Lesson VII Rev. W. John Murray
JESUS THE CHRIST
The Murray Course in Divine Science
Society of the Healing Christ
New York, 1927.
There was a man born of woman whose name was Jesus and who is known as the Christ. His existence is as well certified to as that of Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander, or of any man of the past whom no living person has seen. Jesus was immeasurably the most remarkable personage the world has ever known. There have been many great spiritual men in the world; many leaders of world thought and uplifters of world aspiration, many founders of religions. But no man ever spoke as this man spake. Clear and pure in intellect, modest and self-effacing in character, sinless in life, detached and aloof from any desire for personal power, wealth, dominion, honors or luxury, he performed within a space of three years a work that saved the human race from extinction through sheer loss of spiritual vision. The Scriptural summary of Jesus’ life is: “God annointed him with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him.” (Acts 10:38, R.V.)
At the time that Jesus was born the world was entirely under the dominion of the Roman empire, which contained within the power, cruelty and brutality on which it was built the seeds of destruction and annihilation. Men were either bond or free; citizens or slaves; and the number of slaves was enormous and growing formidably. Woman was a chattel and virtue was at its lowest ebb, brilliant and cultivated as society appeared. The world was for the greater part plunged in idolatry, and would have been entirely thus had it not been for a few esoteric priesthoods and the little spiritual empire of the Jews.
Jesus began his ministry by working wonders–“miracles” as they are called. (A miracle is defined to be a suspension of the laws of Nature, an occurrence outside the domain of natural law.) He “began to speak of the kingdom of heaven and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among people.” He did what no world teacher before or since ever dared to do. He identified himself with God so that when he spoke of himself he spoke as, of and for God. These are among his declarations:
I and the Father are one.
I am the light of the world.
I am the door.
I am the bread of life.
I am the good shepherd.
I am the resurrection and the life.
Before Abraham was I am.
No man cometh to the Father but by me.
He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.
I am in the Father and the Father in me.
All things that the Father hath are mine.
If a man keep my sayings he shall never see death.
I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman.
Destroy this temple and I shall raise it up in three days.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.
Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name He will give it to you.
I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.
If a man love me he will keep my words and the Father will love him and we will come unto him and make our abode in him.
It is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing but should raise it up again at the last day.
Jesus is the supreme figure of the race. Millions of men have puzzled over these words. Millions have gone to their death for them. Countless millions have lived and died by them. The highest civilization the world has ever known has been built up on them. Jesus placed before men the loftiest ideals ever visioned. He declared them, expounded them, lived up to them and his chief solicitation was that we, too, should attain to them.
Jesus has won his way to the hearts of all men. He may have been hated, as he was persecuted; but hate for him no longer exists. He is the object of universal love and veneration.
The theory that Jesus was the victim of a strange hallucination has been held by many, and this theory is by some contended for today, but it is a theory that cannot stand the test of logic, since it amounts to the contention that an unsound mind is productive of truer thought than a sound mind; that insanity is a higher state of intellect than sanity; that disorder is more perfect than order–all of which are absurdities.
No, Jesus must be accepted on his own statement of being; that he was the way, the truth and the life; that he came to teach us all truth; that all that God possessed was his; that hereafter we should see him sitting at the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven; that he and the Father were one.
It is not to prove the divinity of Jesus that this Lesson is written. For many centuries Christians believed that Jesus was the Second Person of the Triune God; the Son in the Divine Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost; that he was Very God of Very God; that he was the incarnation of God in human form. The mind of Christianity was resolved into this belief at the time that Arius stood out in the early church and held with all his strength for the conception of Jesus as man. At that time the Christian world was mostly Aryan and it took many years for the church to stamp out the belief. Yet this belief is what the world clings to and turns to more resolutely day by day. The Trinity of God is illogical and a fantasy based on belief in God as Person, or a tripartite Person, a Person with three personalities. St. Augustine said that the human mind can no more comprehend the Trinity than a hole made by a child in the sand can contain the ocean. And he was right. Not because of the incapacity of the human mind to comprehend God, but because of the incomprehensibility of the proposition.
Dispense with the idea of the Trinity; regard God as Principle and Jesus as a God-conscious man who realized to the fullest the divinity that is in every man, through whom the Christ of God was speaking, who revealed to us the truth and demonstrated to us Eternal Life–view the Holy Spirit as the active intelligence of God through which the Christ operates, and every one of the Christ mysteries becomes an open book, to be read and understood of all.
Jesus said he was the son of God; that we were the children of God also.
Jesus said that he and the Father were one and that we could become one with them.
Jesus realized his Christhood, took it up and lived it to its fullest consummation, pointing out the way to us to realize also the Christ within us.
Jesus was the Son of Man as he proclaimed himself to be, the Son of God as he also proclaimed himself and the Christ as he affirmed.
His mission was to show us that we are as he was, full of the same divine possibilities. The things that he did we could do and “greater than these” also. He was tempted in all things as we are; human in all ways as we are; and what he taught was that we could be divine in all things as he was.
