The Urantia Book
PAPER 196
THE FAITH OF JESUS
196:0.1 JESUS enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted
faith in God. He experienced the ordinary ups and downs of mortal
existence, but he never religiously doubted the certainty of God's
watchcare and guidance. His faith was the outgrowth of the insight
born of the activity of the divine presence, his indwelling
Adjuster. His faith was neither traditional nor merely
intellectual; it was wholly personal and purely spiritual.
196:0.2 The human Jesus saw God as being holy,
just, and great, as well as being true, beautiful, and good. All
these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind as the "will
of the Father in heaven." Jesus' God was at one and the same time
"The Holy One of Israel" and "The living and loving Father in
heaven." The concept of God as a Father was not original with
Jesus, but he exalted and elevated the idea into a sublime
experience by achieving a new revelation of God and by proclaiming
that every mortal creature is a child of this Father of love, a
son of God.
196:0.3 Jesus did not cling to faith in God as
would a struggling soul at war with the universe and at death
grips with a hostile and sinful world; he did not resort to faith
merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a
comfort in threatened despair; faith was not just an illusory
compensation for the unpleasant realities and the sorrows of
living. In the very face of all the natural difficulties and the
temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he experienced the
tranquillity of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt the
tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very presence of the
heavenly Father. And this triumphant faith was a living experience
of actual spirit attainment. Jesus' great contribution to the
values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new
ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that he so
magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of
living faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe,
in the life of any one mortal, did God ever become such a
living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of
Nazareth.
196:0.4 In the Master's life on Urantia, this
and all other worlds of the local creation discover a new and
higher type of religion, religion based on personal spiritual
relations with the Universal Father and wholly validated by the
supreme authority of genuine personal experience. This living
faith of Jesus was more than an intellectual reflection, and it
was not a mystic meditation.
196:0.5 Theology may fix, formulate, define, and
dogmatize faith, but in the human life of Jesus faith was
personal, living, original, spontaneous, and purely spiritual.
This faith was not reverence for tradition nor a mere intellectual
belief which he held as a sacred creed, but rather a sublime
experience and a profound conviction which securely held him.
His faith was so real and all-encompassing that it absolutely
swept away any spiritual doubts and effectively destroyed every
conflicting desire. Nothing was able to tear him away from the
spiritual anchorage of this fervent, sublime, and undaunted faith.
Even in the face of apparent defeat or in the throes of
disappointment and threatening despair, he calmly stood in the
divine presence free from fear and fully conscious of spiritual
invincibility. Jesus enjoyed the invigorating assurance of the
possession of unflinching faith, and in each of life's trying
situations he unfailingly exhibited an unquestioning loyalty to
the Father's will. And this superb faith was undaunted even by the
cruel and crushing threat of an ignominious death.
196:0.6 In a religious genius, strong spiritual
faith so many times leads directly to disastrous fanaticism, to
exaggeration of the religious ego, but it was not so with Jesus.
He was not unfavorably affected in his practical life by his
extraordinary faith and spirit attainment because this spiritual
exaltation was a wholly unconscious and spontaneous soul
expression of his personal experience with God.
196:0.7 The all-consuming and indomitable
spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical, for it never
attempted to run away with his well-balanced intellectual
judgments concerning the proportional values of practical and
commonplace social, economic, and moral life situations. The Son
of Man was a splendidly unified human personality; he was a
perfectly endowed divine being; he was also magnificently
co-ordinated as a combined human and divine being functioning on
earth as a single personality. Always did the Master co-ordinate
the faith of the soul with the wisdom-appraisals of seasoned
experience. Personal faith, spiritual hope, and moral devotion
were always correlated in a matchless religious unity of
harmonious association with the keen realization of the reality
and sacredness of all human loyalties -- personal honor, family
love, religious obligation, social duty, and economic necessity.
