
express the idea. When somewhat later the same
Evangelist writes: ‘And there came to him his mother
and his brethren... (Luke 8:19), he is surely not trying
to convey the meaning that these were merely kinsmen
who happened to be with His mother, nor were the
people who told Him: ‘thy mother and thy brethren
stand without, desiring to see thee’. Matthew and Mark
likewise relate that Christ’s ‘mother’and His ‘brethren’
had come to speak to Him; do you believe that all three
Evangelists used the word ‘brethren’ when they meant
‘kinsfolk’, in which case that was the word which they
could and should have used? Any such assumption is
foolish.

“Furthermore, in telling of the appearance of Jesus in
His native village of Nazareth, Matthew records: ‘He
went on to his home city Nazareth and preached in the
synagogue there. His words impressed his hearers so
deeply that they asked of one another: From where has
this man all this wisdom and the power of his
eloquence? Is he not the son of the carpenter? Is not his
mother’s name Mary, and are not his brothers named,
James, Joseph, Simon and Judah? Do not his sisters
also live there? How has he come by all this’?
(Matthew 13:54-56.) Can any rationally minded person
contend that this enumeration of the father, mother,
brothers and sisters of Jesus refers to kinsfolk only?
Just as the allusion in this case is to the real father and
mother of Jesus, so too His real brothers and sisters are
meant. What purpose could be served by calling over
the names of His kinsfolk? The inhabitants of Nazareth
were astonished at His works and His teachings, and
asked each other, as you would under similar
circumstances: ‘Whence has He all these things? His
father, the carpenter, is a man like the rest of us. Mary,
His mother, is a simple, unpretentious woman, and His
brothers and sisters are nothing out of the ordinary, for
his brothers James and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas,
live among us and we see them every day, but we have
never discovered anything unusual in any of them, and
as for His sisters, all of them live in this village and are
no different from any of the other women of Nazareth.
How does it happen that of all the family, Jesus is the
only one who is so wonderfully gifted?’

“The contention that the expressions: ‘brethren’ and
‘sisters’ as used here, refer to ‘kinsfolk’ only, is too
trivial to be advanced by anyone without an ulterior
motive. You can see in this an instance in which one
untruth must be supported by another. The Catholic
Church has taken the unreasonable stand that Mary
remained a virgin in spite of the fact that she bore
Jesus, a position which would, of course, be utterly
untenable in the face of an admission that she
afterwards gave birth to other children. On the other
hand, there are many references in the Bible to the
brothers and sisters of Jesus, and since this conflicts
with the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, it
becomes necessary to transmute these historically
established brothers and sisters into ‘kinsfolk’.
Otherwise, the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity,
and with it, that of the Papal infallibility, would fall to
the ground.

THE HUMAN BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST

“The birth of Jesus took its course like any other
human birth, as regards both the Mother and the Child.
The newly-born Infant was nursed, cared for and
eventually weaned, as are all children.

“The message of the angels to the shepherds and their
salutation of the Redeemer of mankind Who had
appeared, the presentation of Jesus in the temple, the
coming of the Wise Men of the East, all happened
exactly as it is related in your New Testament. These
Wise Men were Divine instruments and were highly
gifted with mediumistic powers. At home they were the
dispensers of the true faith, and through their
communication with the good spirit-world they had
been initiated into many of the truths relating to the
salvation of mankind. The same spirit-world which had
announced the birth of the Savior to the shepherds,
brought to the Magi also the tidings of the happy event
which had already been foretold to them as impending,
by messengers from God. They were now invited to set
out in search of the Child in Whom the Son of God was
incarnated. The name of the place at which the Child
lay was withheld from them, but they were told that the
gleam of a light would go before them to guide them
on their way. Not only the Wise Men, but everyone
else saw this light, which appeared as a bright star
moving before them and leading them as Moses and
the people of Israel had once been led by the pillar of
cloud.

 

“Their journey took them first to Herod in Jerusalem.
This was an act of God, by which that temporal prince
was to be apprised of the human birth of Him Who was
to rule the world, and in order that the fate of the
children of Bethlehem might be fulfilled, as had been
foretold by the prophet. Here again the forces of Anti-
Christ gave evidence of their activity by inspiring
Herod with fear for his throne and thus driving him to
perpetrate the slaughter of the children, in order that
the new-born Herald of the truth might perish.

“The Magi did not reach Bethlehem until after the
presentation of Jesus in the temple, His parents having
returned thither from Jerusalem with the intention of
resting a few days before resuming their journey to
Nazareth. It was immediately after their arrival in
Bethlehem that the Wise Men found them, and after the
latter had set out for home, the parents of the child also
prepared to continue on their way, when a messenger
from God appeared to Joseph warning him to flee into
Egypt with his wife and child, as Herod, who on first
learning of the birth of a new King of the Jews had
determined to destroy him, was now on the point of
carrying out his design.

“After the Babe had emerged from the years of
infancy, His childhood was like that of other children.
He learned to walk and to speak, and in time began to
play, like the rest. On occasions, He misbehaved, as all
children will. With the passing of His boyhood His
understanding developed, and inasmuch as He was the
incarnation of the highest of created spirits, He was
also endowed with intelligence of a high order.
Nevertheless, He had to learn things from the
beginning as does everybody, even the most brilliant
minds. As a child He came to know of God exactly as
you yourself did, namely, by what He learned from His
parents and teachers. He listened to sermons on God in
the synagogue of His native village, and discussed
them with His elders, of whom He asked for
explanations of the things which He had not
understood or which had impressed Him as being
untrue.

“As a boy, moreover, He was assailed by those
temptations which come to all children of men and
which are sent of a strength in keeping with youth’s
powers of resistance, temptations which He overcame
in the measure as His knowledge of evil increased with
the advancing years. Nevertheless, there were times
when He erred and was guilty of failings due to human
weakness, as is the case with the best of children. With
every victory over temptation the Boy received from
God greater inner strength and knowledge of the spirit,
but as His power of resistance grew, the Forces of Evil
were permitted to increase the violence of their assaults
upon Him. It is so with every mortal, and no exception
was made in favor of the Boy Jesus, for it is a law that
applies to all men alike that they gain in ability to resist
sin with every victory over temptation, while, on the
other hand, Evil is left free to proceed with more vigor
than ever, with the result that the whole life of a God-
fearing man is a constant battle with the Hostile
Powers. ‘War is the lot of man upon earth’!

“As the Boy grew in years, the numerous errors of the
Jewish faith professed by His parents caused Him
many an inward struggle. All of these had been
introduced in the course of time by the Jewish Church
in the form of manmade doctrines and alleged
amendments to the Divine commandments.

“When He had reached the point of being able to read
and understand the original texts of the Old Testament,
He began to question the interpretations given to Him
by His Jewish instructors, but whenever, in His
youthful enthusiasm, He expressed these views to His
elders, He was severely rebuked. It was these
convictions conflicting with the Jewish religious
doctrines which at the age of twelve He laid before the
priests in the temple at Jerusalem much to their
amazement, putting questions to them and replying to
theirs out of His own wisdom.

“Undoubtedly He was in this respect what you call a
‘child marvel’, such as you find in all branches of
human endeavor. This Boy was a ‘child marvel’ in His
knowledge of God’s ways of salvation. But He was
human, like all others. At first He did not know who
He was, nor what mission He was destined to fulfill as
a mortal.

However, soon after He had reached the years of
discretion, He began to exhibit great mediumistic
powers. These consisted of the gifts of clairvoyance
and clairaudience, which, from small beginnings,
rapidly attained great perfection, enabling Him to
communicate with the spirit-world, to see the spirits as
a clairvoyant, and as a clairaudient to hear the words
spoken by them. This gift with which the adolescent
youth was endowed was nothing new; it had been
possessed by many others before Him, but in the case
of this Envoy of God it was developed to the highest
degree attainable by man.

“Through His communication with the Divine spirit-
world He was taught, while on earth, everything which
He needed for the execution of his task, for in these
matters He, as a mortal, was as ignorant as all the rest.
Recollection of His previous state as the highest of
God’s spirits he had none, because in every instance,
the incarnation of a spirit in a material body destroys
all memory of the past.

“Therefore, the things that Christ preached while He
was on earth, were taught to Him by the spirit-world,
as Moses was taught, by inquiring of God in the tent of
testimony, all of those things which he later proclaimed
to the people.

“Thus Jesus passed from boyhood, through
adolescence, to manhood, and as He grew older, His
wisdom increased, not only in the way in which this is
the case with all people as they mature, but chiefly by
reason of the teaching which He received from the
Divine spirits. Hand in hand with this went the growth
of His goodness, or, as your Bible expresses it: ‘Jesus
grew in wisdom and became day by day dearer to God
and to men’. (Luke 2:52.)

“It was real progress and not merely a gradual
disclosure of Himself, as your former religion
maintains. As a mortal, Christ was not originally
perfect, a thing which is impossible for any spirit
incarnated in human form, since all matter is inherently
base and full of imperfections. Even a spirit which
enters, pure and flawless, into the garment of flesh,
must, during its life as a human being, fight its way
step by step toward perfection, through the debasing
influence of evil.

“The weaknesses and failings of every human body
react upon the spirit which it houses and which,
however perfect, must constantly wrestle with them
and can never quite free itself from them during its
earthly existence. This is a part of human nature from
which not even Christ was exempt. To His last breath
He was compelled to fight against these failings and
more than once succumbed to them in His battle with
Evil. In the garden of Gethsemane even this mighty
Conqueror turned faint and weak praying that the
Father might let the cup pass away from Him, yet
adding: ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt’.
He knew that it was the Father’s will that He must
suffer, and His outcry reveals the weak, imperfect
mortal, whose nature, being human, quails and rebels
at the thought of an agonizing death. A perfect being
would have said: ‘Father, send whatsoever torments
thou wilt and deemest best. I will endure them’. He
would not have said: ‘Let this cup pass away from me’.
And it was human frailty which spoke from Him from
the Cross, when He uttered the plaint: ‘My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?’. This cry would
never have been uttered by a human being perfect in
every way, but such human beings do not exist. If they
did, mortals would no longer be what they are, and the
material body would cease to be.

“Saint Paul has recorded this truth in his Epistle to the
Hebrews, in words which may offend those who regard
Christ as a Deity, and hence deny the possibility on His
part of sin or of rebellion against God. The passage in
question reads: ‘In the days of his stay upon earth,
Christ, amid loud lamentations and many tears sent up
fervent prayers to Him, Who could save him from the
spiritual death of apostasy, and was heard because of
his piety. But although he was a Son of God he also
had to learn through the sufferings that lay before him,
and only after he had attained perfection did he
become the author of the salvation’. (Hebrews 5, 7-9.)

“In these words you will find confirmation of
everything I have told you, to the smallest particular.
“In my explanation of God’s Plan of Salvation I called
your attention to the very important fact that even the
highest of created spirits is exposed by incarnation to
the danger of being overcome by Evil and to being
persuaded to desert God. This danger threatened Christ
Himself Who was fully aware of it. On more than one
occasion He was on the point of succumbing to the
assaults of Satan, as Saint Paul intimates in the passage
I have quoted by saying that Christ had called upon
God amid loud lamentations and many tears to save
Him from death. That it was not corporeal death from
which He prayed to be saved is evident from the fact
that Paul expressly says, that Christ’s prayers were
heard, and that God saved Him from the death which
He so greatly feared. Did God then save Him from
earthly death and its terrors? On the contrary, that was
a cup which Christ was compelled to drain to the dregs,
and, therefore, it must have been death of another kind
from which Christ was saved in answer to His prayers.
As you know, the word ‘death’ in almost all passages
of the Bible, and above all, where it is used in the
epistles of Paul, signifies ‘spiritual death’ or the
abandonment of God. This was a danger at which
Christ trembled even before He knew that He was fated
to die on the Cross; such was the fierceness of Satan’s
assaults upon Him. Your Bible says nothing of Christ’s
daily battles with the Powers of Hell which spared no
effort to break His will-power and thus to force Him to
forsake God. From the fact that He raised His voice in
tears to God praying for help as Satan and his hosts
bore down upon Him, and that He trembled for fear
that He might not prevail against Hell for long, from all
this, you may gather that it was possible that even
Christ might forsake God. Had there been no such
possibility, He would have had no occasion to tremble
before Hell’s onset; still less, to call to be saved from
death ‘with strong crying and tears’. Furthermore,
Satan, who knew exactly what manner of a foe he had
before him in Christ, would have known better than to
take the field against Him with all his forces, had he
seen no prospect of victory. It is for this reason that he
never directs his attacks upon God Himself, but against
His creatures. If Lucifer, the highest but one of created
spirits, had deserted God, why should not the highest
of them all do likewise, particularly when, in the shape
of a weak mortal, it found itself face to face with the
Infernal Powers. Satan knows full well what he is
doing, and undertakes nothing that does not offer at
least a fair prospect of success.

“The further fact that Christ had human weaknesses
and failings is indicated by Paul in the same passage,
for he says that ‘Christ, though he was a Son of God,
yet learned obedience by the things which he had
suffered’. Thus Christ, as a mortal, had to learn
obedience. Not even He, on every occasion, gave heed
to the appeals to His better nature which came from
without and within, but the penalties which He as a
man suffered for even the most trifling act of
disobedience, taught Him obedience little by little,
when He stumbled. It is only he who is never weak that
never stumbles.

“It is precisely this that constitutes Christ’s wonderful
merit, that although He was the Son of God, He was
compelled to battle with the human frailties and short-
comings which He shared with other men, and in spite
of which He held out against the Infernal Powers. He
was called upon to sustain their most savage attacks.
directed against Him as a vulnerable antagonist who,
terrified at the threat of defeat, cried out to God in
prayer. He, therefore, knows from experience how
helpless you mortals feel in your feebleness. ‘For in
him we have, not a high priest unable to feel for us in
all our failings, but one who in the face of temptation
all about him felt as we feel, and yet did not commit
the sin of apostasy’. (Hebrews 4:15.)

“The word ‘sin’ is used here not to designate
transgressions due to human infirmities from which not
even Christ was free, but with reference to the iniquity
which severs us from God, the sin whose wages is
death. Christ was never one of the fallen spirits, and
even as a mortal did not allow His loyalty to God to
waver. The ‘mortal sin’ as the Apostle John calls it,
was something of which He was never guilty, but in
other ways He became as all men, even as to their
infirmities, and like them, there were times until He
achieved perfection, as proved by His consummate act
of submission: -- His death upon the Cross.

“The public appearance as a preacher of penitence of
John the Baptist was destined to be a decisive event in
the life of Christ Who until then had not known that He
was the promised Messiah. When, however He went in
search of John who hailed him before the people as the
Lamb of God ‘that taketh away the sin of the world’He
knew Himself, and was confirmed in His knowledge by
the voice of God saying: ‘This is my beloved Son, in
whom I am well pleased’.

“The moment had now arrived for the Divine spirit-
world to reveal to Christ His mission in life. He was
told that He was the highest of created spirits, God’s
First-born; that it was His mission to proclaim the
Divine truth; that He must stand firm against the
attacks of Satan who would do battle against Him to
the utmost and bring about His death upon the Cross,
as the Prophets had foretold. But only after His earthly
body had died upon the Cross and His Spirit had
departed from it, did Christ learn wherein the final
victory over Satan lay.

“Hell recognized in Christ the Son and Emissary of
God, Who was to lead humanity God-ward by His
teaching and Who was to be ready to die for the truth,
but of the true connection between Christ’s Crucifixion
and a victory over Hell, not even Satan was aware. Had
he been so, he would neither have tempted Christ, nor
brought about His death. As it was, he sought only to
render (Christ, in Whom he saw only a herald of the
truth, harmless, as speedily as possible. Should he be
unable to induce Christ to forsake God, he hoped to
discredit His teachings by preparing for Him a
malefactor’s death as the surest way of attaining that
end. In this he reckoned upon the fact that men would
naturally expect that a Son of God, such as Christ
proclaimed Himself to be, would be endowed with
Divine power sufficient to prevent so ignominious an
end at the hands of His enemies. If He failed to prevent
this, His teachings would be condemned. Such was the
way in which Satan reasoned.

“Christ now knew Who He was, as well as the nature
of his task, but before beginning with the execution of
the same His powers of resistance must be tested, as
had been those of all men who had previously served
God as His instruments. He must prove Himself equal
to His momentous, far-reaching Mission. It was to this
end that the Spirit led Him into the wilderness.

“Here it was that He was called upon to face a terrific
onset on the part of the Powers of Hell. No helper
stood beside Him. No word of human consolation from
His mother, His brothers or sisters, or His friends,
could reach Him, at the very time when, torn by the
conflict within His soul, He yearned for the sympathy
and support of a friendly human heart. All this was
denied Him in the wilderness; instead, he heard the
howling of wild beasts, and His clairvoyant eyes saw
shapes from Hell before Him, coming and going
without cease. He could hear them enticing, promising,
threatening. Every form of appeal to which men are
amenable was employed against the Son of Man, for
Satan has his specialists in every field of evil. Among
them were spirits of despondency and timidity, and
spirits of doubt, seeking to shake His belief in himself
as the Son of God, and in His Divinely assigned
mission, and to drive Him to despair of Himself.
Again, there appeared spirits of hatred, intent upon
embittering Him against a God who would drive Him
forth into the desert to suffer. There also came the
spirits of a sinful life of pleasure, drawing the most
enticing pictures of human ease and enjoyment in
contrast to the dreary waste about Him.

“The parts which these various spirits had to play were
skillfully assigned. The ablest of them were the spirits
of doubt which appeared upon the scene again and
again. How, argued they, could any God send His Son
into a desert to suffer hunger and unspeakable torture
of the soul? After all, was not everything that He had
heard from the allegedly good spirits, was not the
utterance of the Baptist, was not the voice of God
speaking to Him by the Jordan, merely a part of a great
delusion? Was not His Son-ship of God a great
hallucination, to which He had fallen a victim?

 

“This was the point upon which Hell centered its main
attack, seeking to destroy within this Son of Man His
conviction that He was the Son of God. Once this end
was accomplished, Satan had won the battle, for
whoever loses faith in his mission, casts it aside.

“For forty days and forty nights this remorseless
persecution was continued against a victim who stood
helpless and defenseless, trembling at every limb from
emotion and from physical exhaustion, brought on by
hunger and sleeplessness. The desert offered no
nourishment; Christ fasted, indeed, not voluntarily,
however, but because there was no food. Nothing but
sand and rock, as far as the eye could reach.

“Nevertheless, all the specialists of Hell labored in vain
to overcome this fever-racked Jesus of Nazareth, in
spite of the fact that what with bodily fatigue, hunger
and thirst, He was at last no longer able to stand. Again
and again, amidst tears, He cried to His Father for help,
in order that He might be spared the mortal sin of
desertion, and be given the strength to hold out
victoriously against the assaults of the Evil Powers.

“Finally, on the very last day, when the other infernal
powers with all their arts of seduction had failed to
make headway against their tormented victim, the
Prince of Darkness arrived in person. He, too, is a
specialist in some branches and in particular as a
worker of infernal miracles. As such he now stood
before the famishing Jesus and said: ‘Thou callest
thyself a Son of God. If this be true, thou needest not
suffer hunger. Command that these stones become
bread. That, however, is beyond thy power, deluded
man, and because of thy obsession, thou must die here
of starvation. Thou art not able to work miracles. Thou
never wert, and never wilt be, and yet thou imaginest
thyself to be a Son of God! Look upon me! I am a son
of God, Whom I have left, and Who in His cruelty
leaves thee to suffer thus. I can work miracles, and turn
these stones into bread, which I will give thee to eat.
Thou wilt see that I am able to do this. Abandon Him,
Who has abandoned thee to die of hunger! Worship
me, and the choicest viands on earth will be thine.’
‘Get thee away, Satan, I want not thy bread, nor would
I want any could I make it out of these stones. I await
the magic word that cometh from the mouth of God.
That-word will come at the hour appointed. By it I
shall have food, and shall live’.

“Satan, however, was not so easily discouraged.
“So be it! he replied, ‘If thou wilt work no miracle in
my presence, nor accept the bread that I offer thee in
pity, thou mayest choose another way to convince
thyself whether thou are indeed a Son of God, for that
thou art not, I would gladly prove to thee, and rid thee
of thy delusion. Behold the pinnacle of the temple; I
will take thee thither and do thou cast thyself down, for
it is written, He shall give His angels charge
concerning thee and on their hands they shall bear thee
up. Make the trial, therefore. Thou knowest that I will
not help thee, since it is my purpose to prove to thee
that thou art not of the Sons of God, and I am certain
that the fall will dash thee in pieces. Nevertheless, thou
shouldst make the trial. Not even God may demand of
thee a blind belief that thou art His Son. Unless thou
art willing to put thy Son-ship to but one single trial,
thou must confess thyself lacking in understanding. If it
be that thou survive thy fall unhurt, even I will believe
in thee. But if thou perishest, be thankful that death
hath relieved thee quickly of the deceit with which thou
hast been beguiled, rather than thou shouldst waste thy
life in such madness, to die at last, disappointed, and
reviled by mankind’.

“Tortured though He was by weeks of suffering,
Satan’s Victim controlled Himself with a mighty effort
and replied steadily:
‘I will not make trial of the Lord. Not in this way will I
seek to prove that I am His Son. In His hands I leave
the proof. He will not fail me, as thou too shalt find’.
“At this speech Lucifer, the second, the fallen, son of
God, quailed for a moment before his elder brother, the
loyal. His sorcery availed him nothing against One
Who would accept no miracles nor presume to perform
these on His own account.

“Not even then did Satan lose hope; he had still
another lure to offer that in the past had always given
brilliant results: the world was his, for everything
material is under his sway. He could give the kingdoms
of the earth to whomsoever he pleased; whether to the
Babylonian, Nebuchadnezzar, or to the Roman,
Tiberius, or to the Nazarens, Jesus, was for him to
decide. All those to whom he had made such a gift
heretofore, had become his vassals and had obeyed his
orders. The kingdoms of the earth in all their
entrancing splendor, passed as in a film before the
fevered eyes of the Son of Man. ‘All these things will I
give thee. If thou desirest them all, they shall be thine;
if but one, thou hast but to choose. But thou must bow
down to me as thy overlord. In the kingdoms which
thou hast seen, I am, and will remain supreme. But
thou shalt be next in power’. ‘Get thee hence, Satan,
for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God,
and him only shalt thou serve’.

“Satan had lost the battle. In the days which had passed
he had felt certain of his victim Whose prayers for help
to the Father he had overheard and Whose signs of fear
he had witnessed, and that at a time when only
Lucifer’s subordinates had been engaged. Now he had
come in person to reduce a fortress which seemed
ready to yield to an assault and into which hunger had
entered as his ally. He found that he had been
mistaken: spiritual weapons and bribes had no effect
upon this mortal. One implement of warfare remained
untried; one before which all men tremble and grow
pliant, namely, physical tortures, of which he resolved
to use the most excruciating. To inflict these there was
no lack of human minions, from the learned to the
ignorant, from kings to peasants; authorities temporal
and spiritual. In the end he could not fail; he need only
bide his time, and await the most favorable moment.
Therefore, as your Bible tells you: ‘When the devil had
vainly exhausted his artifices and wiles in tempting
Jesus, he withdrew from him to bide his time’. (Luke
4:13.)

“It was these terrific onsets of Evil upon Jesus which
Saint Paul had in mind when he wrote that Jesus had
‘offered up prayers and supplications with strong
crying and tears unto him that was able to save him’
from the mortal sin of abandonment of His God.

“As you see, God does not bestow His precious gifts
without exacting something in return: those who
receive them must prove themselves worthy by
standing severe trials. Even Christ as a man was
compelled to earn painfully the strength which He
would need for the mighty task before Him. He
received nothing for the asking, but whenever He had
fought victoriously with Evil, He was rewarded by an
access of Divine power. The heavens opened and
God’s spirits flocked about Him, and so it was after the
battle in the desert. ‘...and behold, angels came and
ministered to him’. (Matthew 4:11.) They also gave
Him earthly food, after His fast forty days. Now that
the stones were turned into bread by Divine
intercession, Jesus accepted it, giving thanks to God.

When it had been offered to Him at the instigation of
Satan, He had felt constrained to refuse it.

“After this first trial which He had met triumphantly,
Jesus began His career of teaching the multitudes,
collecting about Him a few men known to you as the
Apostles, who though poor and obscure were willing to
accept the truth. It had been His intention to initiate
them into the mysteries of the Redemption but
presently He found that even they were the weak
product of their times and unable to endure more than a
portion of His doctrine.

“The first step to be taken by Jesus was to convince not
only His disciples, but the people as well, of the Divine
nature of His mission. He must reveal Himself and His
intentions, and prove His word with the aid of Him
Whose emissary He proclaimed Himself to be.

“The same had been true of Moses, whose mission was
in every respect the counterpart of that of the Messiah,
whose coming he predicted in the words: the Lord thy
God will raise unto thee a prophet from the midst of
thee, like myself’. (Deuteronomy 18:15.) Moses had
been sent by the Lord to lead a people out of the land
of bondage into the Promised Land; the bond slaves
were the Israelites; their taskmasters, the Egyptians
under Pharaoh.

“Those whom Christ came to deliver from bondage
were all the spirits which had fallen from God; their
taskmasters were the Powers of Hell, under Lucifer.

“Before Moses could succeed in solving the problem
before him, two things had to be done. First, he must
persuade his people to agree to leave the land of their
bondage and to accept him as their leader. Next, and
far more difficult, he must compel the Egyptians and
their king to allow the Israelites to depart, for that
Pharaoh and his subjects would not part willingly with
the cheap labor of their serfs, male and female, went
without saying.

“In the same way the redemption through Christ
depended in the first place upon His success in
persuading the fallen spirits, which, having reached the
level of incarnation in human form, were groaning
under the bondage of Evil, to declare themselves ready
to abandon its ways. With this accomplished, there
remained the harder task of compelling Lucifer’s
government to surrender all those of its subjects who
desired to return to God.

“With Moses as with Christ, the task involved two
clearly defined steps.

“As regarded Moses personally, it was incumbent on
him above all to remain firm before Pharaoh, and to
allow himself to be diverted from his God-given
mission neither by threats nor by blandishments, lest
God’s plan come to naught by reason of his lack of
purpose. The people of Israel, on their part, must do
their share by declaring themselves willing to leave and
by holding themselves in readiness for the journey. It
then rested with God to grant them a decisive victory
over Pharaoh and to consummate their deliverance.
The manner in which this was to be achieved did not
concern either Moses or the people, that was for God
alone to decide.

“So too it was with Christ. He had nothing to gain by
telling the people how the redemption was to be
accomplished. It was His duty only to proclaim to them
that the hour of their deliverance was near; that they
must strive to make themselves worthy of the gift, and
that it was He Whom God had sent as their Savior.

“On His own part, He must beware of succumbing to
the Princes of Darkness who left no stone unturned to
induce Him to forsake His God and to abandon His
Divine mission. Like Moses, Christ must guard against
being vanquished by the foe whom He had come to
conquer. If He could hold out in His entrenchments
against the assaults of Evil, it was for God to determine
how the defense could be turned into a successful
attack, for obviously, as a mortal, Christ could not
wage an offensive campaign against spirits. The most
that mortals can do is to defend themselves against the
attacks of the Evil Powers when these attempt to lead
them astray by means of insinuations, suggestions,
temptation and intimidation, or by apparitions, as well
as with the aid of human agents. Hence Christ could
advance for an attack upon Satan only as a spirit, and
only after His earthly death. Not until then could it be
said of Him that ‘He had descended to Hell’.

