The Religion of Jesus

UB 1013      True religion must ever be, at one and the same time, the
                     eternal foundation and the guiding star of all enduring civilizations.

UB 1107       True religion consists in the experience that "the Spirit
                      itself hears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.

     True religion, the true way, is a way that has never yet been taught "to the nations". Elsewhere in scripture we are told that before the end of the age the gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven will be proclaimed to all the world. Who in the present world knows about the Kingdom of Heaven? Certainly not the popular scholars. Read their work! Certainly not those who espouse the gospel about Jesus Christ. Then, just who might this be? It would appear that the servant in Isaiah 42 is an individual that will teach about the Kingdom of Heaven within. Note that God ‘puts his spirit’ on the servant, therefore God ‘anoints’ the servant! Anointment is what happens to make someone a messiah. This is why the Dead Sea Scrolls speak of more than one messiah. The Messiah is Melchizedek a divine being, another messiah is God’s servant, the Final Prophet whom God has ‘put His spirit upon’ (anointed). Also note that God calls His servant My chosen one. This provides a link to a Dead Sea Scroll fragment, which describes a chosen one who reveals God’s truths and wisdom at the end of the age.

     The intellectual elite of our world appears daily in newspapers and on our televisions. They are the "experts" who write the books about marriage, although they are divorced three times. They tell us how to bring up our children, and yet their own children rebel against them. They know everything about anything, and there is no doubt about it. Ask if they believe in God and somber tones cover the smirk and smile. And yet, the question of God is the essential question of all philosophy, all ideologies, and all human understanding. If this most essential question were on a test, it would count for ninety-nine percent of the grade and the remaining one percent of the test would directly depend on the answer to the first. If you are wrong about God, then you are wrong about very much else as well. Yet the intellectual and political elite are all confirmed in the opinion that "religion is the opiate of the masses." Those who won’t say this in public believe it in private, as their very actions and behavior betray them. If our leaders are wrong about the first question, what hope do we have for a peaceful world guided by wisdom. My answer for that is zero. What do you think? Many of us deny or question the existence of the very One who gave us existence. God replies:

Isaiah 45:9    Shame on him who argues with his Maker,
                    Though naught but a potsherd of earth!
                    Shall the clay say to the potter, "What are you doing?
                    Your work has no handle."

     Notice how similar that time is to ours. Ends of ages have highly similar circumstances and types of people. Human history is monotonously similar, repeating cycles of sameness. But there is evolutionary progress; the remnant groups have a survival advantage that results from biologic factors that modify the capacity for spiritual receptivity. The Adamic genes should therefore become increasingly prevalent over long periods of time. The comment of 47:10 on science as the cause of our going astray is well taken. True religion and true science are complementary and never contradictory, however man’s error exists in forming a religion about science that denies or ignores God and true religion. This religion of science believes that science has all the answers for man’s every problem, that science is the only true knowledge, that man doesn’t need the axiom of God, that man can completely understand his world through science, and that science offers proof and certainty. All of these beliefs are false, but they go unrecognized and unchallenged. As the Urantia Book states, we overreacted to the superstitions and tyranny of the Middle Ages and threw out the baby with the bath. (The baby being God and the bath being knowledge based on superstition). Balance is what we have lacked, and balance is what we are given in the Fifth Epochal Revelation, the Urantia Book. Further, God reads our thoughts to us and comments:

Isaiah 47:10    And you thought to yourself,
                       "I am and there is none but me."
                       Evil is coming upon you
                       Which you will not know how to charm away;
                       Disaster is falling upon you
                       Which you will not be able to appease;
                       Coming upon you suddenly
                       Is ruin of which you know nothing.

UB 2081       The father of secularism was the narrow minded and godless
                      attitude of . . . atheistic science. Secularism had its inception as a rising
                      protest against the domination . . . by the institutionalized Christian
                      church. The majority of professed Christians . . . are unwittingly
                      actual secularists. Secularism . . . sells man into slavish bondage to the
                      totalitarian state . . . the tyranny of political and economic
                      slavery. Secularism can never bring peace to mankind. Nothing
                      can take the place of God in human society . . . Secularism
                      simply ignores God. More recently, secularism has assumed
                      a more militant attitude, assuming to take the place of the
                      religion whose totalitarian bondage it one time resisted. But Beware:
                      this godless philosophy will lead only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness,
                      war, and worldwide disaster. Complete secularization . . . can lead only to disaster.

UB 2086       Christianity unwittingly seems to sponsor a society, which
                      staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism,
                      politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure
                      without restraint, knowledge without character, power
                      without conscience, and industry without morality.

     Selfish men and women simply will not pay such a price for even the greatest spiritual treasure ever offered mortal man. Only when man has become sufficiently disillusioned by the sorrowful disappointment attendant upon the foolish and deceptive pursuits of selfishness . . . will he be disposed to turn . . . to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. (Man is not yet so disillusioned)

UB 1087      Institutional religion cannot afford inspiration and provide
                     leadership in this impending, worldwide social reconstruction
                     and economic reorganization because it has unfortunately
                     become more or less of an organic part of the social order and|
                     the economic system, which is destined to undergo reconstruction.
                     (Doesn’t reconstruction imply deconstruction first?)

But, lest we despair:

UB 1088       The religion of living experience finds no difficulty in keeping
                     ahead of all these social developments and economic upheavals,
                     amid which it ever functions as a moral stabilizer, social guide and spiritual pilot.
UB 2082       A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined
                      to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism . . .(our world empire of today)
UB 2087       The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original
                      foundation of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity—
                      the real life and teachings of Jesus. (The Kingdom of Heaven within)

And why does secularism fail?

UB 1126        Those who would invent a religion (any system of strong
                      convictions) without God are like those who would get the
                      fruit without trees. . . You cannot have effects without causes.
UB 1126        Man may graft many purely humanistic branches onto his
                      godless religion, but such an experience is devoid of survival
                      values . . . only social fruits are forthcoming, not spiritual . . .
                      of belief proposed by secular humanists.

     Here we have stated the real battle of the human will. Who makes the rules? God or man?  Whose universe is it anyway? The question has a real answer and if the wrong answer is given there are real consequences that will result. We truly reap what we sow.  "In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being."  The fruits of the spirit (peace, happiness, and joy) will only grow from a good tree rooted in God’s spirit. All goodness comes from God, man has no goodness of his own, regardless of the words he may utter.

"Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of
their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be
fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism
will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental
and unreal hopes and wishful thinking."(Humanist Manifesto I)

     Now it is revealed that secular humanists are "reasonable and manly." Theists are therefore superstitious and weak, and they rely on fantasy religion, the "opiate of the masses."

     God Himself has prepared His servant and trained him. His servant stands fast against his many opponents. He stands fast against ridicule and personal attacks. He recommends to those who "revere the Lord" trust and reliance on God alone during the period of darkness to come. And this reliance on God’s inner guidance is the very "religion of Jesus" that is to come, the "true religion" which the servant brings forth in Isaiah 42:1-4. Once again, "necessity is the mother of invention." We must trust Him to be led by His spirit during the trial period.

     We are unaware of the presence of the spirit within and so "we have not known what we are" and haven’t begun to realize "how divine" we ourselves can become. The voice within points the way, if we but listen. Follow the guide within and experience the reality of the divine indwelling. Behold, "all things are becoming new"-- once we experience and are aware of God’s spirit within; that "little voice" that speaks silently. And now, back to Isaiah. He turns 180 degrees and addresses our elite and illustrious leaders: the "blind watchmen," "the negligent shepherds," and "the greedy dogs." The future always comes in through the minority. The last battle won, "conventional wisdom" is one step from the scrap heap. We fear and resist change, no matter what its content. Nearly all-conventional wisdom today is wrong! Wrong about science, wrong about politics, wrong about people, wrong about philosophy, wrong about religion and wrong about most anything else we can think of. Our leaders, our intellectuals and our so-called elite will have the same constant refrain right up to the hour when they are removed from their power and prestige.  The refrain is "everything is fine, going just as we expected." This is why they are so "confounded" in Micah 7:16 when the World Messiah steps into the fray. It’s time we started thinking for ourselves and stop buying the illusions, which are cast up in front of us by the "leadership class" and the media; one working hand in hand with the other. There is a Sufi metaphor about identification. Misery doesn’t come to us; we unconsciously seek it out and hold on to it, like flinging our arms around a pillar. We squeeze tighter and yell, "Oh if I could only be rid of this misery and pain!"…We "do" misery we "do" expectation. Hell is not a place, we "do" it, as American mystic Adi DaSantoshia once remarked…We make prophecy work because we are so damned predictable… We have repeated again and again the behaviors that make it easy for the seers to prophesy us unto doomsday. (John Hogue, Millennium Prophecy, Pg. 305). In other words, we have seen the enemy and it is us. This is why the Urantia Book gives Caligastia (the devil) little credit for the evil around us and places the blame squarely where it belongs – on ourselves. And the silence of "the good people" is deafening as we stand back and watch the destruction of our country and our families.

Nahum 1:3   The Lord is slow to anger and of great forbearance,
                    But the Lord does not remit all punishment.
                    He travels in whirlwinds and storm,
                    And clouds are the dust on His feet.
                    He rebukes the sea and dries it up.

     Actually God never angers, we project our human feelings onto him. He is an infinite, never changing, and perfect Being. He is the source and center of all existence, all creation, and all reality. Perhaps the prophet is referring unknowingly to Melchizedek here, but much more likely he is projecting his own feelings and emotions upon a God that he reveres but does not fully understand. The Urantia Book teaches us that it is our perceptions of God that change and that God is eternal and unchanging. When we are at the beginning of our development we fear the great and powerful God, but as we develop, we begin to understand that God’s true motive towards us is one of love. Our fear evolves through awe, reverence, and appreciation, and finally to love. "Fear is the beginning of wisdom, but love is at its end." And so, this passage above is one of many in scripture that misunderstand God’s true motives and intentions. The Urantia Book tells us that "Jesus did not hesitate to appropriate the better half of a scripture…" and that he "appropriated the positive portion…" . All human truth is partial and incomplete. We must always separate the wheat from the chaff, using both the external facts available and the internal guiding of The Spirit of Truth. Logic and intuition are both necessary and interdependent. The approaching age will be the age of Faith and Reason; Science and Religion; Intuition and Logic; Divine and Human; Matter and Spirit. And is replacing either/or in the harmonized philosophy of our near future as the Cartesian dichotomy is sealed by new revelation. The Urantia Book is the stone on which such a philosophy will be built.

Jeremiah 3:14 
Turn back rebellious children (Israel) – declares the Lord. Since
I have espoused you, I will take you, one from a town and two from
a clan, and bring you to Zion. And I will give you shepherds after My
own heart, who will pasture you with knowledge and skill. And when you
increase and are fertile in the land, in those days – declares the Lord – men
shall no longer speak of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, nor shall it
come to mind. They shall not mention it, miss it, or make another. At that
time, they shall call Jerusalem "Throne of the Lord," and all nations shall
assemble there…They shall no longer follow the willfulness of their evil
hearts. In those days, the House of Judah shall go with the House of Israel;
they should come together from the land of the north to the land I gave
your fathers as a possession.

     This passage refers to the end of this age when Judah is reunited with Lost Israel. The shepherds (leaders) are replaced by good leaders and "the Lord" is in Jerusalem on his "Throne" symbolizing the sovereignty of "the Lord," Planetary Sovereign, Melchizedek. We are told that the new reunified Israel of Christians and Jews, will not revert to the traditions of ancient Judaism but instead will go forward with religion in the new light in which they stand at ages end.  We are also told indirectly, that ‘the nations had followed the willfulness of their evil hearts’ in times past. This is consistent with the negative judgment of the nations and their leadership expressed many time elsewhere in scripture. This passage definitely refers to the messianic end of the age by virtue of : ‘in that day’, ‘in that time’, ‘the assembling of all nations in Jerusalem,’ and the reunification of Judah and Israel. And now Jeremiah speaks about the onslaught of Jerusalem by Babylon in ancient times.

UB 1065 
Good crops depended on the favor of Baal. The cult was largely
concerned with land, its ownership and fertility. In general, the Baalites
owned houses, lands and slaves. They were the aristocratic landlords and
lived in the cities. Each Baal had a sacred place, a priesthood, and the
"holy women," the ritual prostitutes of the Baals were many, Yahweh was
one; monotheism won over polytheism.
UB 1052 And this is one of the purposes of Melchizedek’s incarnation:
that a religion of one God should be so fostered as to prepare the
way for the earth bestowal of a Son of that one God (Jesus).

     And so we can readily compare the evolutionary religion of man with the revealed religion of God. Man’s religion (Baalism) centers around self-interest and self-gratification while God’s religion is the selfless pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness. Is it any wonder why the former is the more popular and the latter is "the road less traveled?" Isn’t Baalism without Baal still the most prevalent ‘religion’ today? Also, notice how well the Urantia Book illuminates known history. It puts history into a higher perspective that explains historical events in a much wider context. This organic flavor of the Urantia Book is the flavor of truth. Disconnected human history is a cross section of a higher dimensional reality, the reality of eternity. If one takes successive horizontal cross sectional views of a vertical tree and its branches, you will first see one large circle (trunk) and then several smaller circles (main branches) and then finally a great multitude of still smaller circles and ovals of variable size and separation (small branches). If you give these cross sectional views to someone who has no idea of how it was formed, he will not see a tree – but rather various patterns of circles with no particular connection to one another (similar to looking at a wood ceiling with its "knots"). >From Antioch the Pauline version of the Teachings of Jesus and the teaching about Jesus spread to all the Western World; from Philadelphia the missionaries of the Abnerian Kingdom of heaven spread throughout Mesopotamia and Arabia until the later times when these uncompromising emissaries of the teachings of Jesus were overwhelmed by the sudden rise of Islam.