196:0.8 The faith of Jesus visualized all spirit
values as being found in the kingdom of God; therefore he said,
"Seek first the kingdom of heaven." Jesus saw in the advanced and
ideal fellowship of the kingdom the achievement and fulfillment of
the "will of God." The very heart of the prayer which he taught
his disciples was, "Your kingdom come; your will be done." Having
thus conceived of the kingdom as comprising the will of God, he
devoted himself to the cause of its realization with amazing
self-forgetfulness and unbounded enthusiasm. But in all his
intense mission and throughout his extraordinary life there never
appeared the fury of the fanatic nor the superficial frothiness of
the religious egotist.
196:0.9 The Master's entire life was
consistently conditioned by this living faith, this sublime
religious experience. This spiritual attitude wholly dominated his
thinking and feeling, his believing and praying, his teaching and
preaching. This personal faith of a son in the certainty and
security of the guidance and protection of the heavenly Father
imparted to his unique life a profound endowment of spiritual
reality. And yet, despite this very deep consciousness of close
relationship with divinity, this Galilean, God's Galilean, when
addressed as Good Teacher, instantly replied, "Why do you call me
good?" When we stand confronted by such splendid
self-forgetfulness, we begin to understand how the Universal
Father found it possible so fully to manifest himself to him and
reveal himself through him to the mortals of the realms.
196:0.10 Jesus brought to God, as a man of the
realm, the greatest of all offerings: the consecration and
dedication of his own will to the majestic service of doing the
divine will. Jesus always and consistently interpreted religion
wholly in terms of the Father's will. When you study the career of
the Master, as concerns prayer or any other feature of the
religious life, look not so much for what he taught as for what he
did. Jesus never prayed as a religious duty. To him prayer was a
sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul
loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of
thanksgiving, an avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of
conflict, an exaltation of intellection, an ennoblement of desire,
a vindication of moral decision, an enrichment of thought, an
invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration of impulse, a
clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a
transcendental surrender of will, a sublime assertion of
confidence, a revelation of courage, the proclamation of
discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation of
consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and
the mighty mobilization of the combined soul powers to withstand
all human tendencies toward selfishness, evil, and sin. He lived
just such a life of prayerful consecration to the doing of his
Father's will and ended his life triumphantly with just such a
prayer. The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this
consciousness of the presence of God; and he attained it by
intelligent prayer and sincere worship -- unbroken communion with
God -- and not by leadings, voices, visions, or extraordinary
religious practices.
196:0.11 In the earthly life of Jesus, religion
was a living experience, a direct and personal movement from
spiritual reverence to practical righteousness. The faith of Jesus
bore the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit. His faith was
not immature and credulous like that of a child, but in many ways
it did resemble the unsuspecting trust of the child mind. Jesus
trusted God much as the child trusts a parent. He had a profound
confidence in the universe -- just such a trust as the child has
in its parental environment. Jesus' wholehearted faith in the
fundamental goodness of the universe very much resembled the
child's trust in the security of its earthly surroundings. He
depended on the heavenly Father as a child leans upon its earthly
parent, and his fervent faith never for one moment doubted the
certainty of the heavenly Father's overcare. He was not disturbed
seriously by fears, doubts, and skepticism. Unbelief did not
inhibit the free and original expression of his life. He combined
the stalwart and intelligent courage of a full-grown man with the
sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child. His faith grew
to such heights of trust that it was devoid of fear.
196:0.12 The faith of Jesus attained the purity
of a child's trust. His faith was so absolute and undoubting that
it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow beings and to
the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the divine
was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the
assurance of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating
pretense in his religious experience. In this giant intellect of
the full-grown man the faith of the child reigned supreme in all
matters relating to the religious consciousness. It is not strange
that he once said, "Except you become as a little child, you shall
not enter the kingdom." Notwithstanding that Jesus' faith was
childlike, it was in no sense childish.