“As I have told you, the possibility existed that Christ,
the man, could be overcome by Satan; had this
happened, the Prince of the lower would have
numbered the first Son of God also among his vassals.
In that event, God would have brought about the
incarnation of another of the highest of the celestial
princes to accomplish the work of redemption which,
because of human infirmities, His First-born Son had
failed to perform.

“You may shudder at the thought that Christ could
have fallen before Satan’s attacks, and yet this is a fact.
You mortals do not even faintly appreciate the love of
your Heavenly Father, Who did not spare His First-
born, but Who, for your sake, risked losing Him as He
had lost His second son. Nor can you picture to
yourselves how desperate was the battle which Christ
was forced to wage against all of Hell, in order that
men might be redeemed.

“The least of the devils can bring about your desertion
of God in a very few moments. The victory is his, for
the offering of a handful of money, earthly fame, or
sensual pleasures. But Christ, your oldest Brother, was
assailed by all of Hell’s forces led by Lucifer in person,
not once and for a few instants only, but again and
again throughout the whole span of a human life.
Column after column of those sinister warriors
advanced, day in, day out, upon the Son of Man,
resorting at last to the most fiendish physical torments,
until their victim, bleeding upon the Cross, died,
indeed, in the body, but did not waver in His loyalty to
His God. Satan had proved powerless against Him, yet
He, against Whom the full forces of Hell were
marshaled, was as human as you are, and was in every
way like you.

“This, then, is the true picture of the Redeemer, and
such was the way in which He performed His mission.
“Like Moses, who had to make himself known to the
Israelites as Divinely sent and prove his claim by
means of miracles, Christ owed it to the people to tell
them Who He was, and to accredit His mission of
redemption by similar means.

“Who was Christ, and what did He profess to be? ‘I am
Christ, the Son of the living God’. Such is His
testimony of Himself, substantiated by the words of
God: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased’. Christ was, therefore, the Son of God, and
claimed to be nothing more. He was not the Deity. Not
once did He say: ‘I am God. Not once did He assert
that He was God’s equal in any respect. Never does He
weary of repeating explicitly that He can do nothing by
His own power, that His words are not His own, that
His miracles owe nothing to Him. It is the Father Who
has sent Him; from Whom He has derived His
teachings; from Whom He has received the power to
heal the sick and to raise the dead. Whatever He does
is as the Father wills, and at the hour appointed by the
Father.

“Just as a viceroy may act only in the name and on
behalf of his sovereign by whom he was appointed, and
only within the limits of authority delegated to him, so
is it with Christ. Even if a ruler confers full powers
upon his lieutenant, the latter cannot call those powers
his own, for he is merely the ruler’s dependent and can
be relieved of his place at any moment. Thus Joseph
was set over all the land of Egypt by Pharaoh who
‘took off his signet ring from his hand and put it upon
Joseph’s Hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine
linen... and said to him ‘without thee, shall no man lift
up his hand or his foot in all the land of Egypt’.
Nevertheless, it was not Joseph, but Pharaoh, who had
been, and continued to be, the sovereign head of the
State. Joseph was merely his governor, even though he
was invested with full regal powers. He did not hold
these by virtue of his own right, but by voluntary
bestowal on the part of the king, who could restrict or
withdraw them at pleasure, or confer them upon
someone else.

“This is the simplest way of illustrating the relations of
Christ to God. God is Lord and Creator of all things,
not excepting His Son. God is of Himself, eternal,
omnipotent, omniscient. Not so His Son. Upon Him the
Father has conferred the government of Creation, and
foremost of all, the task of redemption. But the Son has
nothing by virtue of His own initiative, neither His
existence, nor His vice-regal office, nor His power.
Everything was conferred upon Him by the Father.
Although in Heaven the Son be arrayed like unto His
Father and act with Divine authority, nevertheless, it is
not He Who is God, any more than it was Joseph who
was the monarch of Egypt.

 

“This fact is so clearly brought out in the Holy Writ
that it is surprising to find that people could ever have
regarded Christ as God’s equal, in the face of God’s
solemn declaration. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt
have no other gods besides me.

“Not even those Christian denominations which revere
Christ as the Deity and would make Him the equal of
His Father in all things, dare assert that He ever said: ‘I
am God’, but base their contention upon the fact that
He called Himself the Son of God. They argue as did
the high priests, the scribes, and the Pharisees, of
whom the Bible says: ‘Because of these words the Jews
sought more intently than ever to take his life, holding
him guilty not only of profaning the Sabbath, but also
of making himself equal to God by calling God his true
father’. (John 5:18.)

“Christ did not defend Himself against the charge of
having called God His own Father, for He was a Son of
God in a sense which was not true of the other Sons of
God, the Divine spirits. He was not only the highest of
created spirits, but the only one whose celestial body
had been called into existence by God. Of the others,
the spiritual part was God-created, whereas their
celestial bodies owed their existence to His First-born
Son. Christ was, therefore, not only God’s First-born,
but the only one whose whole being was by direct
Divine creation. He was alone of His kind. He was His
Father’s ‘sole offspring’.

“In another respect also He was the Son of God in a
sense which applied to Him alone. Upon Him, and
upon no one else, had God conferred the rule over
creation. It was the same position as that held by
Joseph in the kingdom of Egypt, under Pharaoh.

“In this particular, then, the Jews were right: Christ did
call Himself a Son of God in a specific sense. He was
the Son of God.

“But against the charge brought by His Jewish
enemies, that He made Himself equal with God, Christ
defended Himself vigorously. Again and again He
protested that He was not from Himself, and that by
His own power He could do nothing. No one who
makes such an admission freely lays claim to the
attributes of a Deity, a conclusion so obvious that not
even the high priests and the scribes could have failed
to see it, but although they understood well enough
what Jesus meant by the phrase ‘the Son of God’, they
professed not to, for they were seeking a ground for
His death and could find none better than to assert that
Christ was making Himself equal with God by calling
Himself His Son. Once they were committed to this
pretext, they must adhere to it at all costs; nothing that
Christ could have said in refutation would have been of
any avail.

“It is true that Christ had full authority on earth and in
Heaven, but not from Himself. As Joseph held his
power in Egypt by the grace of Pharaoh, so (Christ
derived His power from His Father. Neither Joseph nor
Christ was the sovereign master.

“The Father alone, and none besides Him, is God. The
power resides in the Father exclusively, and in no other
being. At His own pleasure the Father can delegate this
power to any spirit, in and through which He performs
His works. That power which was conferred upon
Christ, could have been conferred by the Father upon
any created spirit other than His First-born Son, and
the great miracles worked by Christ could have been
performed by any other man had God given him the
necessary power. Christ Himself says frankly that the
things He had done could be done by any one who
believed in Him. ‘He who believes in me, shall have
the power to do the same deeds that I do, and even
greater deeds’. (John 14:12.) Belief in Christ is belief
in God; not, however, because Christ Himself is God,
but because He is the promulgator of God’s teachings.
‘The doctrine that I have taught is not my own; it was
my Father, who sent me, that directed me what I should
teach and in which words I should present my
doctrine’. (John 12:49.)

“Between the Father and Christ there prevails a perfect
unity of love, a unity to which each of God’s creatures
can attain and for which Christ prays to God on behalf
of His disciples. ‘...that they may be one, as we are
one. I, united with them, and Thou with me, so that
they may attain to the highest perfection of unity’.
(John 17:22, 23.)

“You see how illogical it is for your former religion to
base its contention of the Divinity of Christ upon the
phrase: ‘I and the Father are one’, in the face of the fact
that the same oneness that exists between them is
promised to all who believe.

“If you will study those of Christ’s utterances in which
He describes His relations with His Father, you will see
the impiety of referring to Christ as God; of picturing
Him as the giver whereas He is but the recipient Who
can give to others only those things which He Himself
receives from God. The same sacrilege with which the
Jews charged Christ when they falsely asserted that He
made Himself God’s equal, is committed today by the
people who today raise Christ to a level with the Deity,
in spite of the fact that He Himself spurned any such
pretensions.

“Christ’s contention concerning His own person,
concerning the source of His doctrine and the power
which He possessed was, therefore, that He had
received each and everything from the Father. From
Himself He had nothing. He is not God.

“There were things which God withheld, even from
Christ, and which He reserved to Himself. Witness
Christ’s answer to the mother of the sons of Zebedee:
‘...but the places at my right and at my left are not mine
to give, for they will be bestowed upon those to whom
they are allotted by my Father’. (Matthew 20:23.)
“Again, nothing is known by the Son of the Day of
Judgment, the knowledge of which is the Father’s
alone: ‘The day and the hour of fulfillment are known
to no one, neither to the angels of heaven, nor to the
Son, but to my Father alone. (Matthew 24:36.)
“Nor was Christ allowed by God to evade the agony of
death upon the Cross. Hence His prayer in the garden
of Gethsemane that the cup be permitted to pass, was
not answered.

“Christ’s own family as well as the Apostles and those
of the people who believed in Him, saw in Him nothing
more than a ‘prophet’ -- ‘God’s emissary’. It is true
that His mother knew that in Him was incarnated one
of the ‘Sons of God’ for this had been revealed to her
by the angel, before Christ was born. But she was also
aware that He was human and that He had human
infirmities. His conduct in public and the doctrines
preached by Him did not meet with her approval. She
had known that His creed differed materially from the
doctrines held by the Jewish religion, but to see Him
proclaim His views openly to the multitudes distressed
her sorely. She had pictured to herself His mission on
earth in a very different light, and when she heard that
Jesus in His sermons had spoken strongly about the
spiritual guides of the Jewish people and had publicly
branded as false many of the tenets of her ancient faith,
she, in company with her other sons, sought to restrain
Him, and even tried to compel Him to return to His
parental home, believing that in this way she could
allay the ill will that His actions had aroused among the
high priests, scribes and Pharisees. ‘And when his
family heard it, they went out to lay hold on him: for
they said, He is out of his mind’. (Mark 3:21.) ‘At that
time, not even his brothers believed in him’. (John
7:5.)

“That His mother and brothers should have
discountenanced His conduct in public is easy to
understand. They believed that the doctrines of the
Jewish religion were true. Their ancestors had lived
and died in that faith, and the fact that now an own son
and brother should preach publicly that this faith
embodied many errors, was more than these simple and
inexperienced people could bear. Whatever they were
told by their own clergy was final so far as they were
concerned. Moreover, they lived in fear of their fellow
men. They were pointed at as the relatives of a man
who was assailing the faith of his fathers. They had
frequently to listen to criticism of themselves on that
score by the head of the synagogue of their native
village. Their business interest suffered. Hardest of all
to bear was the news that the supreme ecclesiastical
council had excluded Jesus from the synagogue, and
had threatened to do the like with all those who
adhered to Him or acknowledged Him as the Messiah.
‘For the Jewish leaders had already agreed, to put a
ban on all who might acknowledge Jesus as the
Messiah’. (John 9:22.)

“The Jewish priesthood warned the people against
Jesus and His doctrines, resorting freely to slander as a

weapon, and alluding to Him as a ‘false prophet’, ‘a
man possessed of the devil’, ‘an agitator’, ‘a wine-
bibber’, ‘a profligate’, who passed his time in the
company of wayward women and sat down at table
with publicans and sinners. There was no expedient so
low that they did not avail themselves of it to render
harmless Him Who was a menace to their hold over the
people. They could not endure to see the great mass of
the people accepting as a religious truth something that
differed from what they themselves preached. It was to
them that the people owed obedience. What the clergy
did not believe, the people must not believe, under
penalty of being damned. ‘Is there a single one among
the leading people or the Pharisees who has been
brought to believe in him? Not a man; it is only the
common herd which understands nothing of the law.
Curses on it’! (John 7:48.)

“It is the old, old hymn, intoned by the clergy of all
denominations, as soon as it sees its influence on the
people threatened by an evangelist of the truth.
“You too will become better acquainted with that
melody than you have been in the past, as soon as you
have made public the truths imparted by me, when you
will witness a repetition of everything that took place
in those days. The servant is not greater than his
master, and you will be called a renegade priest, a false
prophet, a madman, a man obsessed of the devil, a
degenerate. Even your friends will heap reproaches on
you, and tell you that you should have left well enough
alone, and that what was good enough for the rest of
the cloth, was surely good enough for you also. But be
not afraid! Trust in God! What have you to fear of
men? And on the other Hand, by disseminating the
truth you will be of great benefit to many. More than
one member of the clergy even on reading your book
will become convinced that it contains the truth, even
though they may not be disposed to admit this openly.
Things were no different in the days of Christ.
‘Nevertheless, among the leaders of the people many
believed in Jesus although dared not admit it openly for
fear of being put under the ban by the Pharisees, for
they loved the glory that is of men more than the glory
that is of God’. (John 12:42, 43.)

“Even the Apostles on more than one occasion felt
doubts as to their Master, for they also had formed a
different conception of the Messiah. Not until the day
when Simon Peter gave utterance to his conviction:
‘You are the Messiah, the Son of God of our Savior’,
(Matthew 16:16.) did His Apostles know that in Jesus
of Nazareth the ‘Son of God’ had come upon earth.
This conviction, however, had not been reached by
Peter by reason of Christ’s words and acts nor by any
process of reasoning of his own, but by virtue of a
revelation from God. ‘...this was not revealed to you by
men, but by my heavenly Father’. (Matthew 16:17.)

“As to the manner in which the Divine revelations
reached Christ I have already intimated this to you, but
I wish to go into the subject more fully because it is
essential to an understanding of Christ’s life and work,
and in order to make it clear to you that in this
particular the experiences of Christ offer nothing
altogether new or previously unheard of.

“You have only to recall the way in which God had
conveyed His revelations and commandments to His
instruments in the past. How did He communicate with
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? With Moses and Joshua?
With the judges, kings and prophets? With Zacharias,
Mary and Joseph? In precisely the same way He now
communicated with Jesus who in this respect was not
favored above those who had preceded Him as Divine
instruments and emissaries. God caused the spirit-
world to enter into communication with Him as with all
the others, and through it He revealed all things that
Christ required for the fulfillment of the task before
Him.

“The prerequisites for communicating with the spirit-
world were the same with Him as those which apply to
any other person. It was but natural that His
mediumistic gifts were of the highest, for He was the
highest and purest of spirits incarnated in human form,
ever created by God. The ability to concentrate, and to
‘submerge the spirit’ of which I spoke to you in
connection with the development of mediums, was
possessed by Christ to an extent never attained by man
before or since. Moreover, no other human medium
has ever possessed a physical od as pure as that of
Christ. In Him then the prerequisites for
communicating with the Divine spirits existed to a
degree which no other mortal can hope to attain.
“The problem given to Christ to solve on behalf of the
kingdom of God, was the greatest ever assigned to a
mortal, hence it was necessary that God send Him
spirits in abundance, not only as regarded their
numbers, but also with respect to their strength and
ability.

“Among them went spirits of fortitude, to infuse new
strength into Him when His own began to fail in the
battle with the evil powers. Often these spirits were
accompanied by those of hope, joy, and peace of soul.
Again, militant angels from Michael’s Legion came to
His side, when Satan marshaled his legions in full
force, and when the fury of their assaults threatened to
be more than human strength could bear. Spirits of
truth and understanding instructed Him as to the best
way of bringing the word of God before the multitudes
or of answering questions concerning Himself or His
teachings. Spirits of wisdom taught Him how to solve
individual problems, but all this assistance came only
after He had exhausted His own resources without
avail. With Him as with all other mortals the motto
holds good: ‘God helps those who help themselves’. If
you would arrive at a goal, use your own strength first,
and if this does not suffice, God will intercede with the
aid of His spirit-world. God does not heedlessly
distribute favors and success. He demands that
everyone exert himself to the utmost, and this He
demanded of Christ also.

“When the sick required His attention, spirits of
healing came to His rescue whenever His own native
healing powers proved inadequate to cure the diseased
od of the patient, although in many cases these powers
sufficed to bring about the desired end without the help
of the healing spirits.

 

“Nevertheless, Christ did not cure everyone who
appealed to Him, for there are cases in which sickness
is a punishment sent by God, to be suffered by the
patient for a period commensurate with his offense.
Christ’s power of clairvoyance and clairsentience
enabled Him in every instance to tell whether or not the
supplicant’s plea should be granted. Moreover, a belief
in God and in Himself as God’s envoy was exacted by
Him in every cure which He effected.

“Not in all cases was the cure permanent, for many
individuals relapsed into their former ailment as soon
as they lost their faith in God and in Christ, the main
purpose of His healing being to bear witness to the
truth of His message.

“In connection with ‘raising the dead’, I am compelled
to say something that may surprise you. In all cases so
referred to, both those mentioned in the Old Testament
and those ascribed to Christ, the spirits of those who
were thus raised had not actually passed into the
Hereafter. No one who has actually died can again
come to life; his spirit can never again take possession
of the body from which it departed at the moment of
corporeal death. This is a Divine law which admits of
no exceptions. His race on earth is run, without recall.
Only by rebirth can his spirit ever again take human
shape.

“All individuals recalled to life by Christ were those
whose spirits had indeed emerged from their bodies but
still remained connected with the same by a slender
band of od. This was so feeble, that the spirit could not
have returned to the body either by its own efforts or
by virtue of any human assistance, and that, in
consequence, death would have ensued very shortly by
the rupture of the odic band. In the case of Lazarus,
this had already become so weak that the vitality which
could be conveyed to his body was insufficient to
prevent the setting in of decay. Hence, neither the odor
which accompanies that process nor the livid spots
which appear at its inception are infallible symptoms of
final decease.

“The fact that the ‘dead’ so raised were only cases of
suspended animation is clearly indicated by the words
of Christ when He raised the daughter of Jairus: ‘The
girl is not dead, but asleep’. (Matthew 9:24.) These
words have been explained as a jest, but Christ did not
jest in such matters, least of all when He was engaged
in proving the Divine character of His mission to the
people. In the case of Lazarus also He calls the
attention of His Apostles to the fact that death had not
taken place, for on hearing of the man’s sickness, He
said to them: ‘This sickness will not end in his death,
but will serve to glorify God’. (John 11:4.), and when,
as his friends thought, Lazarus had died, Jesus said
again: ‘Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go,
that I may awake him out of sleep’. But when once
more His Apostles failed to understand Him, Christ,
seeing the uselessness of further explanations which in
any event they would have misunderstood, said:
‘Lazarus is dead’. This was perhaps not a strictly
accurate statement of the condition of Lazarus, but it
was the only one that He could use, for at the time
Lazarus was already in his tomb, and people thought of
him as being dead. Had this really been the case, Christ
would not have said a few days earlier: ‘This sickness
is not unto death’, nor could He, after the entombment,
have used the words: ‘Our friend is fallen asleep’. On
both occasions Christ stated the truth, since Lazarus
was dead not in reality, but to all appearances.

“Nevertheless, nothing that I have said detracts from
the merits of the case, for what Christ did could not
have been accomplished by any human power, but only
through the power of God. This is true of every
instance in which Christ recalled the dead to life.
Human power was of no avail, and the Divine spirits
interceded, accomplishing whatever was needed to
allow the return of the spirit into the body. Christ, by
clairvoyance, observed the work of the spirit-world,
and at His word, the spirit was reunited with its body
and the seemingly deceased arose.

“It does not occur to you mortals that such things are
done in accordance with Divine laws. This is true not
only of the raising of the dead, but of all other miracles
performed by Jesus. When He turned water into wine,
this task also was accomplished by the Divine spirit-
world, and for this reason not even He was able to
bring about the transmutation instantly, as His mother
wished. His ‘hour was not yet come’, because the
spirit-world had not completed the necessary work, for
time is required, even by spirits.

“It is because you do not understand these processes
that you fail to grasp the meaning of certain words
found in the Bible which, in consequence, have been
incorrectly rendered into your several languages. Thus
your version of the Scriptural account of the raising of
Lazarus contains a sentence which must impress you as
utterly incomprehensible: ‘Seeing her weeping, and
that the Jews who were with her, were likewise in tears,
Jesus was so moved with indignation in the spirit and
troubled himself’. (John 11:33.) Why indeed should
Jesus be moved with indignation and trouble Himself
at the sight of the weeping sister and friends of a man
who had died? On the contrary, the original text reads:
‘A shivering passed through his spirit and he was
shaken’, for when spirits come near you and allow their
powerful odic radiations to act upon you, you too feel a
sensation of shivering and actually begin to shake. The
sensation is an agreeable one in the presence of good
spirit-beings, and unpleasant when it originates from
the proximity of evil ones. It was the sensation
produced by the nearness of good spirits which passed
through Christ on this occasion; the powerful odic
radiations of the spirits about Him, infusing Him with
their strength, by virtue of which He consummated the
work of the spirits with the summons: ‘Lazarus, come
forth’.

“To raise the dead was something that Christ could
undertake only when He had been assured by
messengers from God that such was the Divine will, for
all signs which bore testimony to the power of God
were manifested solely when they were of special
service in promoting the aggrandizement of the
kingdom of God or the sanction of His Emissary and
the latter’s teachings.

“In public Christ never mentioned His connection with
the Divine spirit-world, of which He spoke only when
compelled to do so. Thus He replied to the Jews who
reproached Him with casting out demons with the aid
of Beelzebub ‘But if I drive out the demons with the
help of one of God’s spirits, then indeed the spirit-
world of God has already come to you’. (Matthew
12:28.)

“Associated with the gift of clairvoyance in its highest
form which was peculiar to Jesus, was His ability to
recognize the mental state of persons and to read their
thoughts. In all times there have been people similarly
gifted, although your age has no understanding of this
matter and above all, does not realize that here also
there are involved certain eternal laws governing these
phenomena.

“Even in the case of Christ these laws applied in every
particular, and were taken into account by Him in the
sense that He always selected the time and place for
communicating with spirits with a view to securing the
conditions most favorable for the purpose. He Who
counseled His adherents to withdraw to their inner
chambers for prayer, Himself sought shady hillsides in
the cool of the dusk and the night, for light and warmth
and the noises of the day exert an exceedingly adverse
effect upon the formation of the od required for
communicating with the spirit-world Hence He
preferred the solitude of the woods and gardens, and
the darkness and coolness of the night.

“Furthermore, all predictions of the future made by
Christ had been learned by Him from the messengers
sent to Him by His Father.

“You have been in the habit heretofore of regarding
Christ’s miracles and prophesies as evidence of His
Divine nature. This conclusion is entirely erroneous.
You confuse the Workman with His implement. The
Workman is God. His visible implement may be any
being whatsoever, while His invisible implements, are
the Divine spirits assigned to that being. A little
reflection on your part would enable you to discover
this fact for yourselves. When you, personally, used to
preach on the ‘Divinity of Christ’ and tried to prove
this by means of His miracles and prophesies, did it
never occur to you to draw a comparison between Him
and God’s emissaries who had preceded Him? Did not
they perform miracles similar to those performed by
Christ? Were the miracles accomplished by Moses any
less wonderful than those which Christ performed?
Were the transformation of a rod into a serpent, and
that of water into blood, the killing of the first-born of
Egypt, the passage of the Red Sea, the flow of water,
caused by the stroke of a rod and many other signs
given by Moses of less account than the transformation
of water into wine, walking upon the waves or
conjuring the storm? If, then, you cite the acts of Jesus
as evidence of His Divine status, you are bound to
concede the same character to Moses. Were not the
sick healed and the ‘dead’ raised by many mortals who
were Divine instruments? Then these mortals also are
entitled to be regarded as Divine, as are Joshua, Elijah,
Elisha and other great prophets, not to mention the
Apostles, since they performed miracles equal to those
performed by Christ, and according to His word,
‘greater works than these shall they do’. You can cite
not a single miracle performed by Jesus which has not
been performed in the same or in a similar manner by
other mortals acting as envoys of God. You
misunderstand completely God’s purpose in bringing
these miracles about. You do not pause to think that
God must establish His instruments as such by the
performance of the unusual, before He can expect
humanity to recognize them as Divinely appointed.

“In the fulfillment of their mission, all of God’s envoys
have suffered greatly at the hands of men. Every one
has had his Calvary. They have been the vessels from
which radiated the Divine truth and light, a light which
mankind, lying in the bonds of darkness, could not
endure, as being too bright for eyes afflicted with sin.
Men turned from the light and sought to destroy the
human vessels which served as lamps. So it has always
been; so it is today, and so it will remain while there
are human eyes sore with sin, which ache when the
light of the truth is turned upon them. The Evil Powers,
and all mortals enslaved by them, hate this light and its
bearers, and do their utmost to encompass their
destruction.

“How desperate, then, would be the efforts on the part
of Evil to break the power of the greatest Light-Bearer
Who ever came upon earth! How painful the road that
Christ had to travel!

“His inner sufferings at the hands of Evil were hidden
from human eyes, and, therefore, nothing is said about
them by the Bible beyond the very casual account of
His temptation in the wilderness. Yet the onslaughts
made upon Him there by Satan were so savage, that
any one of the earlier Divine emissaries would have
abandoned God, if He had allowed the Powers of Hell
to proceed against him with the same vigor as He
permitted them to assail Christ. Moreover, the bodily
tortures which Jesus had to undergo until His last
breath were such, that His predecessors could not have
held out against them, the less so as they had to be
borne in addition to mental suffering equally severe.

“It is true that the sufferings of Christ had a higher
significance than did those of any other of the Divine

prophets. For them, death spelled the fulfillment of
their tasks, if they had remained true to God. For
Christ, however, the end of His earthly life marked
only the fulfillment of a portion of His mission, the
more important part of which was still to be completed
thereafter, by gaining a victory over the Prince of
Darkness. His crucifixion was a condition precedent to
that victory, not indeed, crucifixion in itself, but His
ability to endure it without faltering in His loyalty to
His Master. He might, indeed, while yet alive upon the
Cross, have lost faith in God at the last moment, and
gone over to the Enemy. Had He done so, He would
have died upon the Cross nevertheless, but defeated
and apostate. Until that moment, He had stood upon
the defensive against the terrific hail of missiles that
Hell poured upon Him; had He yielded, all would have
been lost. The effort at redemption would have failed
and Christ would have been a prisoner of the Prince of
Darkness.

“If, on the other hand Christ held out against the most
dreadful anguish of soul and body inflicted on Him by
the Infernal powers, the moment of His death on earth
would mark also the beginning of the second part of
the War of Redemption. He, Who as a mortal, had
stood on the defensive against the Powers of Hell,
would now, as a spirit, advance to attack them in order
to render His victory complete. To force the decision
He would descend into Hell. ‘He also descended into
the lower parts of the universe’.

“However, I shall dwell a little longer upon the first
stage of this war, the most important that was ever
fought, and pass in review those hours of Christ’s
human suffering which you call the Passion, seeing that
humanity appreciates far too little the unspeakable
anguish which this Divinely-sent Bearer of the Cross
was forced to endure in order that men might be saved.

“On the evening before His death Jesus was in the
guest-chamber of a house, in company with His
disciples. The feast of the Passover which He was
observing with them was also His farewell feast, but
who among you can measure and realize the anguish of
His soul? He knew from the Divine spirit messengers
that all preparations for His arrest and speedy
execution had already been made. He knew that one of
His disciples had had dealings with the high priests and
for a traitor’s reward of thirty pieces of silver had
declared himself ready to deliver his Master to them.
And at that very moment, the traitor was lying at table
with Him. They were not seated about a long table, as
you think, and as they are shown in your paintings, but
were reclining upon the skins of animals, elevated, at
the head by bolsters, gathered in groups of three about
low taborets, their left elbows resting on the bolsters,
their right hands serving to convey the food before
them. At the same taboret with Christ reclined John
and Judas, John to the left, his head close to his
Master’s breast, and on His right, Judas, who dared not
meet his Master’s eye and was anxiously awaiting the
moment when he could leave the chamber without
attracting attention.