His words are blasphemy taken merely in the human sense. Read them over, as this Lesson has given them to you, and you will see that, considered in a purely human sense, they are a preposterous assumption of all the powers that are God’s. But read them in a spiritual sense and the meaning is entirely clear. Jesus spoke as never man spake because he had developed the God-consciousness within himself to a point of complete absorption into God. He was in truth the Christ.
Jesus never claimed to be God. He claimed union with God, possession of the Father’s power and all that the Father had. “All power is given me in heaven and on earth,” he said, and “I shall be with you all days even to the end of the world.” Again: “This world shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away.” This is God-consciousness possible through the Christ spirit.
What Jesus did claim was that he was of God; that he had received from the Father. He disclaimed personal power. “It is not me, but the Father in me; He doeth the work.” He had reached the highest spiritual plane, union with the Father, where he was conscious of his tremendous eminence, of his having been with the Father before the birth of the day-star, where he could demonstrate all power because God shared power with him, endued him from on high and manifested Himself through him. All his acts were for the purpose of making God, the Universal Father, known to men, of “glorifying” Him. Surely we can approach God with more certainty knowing that Jesus was our elder brother given us to show the way, and demonstrating to us that we, too, can be perfect “even as our heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus would not ask the impossible of us. He would not ask us to be as God is unless we had the possibilities within us to be what he himself was, humanity absorbed into divinity.
It is of the highest importance that we realize Jesus as one with ourselves, capable of a continuous union of his mind with the Divine Mind during all the years of his Silence of raising himself by illumination and power received from the Father to complete identification in spirit with Spirit, to the highest plane of Spirit’s operation, to Christhood.
For if we do not realize Jesus in this manner we lose the point of his teaching, our one-ness with God; the capacity within us of doing the works that he did, of becoming one with him and the Father.
This is exactly what Jesus taught us; and an understanding of our capacity as exemplified by him is the key to the solution of all his mystic utterances.
Place any one of his sayings under the searchlight of this understanding and the meaning of all his words becomes as clear as crystal. Nothing remains that is hidden or obscure.
This is the real thought of Jesus, and it is permeating the world in this wonderful age of ours, when, through marvelous material progress, all men are being brought within speaking distance of each other, as it permeated the little world of Judea, Greece and Rome when the Word was first carried abroad by the early Christians.
This New Thought that Jesus brought into the world is the New Thought of today, recaptured from the past, and made luminous by the developments of modern science. We are standing on the threshold of a new world of things. The powers of the mind are being disclosed in a new manner. The erroneous doctrines of materialism are being scorched into nothingness over the fire of a rigid investigation into the realms of the spiritual and the psychic. So-called “mysteries” of mind, force and energy are being cleared up by discoveries of operations of natural laws of the extent of which we had no conception. It would seem to one who is familiar, for instance, with the latest revelations in the field of psychology that the greatest discovery we moderns can boast of is that of the subconscious mind. The developments that are to follow this discovery may change the face of the world, reconstruct all systems of education and open wide the door into the kingdom of heaven.
For the conviction that we have within ourselves the power to shape our destiny leads to the highest knowledge, that of spiritual identity with universal Spirit, the power of the Word, the creative process in the individual based on the creative functioning of the Divine; the identity of the spirit within man with the Spirit of God.
This New Thought is not being spread abroad by churches or formulated into binding creeds of belief and practice, but is penetrating the mind of man everywhere, assuring us all of a common brotherhood and a united Fatherhood in God. It is beginning to operate through all religions. It is developing what has been well called “Cosmic Consciousness.” This is the oldest of thoughts and yet it is New because of its having remained unexpressed for so long a period although always more or less dimly comprehended.
God is the Father of all mankind and all races and peoples can unite in worshipping Him as Spirit. Jesus said: “God is Spirit, and they that worship Him shall worship Him in spirit and in truth.” And this is the true worship that we have come into–the recognition of Spirit in everything, in matter as in mind, the immanence of Spirit in all things and our sharing of it with, in and through all things.
PRACTICE IN DIVINE SCIENCE
Methods Recommended for Putting Into Daily Application
After its own self-working. A child’s kiss
Set on the sighing lips shall make thee glad;
A poor man served by thee shall make thee rich;
A sick man helped by thee shall make thee strong.
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense
Of service which thou renderest.”
Golden Grains
“Grasp the weapons God hath given, the Light and Truth and Love of Heaven.”
(Memorize and Repeat Often)
Pages 81 to 98 of the “Astor Lectures.” [Online at this website.]
Health, Prosperity, Protection
The order and Harmony of the Christ Consciousness, established in me throughout all eternity, is expressing itself now as perfect Health.
The vitalizing energy of the Holy Spirit is circulating freely through every artery of my being, strengthening and invigorating me.
That Omnipresent Opulence which is God is now expressing Itself in and through me in terms of Unlimited Abundance.
The Lord, the everlasting Truth Sustains me; Divine Love alone governs me, and I reflect its government, in Peace, Power, Purity, Prosperity, Perfection of Mind and Body.
2. How did Jesus begin his ministry and where did his powers come from?
3. Was Jesus Divine?
4. What was the mission of Jesus?
5. Why should we realize Jesus as man?
6. What is the New Thought brought by Jesus to accomplish?
7. Was Jesus the victim of hallucinations or a visionary?
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