196:0.13 Jesus does not require his disciples to
believe in him but rather to believe with him, believe in the
reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the
security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father. The
Master desires that all his followers should fully share his
transcendent faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his
followers, not only to believe what he believed, but also
to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of
his one supreme requirement, "Follow me."
196:0.14 Jesus' earthly life was devoted to one
great purpose -- doing the Father's will, living the human life
religiously and by faith. The faith of Jesus was trusting, like
that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He made
robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold
disappointments, resolutely surmounted extraordinary difficulties,
and unflinchingly confronted the stern requirements of duty. It
required a strong will and an unfailing confidence to believe what
Jesus believed and as he believed.
1. JESUS -- THE MAN
196:1.1 Jesus' devotion to the Father's will and
the service of man was even more than mortal decision and human
determination; it was a wholehearted consecration of himself to
such an unreserved bestowal of love. No matter how great the fact
of the sovereignty of Michael, you must not take the human Jesus
away from men. The Master has ascended on high as a man, as well
as God; he belongs to men; men belong to him. How unfortunate that
religion itself should be so misinterpreted as to take the human
Jesus away from struggling mortals! Let not the discussions of the
humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure the saving truth
that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith, achieved
the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most
truly religious man who has ever lived on Urantia.
196:1.2 The time is ripe to witness the
figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb
amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of
nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer
sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ.
What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son
of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology
and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his
name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship
of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith
and of practices of living as will enable it to "follow after" the
Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion
to the doing of his Father's will and of consecration to the
unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the
exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of
social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment? Does
institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the
overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of
Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the
ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social
readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral
rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian
civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living
religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion
about Jesus.
196:1.3 To "follow Jesus" means to personally
share his religious faith and to enter into the spirit of the
Master's life of unselfish service for man. One of the most
important things in human living is to find out what Jesus
believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the
achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge,
that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of
Jesus and how he lived it.
196:1.4
The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond
to the presentation of his sincere human life of consecrated
religious motivation if such truths shall again be proclaimed to
the world. The people heard him gladly because he was one of them,
an unpretentious layman; the world's greatest religious teacher
was indeed a layman.
196:1.5 It should not be the aim of kingdom
believers literally to imitate the outward life of Jesus in the
flesh but rather to share his faith; to trust God as he trusted
God and to believe in men as he believed in men. Jesus never
argued about either the fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of
men; he was a living illustration of the one and a profound
demonstration of the other.
196:1.6 Just as men must progress from the
consciousness of the human to the realization of the divine, so
did Jesus ascend from the nature of man to the consciousness of
the nature of God. And the Master made this great ascent from the
human to the divine by the conjoint achievement of the faith of
his mortal intellect and the acts of his indwelling Adjuster. The
fact-realization of the attainment of totality of divinity (all
the while fully conscious of the reality of humanity) was attended
by seven stages of faith consciousness of progressive
divinization. These stages of progressive self-realization were
marked off by the following extraordinary events in the Master's
bestowal experience:
1. The arrival of the Thought
Adjuster.
2. The messenger of Immanuel who
appeared to him at Jerusalem when he was about twelve years old.
3. The manifestations attendant upon
his baptism.
4. The experiences on the Mount of
Transfiguration.
5. The morontia resurrection.
6. The spirit ascension.
7. The final embrace of the Paradise
Father, conferring unlimited sovereignty of his universe.
2. THE RELIGION OF JESUS
196:2.1 Some day a reformation in the Christian
church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated
religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our
faith. You may preach a religion about Jesus, but,
perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus. In
the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a
new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ. The
Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into
Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and
portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of
the Damascus road. The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the
personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee;
Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal
religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost the whole of the
New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant
and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of
Paul's religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal
religious convictions. The only notable exceptions to this
statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
are the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in
his writing, only once reverted to the personal religious life of
his Master. The New Testament is a superb Christian document, but
it is only meagerly Jesusonian.
196:2.2 Jesus' life in the flesh portrays a
transcendent religious growth from the early ideas of primitive
awe and human reverence up through years of personal spiritual
communion until he finally arrived at that advanced and exalted
status of the consciousness of his oneness with the Father. And
thus, in one short life, did Jesus traverse that experience of
religious spiritual progression which man begins on earth and
ordinarily achieves only at the conclusion of his long sojourn in
the spirit training schools of the successive levels of the
pre-Paradise career. Jesus progressed from a purely human
consciousness of the faith certainties of personal religious
experience to the sublime spiritual heights of the positive
realization of his divine nature and to the consciousness of his
close association with the Universal Father in the management of a
universe. He progressed from the humble status of mortal
dependence which prompted him spontaneously to say to the one who
called him Good Teacher, "Why do you call me good? None is good
but God," to that sublime consciousness of achieved divinity which
led him to exclaim, "Which one of you convicts me of sin?" And
this progressing ascent from the human to the divine was an
exclusively mortal achievement. And when he had thus attained
divinity, he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as
well as the Son of God.
196:2.3 Mark, Matthew, and Luke retain something
of the picture of the human Jesus as he engaged in the superb
struggle to ascertain the divine will and to do that will. John
presents a picture of the triumphant Jesus as he walked on earth
in the full consciousness of divinity. The great mistake that has
been made by those who have studied the Master's life is that some
have conceived of him as entirely human, while others have thought
of him as only divine. Throughout his entire experience he was
truly both human and divine, even as he yet is.
196:2.4 But the greatest mistake was made in
that, while the human Jesus was recognized as having a
religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a
religion. Paul's Christianity made sure of the adoration of the
divine Christ, but it almost wholly lost sight of the struggling
and valiant human Jesus of Galilee, who, by the valor of his
personal religious faith and the heroism of his indwelling
Adjuster, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to become one
with divinity, thus becoming the new and living way whereby all
mortals may so ascend from humanity to divinity. Mortals in all
stages of spirituality and on all worlds may find in the personal
life of Jesus that which will strengthen and inspire them as they
progress from the lowest spirit levels up to the highest divine
values, from the beginning to the end of all personal religious
experience.
196:2.5 At the time of the writing of the New
Testament, the authors not only most profoundly believed in the
divinity of the risen Christ, but they also devotedly and
sincerely believed in his immediate return to earth to consummate
the heavenly kingdom. This strong faith in the Lord's immediate
return had much to do with the tendency to omit from the record
those references which portrayed the purely human experiences and
attributes of the Master. The whole Christian movement tended away
from the human picture of Jesus of Nazareth toward the exaltation
of the risen Christ, the glorified and soon-returning Lord Jesus
Christ.
196:2.6 Jesus founded the religion of personal
experience in doing the will of God and serving the human
brotherhood; Paul founded a religion in which the glorified Jesus
became the object of worship and the brotherhood consisted of
fellow believers in the divine Christ. In the bestowal of Jesus
these two concepts were potential in his divine-human life, and it
is indeed a pity that his followers failed to create a unified
religion which might have given proper recognition to both the
human and the divine natures of the Master as they were
inseparably bound up in his earth life and so gloriously set forth
in the original gospel of the kingdom.
196:2.7 You would be neither shocked nor
disturbed by some of Jesus' strong pronouncements if you would
only remember that he was the world's most wholehearted and
devoted religionist. He was a wholly consecrated mortal,
unreservedly dedicated to doing his Father's will. Many of his
apparently hard sayings were more of a personal confession of
faith and a pledge of devotion than commands to his followers. And
it was this very singleness of purpose and unselfish devotion that
enabled him to effect such extraordinary progress in the conquest
of the human mind in one short life. Many of his declarations
should be considered as a confession of what he demanded of
himself rather than what he required of all his followers. In his
devotion to the cause of the kingdom, Jesus burned all bridges
behind him; he sacrificed all hindrances to the doing of his
Father's will.
