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THE COVENANT which God made with Abraham may not have been the
first between the Deity and man, for spiritual men earlier in time
and in different areas of the world became aware of His laws of
righteousness and justice and sought to interpret them and make
them known to their peoples. But the Covenant with Abraham has a
special meaning to mankind because, rather than a groping towards
God, it appears as a revelation by God Himself, and the forerunner
of that New Covenant through Jesus which made available to man His
Divine Love and Salvation.
The Old Covenant was a remarkable one. When he became conscious
of the Divine call, Abraham was in the sunset of a long life. How
much strength, courage and determination God gave him is shown by
his obedience to that call - a call that meant long periods of arduous
and dangerous traveling undertaken by an old man of seventy-five,
from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of the Canaanites, nearly a
thousand miles away. The task which God had entrusted to him seemed
hopeless, to raise up a people devoted to an invisible Deity of
righteousness, justice and mercy, and who demanded that these things
be practiced by those who worshipped Him.
It was impossible to teach the Chaldeans, Canaanites, or other
peoples of that time in that area, to seek God. The benefits and
blessings of the land which God in His Love and Mercy bestowed upon
His children of all races, were attributed to local agricultural
and fertility gods, like Baal, Melcart or Ashtoroth, and accompanied
by immoral rites of worship. Their offerings to these gods were
the first fruits of the fields and the firstlings of the living
creatures-not excepting their own first born, who were slaughtered
or "passed through the fire" to insure the fertility of
fields and wombs. The people of these lands were addicted to these
horrible practices of human sacrifice. Unable to teach them to trust
in Him, or with another plan of salvation in view, God sent forth
Abraham, His willing servant, to a distant land and there raised
him up as father to a race that would turn from the bloody ceremonies
of the heathens and walk in His Ways of justice, righteousness and
mercy.
Abraham's binding of his son, Isaac, to an altar, and the latter's
being saved by an angel of God from sacrifice at the hand of his
father is not, therefore, a narrative depicting the test of Abraham's
faith in God, as Bible commentators so erroneously think. Abraham's
faith in God had been put to the test again and again by the rigors
and hardships which he had faced and borne for months and months
in the slow and exhausting trek from his native Ur, to begin, at
his old age, a new life at the call of a God he could not see but
whom he knew in his heart was the living King of the Universe. The
saving of Isaac, then, was not a test at all, but the undeniable
proof, stamped with the authority of God Himself through His angel,
that He had turned away His countenance from human sacrifice and
demanded true worship in obedience to His statutes of righteousness,
justice and mercy.
A more distressing misunderstanding beclouds God's bestowal of the
New Covenant. In His own good time, the Messianic prophecies which
appear in Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezequiel and Zechariah, whereby He
would provide a new heart for His children by the outpouring of
His Spirit, were brought to fulfillment with the advent of Jesus.
And as Abraham revealed God's righteousness and justice to a people
that sprang from his seed, and as Moses made those God-given attributes
the Holy Torah of Israel, so Jesus revealed the greatest of all
of God's gifts-His Divine Love, which, when shed abroad in the hearts
of men by earnest prayer for that gift, would transform human souls
into Divine souls filled with the very essence and nature of the
Father.
Jesus, manifesting God's Love obtained in abundance through earnest
prayer, was indeed the son of God. For the availability of God's
Divine Love came with Jesus, the Christ, who first received that
Love, and in such degree that while yet in the flesh he became a
Divine Soul identical in nature with that of the infinite Soul of
God. Thus Jesus, the living possessor of the Father's Love, taught
that this love was available to all mankind, demonstrating its power
through his miracles of healing and preaching salvation through
prayer to the Father for its possession. This was the mission of
Jesus, and it still is.
Nowhere in the Old Testament, essential as God's promise of New
Testament fulfillment, do we find that Jesus had to die asphyxiated
on a cross so that His Father, who had just revealed Himself in
Jesus as God of Love, could satisfy a supposed sense of wrath for
human sin. Some cults, mistaken in their understanding of the old
Hebrew offerings, would thus make the loving Father the executioner
of His own son, a ritual He had strikingly condemned in the case
of Abraham. And in accordance with that mistaken conception of the
Hebrew offerings-a conception never advanced by Jesus or the Apostles
themselves, but by later pagan converts to Christianity-Jesus' blood,
in a manner very similar to the pagan mystery cults, is supposed
to immediately cleanse man's soul of all his evil thoughts and deeds
and desires, doing vicariously that which man himself does not make
the effort to do, and making his soul fit to live with God.
The mistake, however, lies in the erroneous idea that the Hebrews
thought there was efficacy in the shed blood of sacrificed animals.
If they said that "life was in the blood," it was a scientific
view devoid of any religious implications. The Hebrew system, as
overwhelmingly demonstrated by the great prophets, who brought the
unchanging word of God to their people, uncompromisingly stresses
forgiveness of sin through turning to God and forsaking evil thoughts
and ways. And in this way only could sins be forgiven. The offerings
of animals in the Temple of Jerusalem were simply an outward act
to show that man's heart was turned to Him, and that he was walking
in the statutes of His Torah of righteousness, justice and mercy.
With the Babylonian captivity, the Hebrews learned that man could
walk in His Ways without a Temple or sacrifices, and that man's
real offering to God, as expressed by Micah the Prophet, consisted
in obeying His commandments.
Later, priestly insistence upon these rites and ceremonies were
for national purposes only-to keep the Hebrew "pure" and
apart from the Gentiles, and the later pagan converts to Christianity,
wedded as they were to their own ritualistic cults, adopted and
blended those of the Hebrews with their own and converted Jesus'
religion of salvation through prayer to the Father for His Love
into one of rite and ritual, with salvation to be had through blood
and sacrifice, with Jesus himself the victim.
But just as no shed blood of pigeon or lamb could of itself save
the Hebrew from sin, but the contrite heart of him who sought God,
so no shed blood of Jesus (who in the early church doctrine takes
the place of the animals) can blot out man's aggression and make
him pure in heart. No one can explain how Jesus' blood, gone back
into the elements these two thousand years, can wash away man's
sin, and some sects now consider the mass' as merely symbolic. Something
more than his blood is needed to turn man from evil and give him
the new heart which the Heavenly Father promised His people
and which he fulfilled through Jesus.
This new heart results from the transformation of the human soul
into one with the nature of God, brought about, not through outward
sacrificial ceremonies which do not touch the heart, but through
the work of the Holy Spirit in conveying the Father's Love into
the soul of whomsoever seeks it in earnest prayer. This revelation
of the Father's plan for man's salvation, first made known by Jesus
in his mission on earth, and rendered incomprehensible in the gradual
formation of the temporal church, has now been printed by the Church
of the New Birth in the TRUE GOSPEL REVEALED ANEW BY JESUS
in two volumes.
There are, of course, two clear references in the prophetic books
of the Hebrews, Isaiah's verses on the Suffering Servant and the
statement in the Book of Daniel, that the Messiah was to be "cut
off." The first of these, impartial students of the Scriptures
agree, represents Jehovah's afflicted servant, Israel, who, purified
through suffering, is to find glory in showing mankind the way to
God. The second is a direct reference to the assassination of Onias
III, the high priest of the Temple, in the days of the Maccabees,
about 171 B.C. Other Messianic allusions refer to the "Branch"
of David, to Cyrus the Great, the Persian monarch, who proved well
disposed to the Hebrews, and to Zerubbabel, the Judean governor
in the late Sixth Century B.C. None of these last mention in any
way a tragedy in the life of the Messiah.
These bald statements, while historically true, do not, however,
write finis to the matter by any means; and this writer sincerely
believes that these references to the coming Messiah form a pattern
in which God, through the prophets, revealed to mankind His foreknowledge
of events to come-not because it was fated or predestined to be
so, but because they were the natural outcome of conditions in which
man's heart was hard and unregenerate. Thus, Jesus was crucified
not for man's sins, but because of them; because mean and evil men,
crystallized in their materialism, were the chief priests at the
time; because a narrow and fantastic legalism, devoid of heart and
human feeling, was stifling real Judaism "and its love to God
and fellow men, and because this deplorable state sat well with
a cynical Roman procurator in power, one who "made a deal"
to placate the priests and their hirelings and liquidated at the
same time the "King of the Jews" one he thought might
be a source of civil unrest and sedition. Jesus went to his death,
not so he could be a willing sacrifice in a bloody ritual, condemned
by God, but because, faithful to his God, he refused to recant or
deny his mission that he was the Christ, possessor of the Father's
Love and Nature and that he had been sent by the Father to teach
man the Way to that new heart through the only way man has in coming
to the Father - through earnest prayer and the longing of the soul.
Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens
Received By: D.G.S. August 1955
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