“The Master’s heart bled on seeing before Him His
traitor in this youth, whose terrible end He foresaw. ‘It
had been good for that man if he had never been born’.
As He looked upon him, Christ’s eyes filled with tears,
for His heart was filled with love for even this lost
brother. In His mind arose a picture of what within a
very few hours was to be a reality: Judas, despair in his
soul, standing, rope in hand before the tree on which he
was to end his own life, and beside him Lucifer, ready
to take the spirit of him who he had led astray, into the
Pit. Terrified at the vision, the Master trembled.

“As for the other Apostles, would they stand by Him
and console Him in the hour of His martyrdom? The
events that the next twelve hours were to bring forth
passed before His mind’s eye. He could see them all
fleeing in terror for their own lives, and Peter, shaking
with dread before a maid, denying all knowledge of his
master with oaths and curses. He saw the devils
crowding about the door of the guest-chamber, ready to
seize upon His disciples as they went out, and in this
very night fill their minds with doubt of their Master, in
order that they might offer no support or help to One
Who was doomed to die. ‘Satan hath asked to have
you, that he might sift you as wheat’. Why had Satan
desired this? Only now it had been divinely revealed to
him what he had at stake in this war. God’s sense of
justice did not permit Him to conceal any longer from
Lucifer the fact that the battle which was now to open
between him and Christ was to decide the sovereignty
of Hell over the fallen spirits. God had revealed to
Lucifer that Christ, should He remain steadfast
throughout the death-agony which was at hand, would
thereafter as a spirit advance to an attack upon Hell at
the head of the celestial legions; that he, the Prince of
Hell would be overcome and would be deprived of an
essential part of his sovereignty. At this news, Satan
trembled; then, appealing to that sense of the Divine
justice which on one occasion had given him absolute
sovereignty over the fallen spirits, he demanded that
God observe strict neutrality in the decisive battle
which was impending. What Satan asked was, that God
withdraw His hand entirely from Jesus, leaving Him
not even any human support, while allowing Hell to
have a free hand. Should God accede to these
demands, Lucifer hoped that by doing his utmost, he
would succeed in breaking the spirit of this Jesus of
Nazareth at the last moment, and in driving Him to
despair of His cause.

 

“God granted the terms asked by Satan with the sole
exception of reserving to Himself the right to
strengthen Christ’s purely physical vitality. Had He not
done so, Christ would have died in the garden of
Gethsemane, and His martyrdom would never have
reached consummation.

“At Lucifer’s desire, all the mental and physical
anguish on earth, crowded into a few short hours, was
to be concentrated upon his antagonist, coincidentally
with an attack to be launched upon Him and His
followers by the entire infernal hosts. For Jesus, alone,
betrayed by one of His disciples, deserted by the
others, denied any Divine aid against the forces of
Hell, Lucifer hoped to prepare an end worthy of a
Judas.

“After Judas had left the guest-chamber, and even as
Jesus gave to His Apostles the wine and the bread
symbolical of His approaching death, His heart was
bleeding from a thousand wounds. He was human, as
you are, and had no advantage over other mortals
during this hour and those which were to follow. On
the contrary, He lacked even those things which are
most men’s, to fortify and console them in the hour of
suffering.

“Picture Him now, going out into the dark of the night
to the garden of Gethsemane. The night is no man’s
friend, least of all his who is overwhelmed with
sorrow. His disciples, on whom the evil spirit-forces
are already at work, walk silently beside Him, in dread
of what is to come. Under the burden of His mental
torments, He too is silent.

“At the remote spot in the garden, chosen by Him as
the place in which to offer prayer for strength, Lucifer
is in wait with his ablest assistants, ready to break
down their intended victim’s spiritual resistance by
their united efforts. This is the very opportunity which
God has conceded to the Prince of Darkness.

“Human words would fail to portray the terrors of the
visions held up by Hell to its victim in this brief hour.
As once the same Lucifer, when he tempted the Son of
Man in the wilderness, had shown to Him the
kingdoms of the world in all their splendor in order to
cause His fall, so now and to the same end he exhibited
to Christ all that is fearful and detestable in mankind,
causing to pass before His eyes pictures of
blaspheming, sinful humanity in its full viciousness and
corruption, in a steady succession of hideous pictures.
Next he showed to Jesus the supposed ‘fruits’ of His
years of endeavor among the Jews as God’s people,
pointing mockingly to His disciples, one of them
actually approaching at the head of a multitude, the
others fast asleep near by, with never a word of
comfort for their Master and unwilling to sacrifice a
single hour of sleep for His sake. ‘And wouldst thou
die to prove thy gospel, for such as these?’ Lucifer’s
mocking voice sounded in His ears, ‘For such as
blaspheme thy Father and will condemn thee as a fool
if that thou givest thy life for this perverse generation.
And hast thou taken thought what thy end will be?’
Before the clairvoyant eyes of his trembling victim
there now passed the scenes of the suffering in store for
Him; His capture, the flight of His disciples, Peter’s
denial, the roar of the multitude which but a few days
earlier had hailed His entry into Jerusalem and which
now thirsted for His blood, the death sentence, the
flagellation, His captors’ brutality, the crown of thorns,
Calvary, the Crucifixion, everything painted in its most
terrifying aspects, in order that He might give way to
despair and abandon His resistance. All the while the
spirits of hopelessness and desperation were driving
the maddest of thoughts into the mind of this victim of
theirs whom all had forsaken. His pulse throbbed, His
whole body was shaken with fever, His heart
threatened to burst. The terror of death seized upon
Him, drops of blood oozing from His pores and
trickling to the ground. Through it all, His disciples
were sleeping peacefully.

“The meager outlines preserved by your Bible of the
story of the Passion of Jesus fail utterly to convey to
your minds the anguish of soul and body suffered by
your Redeemer. Indeed, many of the worst tortures are
not even mentioned in the Bible. Thus, nothing
whatever is said there of the frightful hours which He
was compelled to spend in the underground dungeons
of the courthouse, fetid and swarming with vermin, into
which the soldiers had thrust Jesus after they had
scourged and mocked Him and crowned Him with
thorns, and after they had rubbed salt into the countless
deep gashes left by the lash upon His lacerated body
and had bound His hands, lest by removing the salt He
might find some relief from His unspeakable torments.

“Never did man endure such torture as did this Son of
God incarnated. Through its human tools, Hell did its
worst, for in Him it recognized its greatest foe who
could ever appear on earth. But not even the physical
sufferings which it prepared for Him could equal those
which His soul had to endure; moreover, both forms of
torment, mental and bodily, were applied to Him
simultaneously. Add to this that to the last He was
without any human consolation, and, what was still
harder, without any Divine aid. God had withdrawn
His protecting hand and had left Him helpless to the
devices of Hell. The cry uttered by Jesus as He hung
dying upon the Cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?’ reveals in full the mental agony
which He felt on finding Himself forsaken by all in this
hour of supreme physical suffering. Satan should never
be able to allege the excuse that his failure to reduce
this mortal to submission was due to the help received
by his victim from external sources. He should be
forced to confess that he had met his match in an
unaided human being, who, in spite of the most
excruciating torments of mind and body, could not be
driven to desert His God. (Matthew 27:46) (Mark
15:34)

“The Biblical account, according to which the mother
of Jesus stood by the Cross, accompanied by John, is
incorrect. Even this consolation was denied Him. Not
one of those dearest to Him was near, at the
Crucifixion. They could not have borne the sight, as
where, indeed, can you find a mother who would look
on while her child was being crucified? Again, you go
so far as to assume that Mary was standing by the
Cross throughout; had she been present at all, she
would surely not have remained standing, but would
have fallen unconscious. Hence it is also untrue that
Christ exclaimed from the Cross: ‘Woman, behold thy
son!’ and to the disciple: ‘Behold thy mother’. He did,
in fact, speak similar words to Mary and John as He
was being led from the court after Pilate had
pronounced the death-sentence and while His mother
and John were clinging to Him in anguish until they
were torn away by the soldiers. His mother had been
present at the trial, as had the disciples, and had never
lost hope that it would end in His favor, for there
constantly recurred to her mind the story of Abraham,
whose son was spared from sacrifice at the last instant,
even as the knife with which he was to be slain was
being bared. To this day there has not been a mother
who would not attend a trial in which her child’s life
hung in the balance, nor on the other hand is there a
mother who would go to witness the execution of her
own offspring.

“To see His mother on the verge of swooning from
agony and terror cut Jesus to the soul, and all He
thought of was to spare her any further sight of His
own suffering. He, therefore, begged John to take her
to his home until everything was over, and spoke
lovingly to her, urging her to go with John and to
implore God for strength in this hour of tribulation, and
telling her that the things which He must now suffer
were as the Heavenly Father had willed and that after
three days she would see Him again. (John 19:25-27)

“John willingly acceded to his Master’s request and
took the mother, pierced by a thousand sorrows and
keeping to her feet only with the utmost effort, to his
home; not permanently, as might be gathered from the
text of your Bible, but for the time being, to remove
her from these harrowing surroundings. At that home
also foregathered others, who had remained faithful to
Jesus. Some time later, when it was fair to assume that
the crucifixion had been carried out, some of them,
among whom was Mary Magdalene, went to a spot
whence the site of the execution could be seen, and
returned to relate the death of Jesus. (Mark 15:40)

“His mother staid at the home of John only so long as
she lingered in Jerusalem. In the end she returned the
home of her other children and her own. Naturally, she
often revisited Jerusalem to see the Apostles, in
particular John, as long as they continued their sojourn
there.