196:2.8 Jesus blessed the poor because they were
usually sincere and pious; he condemned the rich because they were
usually wanton and irreligious. He would equally condemn the
irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and worshipful man
of wealth.
196:2.9 Jesus led men to feel at home in the
world; he delivered them from the slavery of taboo and taught them
that the world was not fundamentally evil. He did not long to
escape from his earthly life; he mastered a technique of
acceptably doing the Father's will while in the flesh. He attained
an idealistic religious life in the very midst of a realistic
world. Jesus did not share Paul's pessimistic view of humankind.
The Master looked upon men as the sons of God and foresaw a
magnificent and eternal future for those who chose survival. He
was not a moral skeptic; he viewed man positively, not negatively.
He saw most men as weak rather than wicked, more distraught than
depraved. But no matter what their status, they were all God's
children and his brethren.
196:2.10 He taught men to place a high value
upon themselves in time and in eternity. Because of this high
estimate which Jesus placed upon men, he was willing to spend
himself in the unremitting service of humankind. And it was this
infinite worth of the finite that made the golden rule a vital
factor in his religion. What mortal can fail to be uplifted by the
extraordinary faith Jesus has in him?
196:2.11 Jesus offered no rules for social
advancement; his was a religious mission, and religion is an
exclusively individual experience. The ultimate goal of society's
most advanced achievement can never hope to transcend Jesus'
brotherhood of men based on the recognition of the fatherhood of
God. The ideal of all social attainment can be realized only in
the coming of this divine kingdom.
3. THE SUPREMACY OF RELIGION
196:3.1 Personal, spiritual religious experience
is an efficient solvent for most mortal difficulties; it is an
effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all human problems.
Religion does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does
dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them. True religion
unifies the personality for effective adjustment to all mortal
requirements. Religious faith -- the positive leading of the
indwelling divine presence -- unfailingly enables the God-knowing
man to bridge that gulf existing between the intellectual logic
which recognizes the Universal First Cause as It and those
positive affirmations of the soul which aver this First Cause is
He, the heavenly Father of Jesus' gospel, the personal God
of human salvation.
196:3.2 There are just three elements in
universal reality: fact, idea, and relation. The religious
consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy,
and truth. Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities
as reason, wisdom, and faith -- physical reality, intellectual
reality, and spiritual reality. We are in the habit of designating
these realities as thing, meaning, and value.
196:3.3 The progressive comprehension of reality
is the equivalent of approaching God. The finding of God, the
consciousness of identity with reality, is the equivalent of the
experiencing of self-completion -- self-entirety, self-totality.
The experiencing of total reality is the full realization of God,
the finality of the God-knowing experience.
196:3.4 The full summation of human life is the
knowledge that man is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and
saved -- justified -- by religious faith.
196:3.5 Physical certainty consists in the logic
of science; moral certainty, in the wisdom of philosophy;
spiritual certainty, in the truth of genuine religious experience.
196:3.6 The mind of man can attain high levels
of spiritual insight and corresponding spheres of divinity of
values because it is not wholly material. There is a spirit
nucleus in the mind of man -- the Adjuster of the divine presence.
There are three separate evidences of this spirit indwelling of
the human mind:
196:3.7 1. Humanitarian fellowship -- love. The
purely animal mind may be gregarious for self-protection, but only
the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly altruistic and
unconditionally loving.
196:3.8 2. Interpretation of the universe --
wisdom. Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the
universe is friendly to the individual.
196:3.9 3. Spiritual evaluation of life --
worship. Only the spirit-indwelt man can realize the divine
presence and seek to attain a fuller experience in and with this
foretaste of divinity.
196:3.10 The human mind does not create real
values; human experience does not yield universe insight.
Concerning insight, the recognition of moral values and the
discernment of spiritual meanings, all that the human mind can do
is to discover, recognize, interpret, and choose.
196:3.11 The moral values of the universe become
intellectual possessions by the exercise of the three basic
judgments, or choices, of the mortal mind:
1. Self-judgment -- moral choice.
2. Social-judgment -- ethical choice.
3. God-judgment -- religious choice.
196:3.12 Thus it appears that all human progress
is effected by a technique of conjoint revelational evolution.
196:3.13 Unless a divine lover lived in man, he
could not unselfishly and spiritually love. Unless an interpreter
lived in the mind, man could not truly realize the unity of the
universe. Unless an evaluator dwelt with man, he could not
possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings.
And this lover hails from the very source of infinite love; this
interpreter is a part of Universal Unity; this evaluator is the
child of the Center and Source of all absolute values of divine
and eternal reality.
196:3.14 Moral evaluation with a religious
meaning -- spiritual insight -- connotes the individual's choice
between good and evil, truth and error, material and spiritual,
human and divine, time and eternity. Human survival is in great
measure dependent on consecrating the human will to the choosing
of those values selected by this spirit-value sorter -- the
indwelling interpreter and unifier. Personal religious experience
consists in two phases: discovery in the human mind and revelation
by the indwelling divine spirit. Through oversophistication or as
a result of the irreligious conduct of professed religionists, a
man, or even a generation of men, may elect to suspend their
efforts to discover the God who indwells them; they may fail to
progress in and attain the divine revelation. But such attitudes
of spiritual nonprogression cannot long persist because of the
presence and influence of the indwelling Thought Adjusters.
196:3.15 This profound experience of the reality
of the divine indwelling forever transcends the crude
materialistic technique of the physical sciences. You cannot put
spiritual joy under a microscope; you cannot weigh love in a
balance; you cannot measure moral values; neither can you estimate
the quality of spiritual worship.
196:3.16 The Hebrews had a religion of moral
sublimity; the Greeks evolved a religion of beauty; Paul and his
conferees founded a religion of faith, hope, and charity. Jesus
revealed and exemplified a religion of love: security in the
Father's love, with joy and satisfaction consequent upon sharing
this love in the service of the human brotherhood.
196:3.17 Every time man makes a reflective moral
choice, he immediately experiences a new divine invasion of his
soul. Moral choosing constitutes religion as the motive of inner
response to outer conditions. But such a real religion is not a
purely subjective experience. It signifies the whole of the
subjectivity of the individual engaged in a meaningful and
intelligent response to total objectivity -- the universe and its
Maker.
196:3.18 The exquisite and transcendent
experience of loving and being loved is not just a psychic
illusion because it is so purely subjective. The one truly divine
and objective reality that is associated with mortal beings, the
Thought Adjuster, functions to human observation apparently as an
exclusively subjective phenomenon. Man's contact with the highest
objective reality, God, is only through the purely subjective
experience of knowing him, of worshiping him, of realizing sonship
with him.
196:3.19 True religious worship is not a futile
monologue of self-deception. Worship is a personal communion with
that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of
reality. Man aspires by worship to be better and thereby
eventually attains the best.
196:3.20 The idealization and attempted service
of truth, beauty, and goodness is not a substitute for genuine
religious experience -- spiritual reality. Psychology and idealism
are not the equivalent of religious reality. The projections of
the human intellect may indeed originate false gods -- gods in
man's image -- but the true God-consciousness does not have such
an origin. The God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling
spirit. Many of the religious systems of man come from the
formulations of the human intellect, but the God-consciousness is
not necessarily a part of these grotesque systems of religious
slavery.
196:3.21 God is not the mere invention of man's
idealism; he is the very source of all such superanimal insights
and values. God is not a hypothesis formulated to unify the human
concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness; he is the personality of
love from whom all of these universe manifestations are derived.
The truth, beauty, and goodness of man's world are unified by the
increasing spirituality of the experience of mortals ascending
toward Paradise realities. The unity of truth, beauty, and
goodness can only be realized in the spiritual experience of the
God-knowing personality.