UB 1832
  …the believers at Philadelphia held more strictly to the religion of Jesus, as he lived and taught, than any other group on earth. Now prophecy is true both in the context of the time of its writing and in the time of its prophetic future fulfillment. And so, the church of Philadelphia spoken of in Revelation as existing in the latter days (now) would have characteristics like the church of Philadelphia existing at the time of John’s vision and writing. One might then expect this congregation or church of the latter days to be a group, like Abner’s, true to the message of Jesus (the gospel of the kingdom of heaven), and to be concerned with issues of brotherly love such as the brotherhood of man predicated on the Fatherhood of God. This is exactly the effect of the Urantia Book, ie; to explain and inspire the living of the kingdom of heaven within; the true way, the true gospel of Jesus that the apostles did not understand.

     God explains through His prophet exactly what it is that "His people" do that He finds so displeasing. The lack of justice makes "many stumble at your rulings" God says to man. "The disregard of His Ways" means the lack of compassion and love as well as of justice. On top of it all, the people show no understanding of what they are doing wrong and "weary" God by excusing and confusing evil for good and asking incredible questions such as: "where is the God of Justice?" In the first instance, this means that the people mistake evil for good, as evidenced by the false shepherds, they follow and support. In the second instance, the people project their own failings onto God Himself blaming Him for their own failures, thus washing their hands clean of all responsibility. And so it is, we so easily deceive ourselves, preferring fantasy to reality.  Living honestly and sincerely requires effort, courage, and self-sacrifice. Rather than an escape from reality, the opiate of the masses, true religion requires the full engagement of reality with body, mind, and spirit.

Malachi 3:1 Septuagint
Behold, I send forth my messenger, and he will prepare the way
before me: and the Lord you seek, shall suddenly come into his
temple, even the angel (messenger) of the covenant; whom you
take pleasure in: Behold, He is coming, saith the Lord Almighty.

     God is speaking through Malachi: "Behold, I send my messenger…" The messenger of the first sentence is either John the Baptist or the "greater" John the Baptist to come, both of whom are sent to announce the coming of a Son of God. First Jesus, and then later Melchizedek in the Messianic period forthcoming. Just as John the Baptist "prepared the way before" the Lord, Jesus; the "greater John the Baptist" to come (final prophet) will "prepare the way before" the Lord, Melchizedek. This verse, "Behold I send My messenger," can apply equally to both messengers (prophets). This similarity between the two prophets is why The Urantia Book refers to the final prophet as "another and greater John the Baptist" to come. the end of the age (messiah).  The final prophet depends on the olden prophets to explain and interpret the events unfolding in the messianic age and to "make them (the elect) understand all the ages of time." The final prophet is also God’s servant of Isaiah who addresses the coastlands, and who "brings forth true religion (or the true way)" in Isaiah 42:10, which is the kingdom of heaven within. He is also the "Elijah to come before the end" of Malachi. The Urantia Book calls this prophet "another and greater John the Baptist." Why is he greater? Remember that Jesus said that "there had not been any one greater (man) than John the Baptist" but that anyone who entered the kingdom of heaven "was greater than John." This was true because John as a human being was unsurpassed. He was courageous, faithful, and steadfast, even in the face of death. But as a son of the living God, he had not yet entered the joyful and transcendent kingdom of heaven within. Therefore, greater means that the final prophet will have entered this kingdom of heaven within, which is the "true way" that he helps bring forth in Isaiah 42:1-4. Next, consider the Teacher’s comment that "those who uphold the covenant (do God’s will), turn from walking in the way of the people." It may be necessary for those who follow God’s will, to separate themselves from the opinions, people, and possessions of our present culture to follow the truth on an isolated, lonely, and perhaps dangerous road. Family fault lines may sever; persecution, ridicule and danger could be ahead. Such painful and trying choices will act to establish our priorities and expose them to view. Choosing God’s will in the face of such trials will be the "flame of affliction," which will soften our mettle (metal) for the anvil of adversity and the hammer of mercy. And so we will count the cost and remember that this road is also called the ‘Sacred Way’, and that the ‘redeemed shall walk it.’ Consider further this road:

God chooses us all but only some of us choose Him:

1QS   For without Thee no way is perfect and without Thy Will nothing is done.

     This is essentially the religion of Jesus himself, one hundred years before his birth. Jesus stated this truth in a slightly different way using seven words in complete perfection:

Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done. (Lord's Prayer)

UB 998   When the worship urge is admonished and direct by wisdom…it
                begins to develop into the phenomenon of real religion.

 

The Excerpts above are from the book "The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand" by Ed Roache.