“As during His life Christ had been confirmed as
God’s envoy by signs, so was He in the hour of His
death. The sun’s light failed for three hours, and a
darkness came over the land, not by reason of natural
causes but as a sign from God. At the moment when
Jesus gave up the ghost, the veil of the temple was rent
in the midst, as a token that the wall dividing the realm
of God from that of Satan had been shattered by His
death. The earth shook and the rocks were rent, but the
story recorded in your version of the Gospel of Saint
Matthew that the dead had arisen from their tombs and
had been seen by many in Jerusalem is a falsification
of one of the original, accurate texts, which reads: ‘The
veil in the temple was rent in two from the top to the
bottom, and the earth did quake; and the rocks were
rent; and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of
those who had fallen asleep were cast forth. Many, who
had come from the holy city, did see the bodies lying
there’. This text which is accurate, therefore, records
what naturally would, and did happen, namely that the
tombs carved into the rocks were opened by the
earthquake shocks and that the bodies were cast out
upon the surface, and were, of course, in plain sight of
the many who had come from the city to witness the
crucifixion and who would have to pass close to the
shattered tombs.

“Here you have merely another of the many instances
of the falsifications introduced in the past into the
Sacred Texts, for very particular reasons. The false
doctrine had been set up that the earthly bodies of men
will be resurrected on some future day, and in order to
sustain this doctrine with passages from the Bible, this
particular passage, in addition to others, was distorted
by altering the original text which read: ‘The bodies of
those who had fallen asleep were cast forth’, into
‘Many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were
raised’. The word ‘saints’had to be interpolated if only
for the reason that it would never do to say that the
bodies of the un-saintly also had been raised at the
death of Christ. Still greater a difficulty remained to be
overcome in falsifying this passage, inasmuch as the
Church holds that there could have been no
resurrection prior to that of Christ, Who was the first of
the dead to arise. Hence it was necessary to insert the
sentence: ‘after his resurrection they entered into the
holy city and appeared to many’. They who committed
this falsification did not pause to consider that it had
already been expressly stated that the bodies were
raised on Good Friday, or three days before Christ’s
resurrection and whether they appeared to the people
of Jerusalem on that same day or on Easter Sunday in
no way enters into the question. Besides, where did
these bodies which allegedly had risen on Good Friday
pass the intervening days? Where were they after
Easter Sunday? Did they return to their tombs and if
not, where did they go? It is strange that not one of the
other three Evangelists speaks of this resurrection on
Good Friday, and as a matter of fact, Matthew did not
say the things that are attributed to him, as you have
seen from my explanation.

“Christ was dead. His earthly death had released His
spirit from its material vesture. As a mortal He had
withstood all the onslaughts of Hell and had thereby
performed the first part of His Messianic mission
successfully. He had not been conquered by Hell.
Nevertheless, this alone did not insure His victory over
the Enemy whom He had repelled, for in a battle
between two opponents, he who acts wholly on the
defensive, is not truly the victor, even if he succeeds in
defending himself against the other’s attacks. In order
to claim a victory he must overpower his antagonist
and force him to acknowledge himself beaten.

“This was true of Christ as well. As a man He had
repelled all the attacks of His mighty opponent; He had

done all that man can do. Now, however, that He was
freed from the flesh, He could, as a spirit, advance
upon His enemy, the Prince of Darkness, and
descended into Hell relying upon the all-conquering
Divine power, which as a mortal He had earned by His
loyalty to God, Who now sent to Him the Heavenly
hosts as His comrades in arms. Now began a struggle
like that which had occurred when Lucifer with his
adherents had battled with the Heavenly Legions in the
days of the great Revolt of God’s spirit-kingdom. The
present battle was waged in Lucifer’s realm and was a
duel between him and Christ, as well as a general
engagement between the legions of Heaven and those
of Darkness. This mighty conflict raged until it had
invaded the lowest depths of Hell into which Lucifer
and his followers had been forced to retreat. Then,
when the defeat of the Powers of Hell was no longer in
doubt, many of those who had formerly served it but
who, nevertheless, repented of their disloyalty to God,
went over to the side of the Heavenly hosts and fought
with them against their former oppressors. The number
of those who thus deserted grew from moment to
moment.

“When Lucifer saw that all was lost he begged for
mercy. He who in the desert had tried to tempt the Son
of God by offering Him the kingdoms of the world,
now stood quaking before Him Whose faith in His
Son-ship of God he had then sought to undermine and
trembled at the thought that this same Jesus of
Nazareth intended to deprive him of all his sovereign
power, and that the moment had arrived when he
himself with all his followers would be doomed forever
to the Pit of Darkness. He was but too familiar with the
prophecy which foretold that the time was coming
when he, as the Prince of the kingdom of the dead
would be hurled into the uttermost depths, shorn of all
his power and deprived of his sovereignty over God’s
fallen children.

“Christ however disclosed to him that he was not to be
deprived of his sovereignty entirely, but that this was to
be restricted to apply to those of his subjects who were
whole-heartedly devoted to him, but that any who
desired to leave his kingdom and to return to God must
be released unconditionally. They were no longer to be
regarded as his subjects. He might, if so disposed, bind
them to himself by artifice and guile, but not by force,
as heretofore.

“Satan accepted these terms. He had no other choice,
and had, in fact, expected much harder conditions. The
title by which he held his sovereignty and which God
Himself had once issued to him was changed to suit the
wishes of his conqueror, Christ, and God, in Whose
name the Victor made terms with Lucifer is the just
and almighty Protector Who warrants the exact
observance of these peace-stipulations. To His power
everything, even Hell, is subject. His commands must
be obeyed even by those who are His enemies.

“Thus was concluded the mighty task of redemption. In
all of its important aspects, God’s Plan of Salvation
had been realized. The gulf that yawns between the
Realm of Darkness and the kingdom of God had been
spanned by a bridge which could be crossed freely by
all who desired to leave Satan’s Foreign Legion and to
return to their old home in the land of God. No sentinel
in the service of Hell could prevent them from passing
the frontier.

“Surrounded by His triumphant hosts, Christ returned
from Satan’s stronghold to the sphere that once had
been the Paradise, and the cherubim who had since
stood on guard at its entrance lowered their flaming
swords in salute to their Lord and Master and His
victorious spirit-legions. In Paradise a halt was made
until the day on which, with Christ at its head, the great
procession re-entered the portals of Heaven.

“During this time, however, neither Christ nor His host
of spirits had been idle. Their stay in Paradise must be
utilized to spread throughout all Creation the news of
the Redeemer’s triumph and to urge all who were
minded thereto that they begin their homeward
journey. Especial pains were taken to seek out the
countless sufferers in the lower spirit-spheres in order
that they might be instructed, admonished, cheered and
consoled, and incited to arouse themselves to set out
upon the road to the Father’s house which Christ had
laid open. Christ Himself was foremost in counseling
these unhappy spirits and in seeing to it that as many as
possible of them should take the homeward path
without delay. This is indicated in the words of Saint
Peter: ‘...in which also he went and preached unto the
spirits in prison, that aforetime were disobedient, when
the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah,
while the ark was a preparing...’(1st Peter 3:19, 20.)
“Materialized in human form, Christ appeared to those
who had been closest to Him in life and had borne
much sorrow with Him and on His behalf: His mother,
the Apostles and His friends.

“The day arrived on which He returned to the spirit-
hosts which were awaiting Him in Paradise, after He
had said farewell to His friends on earth and had
assigned to each his task. This was the day of the
Ascension, on which, as a conquering hero, He led His
army back into the kingdom of God.

“From the time at which the Redemption was achieved
by Christ it has been free to those who have fallen from
God to make use of the opportunity thus offered to
them. Satan’s prison-camps have been thrown open by
Christ’s victory, and their inmates are free to leave;
whether or not they avail themselves of the
opportunity, rests with them.

“Christ has indeed built the bridge, but whether it is
used in returning home is left to the decision of each
individual, who must not shirk the hardships attendant
upon the journey. Consider what the prisoners taken in
the World War were ready to under go after peace had
released them from their captivity, wandering from the
furthest of Siberia with bleeding feet, week after week,
in their efforts to make their way back to their native
land.

“The prisoners of Satan must do likewise if they would
find, their way back to God. Christ will be beside them
ready to help them to overcome the hardships they will
face in their wanderings. His messengers show them
the way, strengthen, cheer and console the travelers,
and raise to their feet those who have stumbled and
fallen from exhaustion. But the homeward bound
traveler may not turn back and re-enter the ranks of the
enemy by deserting God; if he does, the longer it will
be before he can again come to the resolution: ‘I will
arise and go to my Father’. But every one, without
exception, will see the day on which he can no longer
appease his hunger for peace and happiness with the
husks of evil, and will resolutely set out on the
homeward path.

“For some, the span of a single human life will be
sufficient. Others must suffer for hundreds, and still
others, for thousands of years, sundered from God in
their race for the gold of happiness which they seek in
the counterfeiters’ dens of iniquity, and led by Satan’s
will-o’-the-wisps from one delusion into another. It is
by their own fault that they must pass through repeated
incarnations, and that they were so slow to find the
Road of Light which the loving care of their Father and
of His Son, the Redeemer of the fallen, has built for
them."

Taken from Johannes Greber's famous 1932 book "Communication with the Spirit World God"
By Johannes Greber

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