196:3.22 Morality is the essential pre-existent
soil of personal God-consciousness, the personal realization of
the Adjuster's inner presence, but such morality is not the source
of religious experience and the resultant spiritual insight. The
moral nature is superanimal but subspiritual. Morality is
equivalent to the recognition of duty, the realization of the
existence of right and wrong. The moral zone intervenes between
the animal and the human types of mind as morontia functions
between the material and the spiritual spheres of personality
attainment.
196:3.23 The evolutionary mind is able to
discover law, morals, and ethics; but the bestowed spirit, the
indwelling Adjuster, reveals to the evolving human mind the
lawgiver, the Father-source of all that is true, beautiful, and
good; and such an illuminated man has a religion and is
spiritually equipped to begin the long and adventurous search for
God.
196:3.24 Morality is not necessarily spiritual;
it may be wholly and purely human, albeit real religion enhances
all moral values, makes them more meaningful. Morality without
religion fails to reveal ultimate goodness, and it also fails to
provide for the survival of even its own moral values. Religion
provides for the enhancement, glorification, and assured survival
of everything morality recognizes and approves.
196:3.25 Religion stands above science, art,
philosophy, ethics, and morals, but not independent of them. They
are all indissolubly interrelated in human experience, personal
and social. Religion is man's supreme experience in the mortal
nature, but finite language makes it forever impossible for
theology ever adequately to depict real religious experience.
196:3.26 Religious insight possesses the power
of turning defeat into higher desires and new determinations. Love
is the highest motivation which man may utilize in his universe
ascent. But love, divested of truth, beauty, and goodness, is only
a sentiment, a philosophic distortion, a psychic illusion, a
spiritual deception. Love must always be redefined on successive
levels of morontia and spirit progression.
196:3.27 Art results from man's attempt to
escape from the lack of beauty in his material environment; it is
a gesture toward the morontia level. Science is man's effort to
solve the apparent riddles of the material universe. Philosophy is
man's attempt at the unification of human experience. Religion is
man's supreme gesture, his magnificent reach for final reality,
his determination to find God and to be like him.
196:3.28 In the realm of religious experience,
spiritual possibility is potential reality. Man's forward
spiritual urge is not a psychic illusion. All of man's universe
romancing may not be fact, but much, very much, is truth.
196:3.29 Some men's lives are too great and
noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful. The
animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the religious man
transcends his environment and in this way escapes the limitations
of the present material world through this insight of divine love.
This concept of love generates in the soul of man that superanimal
effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he does find
them, he is glorified in their embrace; he is consumed with the
desire to live them, to do righteousness.
196:3.30 Be not discouraged; human evolution is
still in progress, and the revelation of God to the world, in and
through Jesus, shall not fail.
196:3.31 The great challenge to modern man is to
achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells
within the human mind. Man's greatest adventure in the flesh
consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the
borders of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of
embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the
borderland of spirit-consciousness -- contact with the divine
presence. Such an experience constitutes God-consciousness, an
experience mightily confirmative of the pre-existent truth of the
religious experience of knowing God. Such spirit-consciousness is
the equivalent of the knowledge of the actuality of sonship with
God. Otherwise, the assurance of sonship is the experience of
faith.
196:3.32 And God-consciousness is equivalent to
the integration of the self with the universe, and on its highest
levels of spiritual reality. Only the spirit content of any value
is imperishable. Even that which is true, beautiful, and good may
not perish in human experience. If man does not choose to survive,
then does the surviving Adjuster conserve those realities born of
love and nurtured in service. And all these things are a part of
the Universal Father. The Father is living love, and this life of
the Father is in his Sons. And the spirit of the Father is in his
Son's sons -- mortal men. When all is said and done, the Father
idea is still the highest human concept of God.
END OF URANTIA PAPERS
5TH
EPOCHAL REVELATION OF GOD TO MAN
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