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HUMAN LOVE PREREQUISITE TO, APPRECIATION OF DIVINE LOVE.
I am here, Jesus:
In my ninth sermon, I wrote about the New Heart, and how it was that in the long intervals of time recorded in the Old Testament, men became aware that if man turned to God, He would help them become men after His own heart, which, to them, meant a soul free of evil, and embued with a sense of righteousness, justice and mercy towards one another. I showed how this took place in the time of the prophet Samuel with the anointing of Saul, and how in later times the prophets were convinced that, in the course of time, God would pour out His spirit upon His children and give them a New Heart, wherein the soul would be without evil and sin, and bright with the purity of justice, love and mercy.
Now in my last sermon I also mentioned specifically Ezekiel and Jeremiah, for they were those prophets who made principal use of the term, the New Heart, or the heart of flesh, in the sense that purification of the soul was available to man when man sought God's aid in obtaining it. In fact, the message received by the prophets said that the day would come when man would be ready to receive His help, and that God promised His help when that day were come.
But when, as a youth, I studied the Old Testament with the Father's Love already aglow, and increasing steadily, in my own soul, I found that purification of man's soul was available to humanity by obedience to His commands as found in the Ten Commandments given to Moses, and that the promise of the New Heart, the heart of flesh, wherein the Spirit of God was to be poured out upon mankind, must mean something above and beyond what was then available to mankind. And I found, with the Father Himself my mentor, that the Way to soul divinity was not through sacrifices or rituals out of fear, nor in the development of the human love, but in doing His Will of obtaining His Love through sincere prayer to Him.
And I found that, alongside of the concept of God as one who exulted in the blood of His enemies, or one who punished a believer if he did not conform exactly to the rituals of the many offerings, which, I must tell you, God never commanded Moses to write, there was a growing understanding of God as a Father who loves His children, who exulted in kindness and mercy and righteousness, wherein His children could come to him and purify their souls of their defilements. And I saw, from the basis in the inspired writings in the Old Testament, that God was a God of Divine Love and Mercy, and that the New Heart promised by God for man was a soul filled with His Love, which would not only purify that soul but make of it a new soul, immortal in its possession of the Father's Love. And the Father's Love in my own soul told me that the New Heart, which up to the time of my coming could mean only a purified soul, meant that the soul of mankind could now be transformed into a divine soul, filled with the Father's essence, Divine Love, and that I, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph and Mary, did possess in my soul the Father's Love and that I was to that extent divine. In that way I realized that I was the Anointed One, the Messiah, through whom salvation was to be given to mankind, and that in me the New Heart of the Old Testament had been fulfilled.
Now for mankind to know and appreciate the wonderful love and mercy of the Father in granting His Divine Essence for the eternal life of His children with increasing happiness for them throughout all everlasting time, mankind had to develop an understanding of what this love was and its power of eliminating evil, and the only way it could be done was through the record of the story of human love, for this is what man had been endowed with at his creation, and was something which he could understand.
And so the message of love in the Old Testament is one of human love, with the promise of that greater love which I was sent to make available to mankind, but the story of that greater love, interrupted by my death and misunderstood by those who followed my apostles, has been unfolded fully only to souls in the world of spirits, and those who have accepted as true this message, have come unto the glory of the Father, and are living with Him in the Celestial Heavens, redeemed children of the Father and divine angels of Divine Love. But those souls who live in the material world, and many who lived in the material world since the day I proclaimed the message of Divine Love to mankind, are not hearing the message which I proclaimed, and are seeking their way to God through the development of their human love, and this love cannot lead to the Celestial Heavens and the Divine Soul, but only to the Spiritual Heavens of the purified, but still human, soul.
Now the development of human love in the Old Testament is a narrative about which many volumes can be written, and I cannot in these sermons do more than to lay down the guiding lines for further elaboration, but already in Abraham, the man after God's heart, human love shines forth. His love of his son Isaac, breaking with the practice of human sacrifice, current during his day to appease the deities of wrath in which mankind then believed, his pleadings with God that sinful Sodom be spared, his proposals to Lot his brother's son, for a peaceful settlement of their dispute over cattle and his rescue of this same Lot from captivity when Sodom was taken by marauding chieftains, reveal the love which Abraham had for his fellow man and for his God, many hundreds of years before the first commandment to Moses was given to the people as a binding commandment from Jehovah.
And the Old Testament writers are concerned with Jacob, son of Isaac, the digger of wells, and how Jacob became prince of Israel after his turbulent years of deceit and trickery. From the robbing of his brother's birthright and blessings, one comes to a different Jacob, a person who shows his sorrow when his sons killed the males of the people of Hamor and Chechem, who sought to marry Dinah, after he had defiled her. And Jacob, many years after deceiving his brother, seeks not to escape or fight Essau, but decides upon some restitution in the form of a gift. And Essau, when he saw his younger brother, ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and they wept.
And this was the kind of human love, between father, brother and son, which mankind could understand, and had to first understand before they could understand the love which the Heavenly Father has for His children.
In my next sermon I shall continue with the development of the human love in the Old Testament.
Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens
