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I am here, Jesus:
Tonight I am going to provide certain information for the benefit of you and mankind regarding certain prophecies and statements in the Old Testament. The first of these is the prophecy of Joel dealing with the dreams and visions of the sons of Judah as well as the manifestations of disorder and destruction in the world in the last days of the Jewish nation. I had not intended to write about this chapter in Joel, but inasmuch as I saw that you had examined it last Thursday and declared it to be non-Messianic, I have come now to inform you that you were mistaken and that the passage in question is one of the finest passages of its type dealing with the New Covenant of grace and presaging the age of destruction about the time of the fall of Jerusalem.
The dreams mentioned by Joel are the dreams which the Jews of my time had in their great zeal to overcome Roman rule and establish a free Hebrew state, and the visions of the Jews were the visions which Peter had regarding the foods to be eaten as provided by the bounty of heaven, and the vision which Paul saw of me on the road to Damascus, and Joel also foresaw the clouds of smoke of Mt. Vesuvious destroying Pompey and Herculaneum and earthquakes in Crete and Asia Minor and elsewhere that took place at this time, as well as the great fire in Rome in 64 A.D., the fighting in Germany between the pagans there and the Roman legions, as well as other disturbances in Palestine and the rebellions and wars finally ending in the destruction of the Holy City. So you see the prophecy of Joel was a two fold prophecy of the New Covenant of Divine Love and the end of the Jewish dispensation following their rejection of me as their long sought Messiah and the upheavals that announced the birthpangs of the Gentilic dispensation.
Another subject I wish to discuss with you tonight is the passage in the New Testament comparing me to the old king-priest Melchizedek, of Genesis Chapter 14, verses 18-20, who blessed Abraham and who offered bread and wine at one of his feasts. I wish to state that at no time is it possible to compare me to a king-priest of this type inasmuch as my own reign as king is not of this world of flesh but of the spirit, and more exactly the Celestial Heavens, and furthermore by no stretch of the imagination am I a priest in the ordinary sense of the word, although I do a great deal of praying to the Heavenly Father, but not as a priest offering sacrifices or performing the usual priestly ceremonies, but simply as a spirit seeking a further portion of the Father's Love through earnest longing of the soul; furthermore, Melchizedek had no conception of the Divine Love or of the possession of immortality which I possessed at the time of my ministry and which I taught in Palestine, bringing to the Jews and to all mankind knowledge of the New Birth and the New Covenant. And thus it is entirely wrong to say, as it is stated in the New Testament, that I was a person after the order of Melchizedek.
Now the reason for the insertion into the New Testament of this falsity, which by the way was not written by any of my disciples but by some later writer who interpolated this comparison a good century or more later, was the desire of this writer to show that the sacrament of the bread and wine being transformed into my body and blood, which is called the Eucharist by the Catholic cult, owes its origin to the Old Testament dating back to the days of Abraham, the Patriarch, and thus putting the stamp of orthodoxy upon this sacrament, to concilate Jews and Jews converted to Christianity.
This comparison between me and Melchizedek does not do me justice insofar as my mission and teachings and relationship to the Father are concerned and was inserted arbitrarily without regard to truth, simply to link me with a king-priest who offered bread and wine at his feasts. I point out to you that this is just as false as that doctrine that makes of me the lamb of God cleansing sin through the shedding of my blood. In the coming true religion of the New Birth, where this false doctrine will be shown up for what it is -- man made and without the authority of my teachings -- and will be eliminated from the beliefs and practices of men.
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 travelling 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 Ashtorch, 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, and 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 testing 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.
I should also like to write you on the origin of the Eucharist, for it is not sufficient to state that this institution is a false one, for the question will invariably arise in the minds of men that if it is false, where did it originate? The fact of the matter is that the Eucharist began as a simple prayer to the Father of thanksgiving that He had revealed one to mankind and through me the gift of immortality through the Divine Love, and this was done accompanied by the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine, but especially of the bread, for here is where the meals began with the Hebrew equivalent of the saying of grace for meals. And thus the prayer of thanksgiving for the gift of food was associated with thanksgiving for the Divine Love through me and as time went on the conception of the Divine Love was lost in favor of immortality gained through emphasis on, and belief in, my person, so that the devotee became aware that he was thankful for immortality through his belief in my immortality, and since this was done with the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine, these parts of the meal became associated with my supposed second person of the godhead, or divinity, and the primitive Eucharist or thanksgiving was thus established.
However, the conception of the wine and the bread being my blood and body was not a Hebrew conception, but was a conception that was very popular and practiced among the Greeks, and this was the cult of Dionysius and Orpheus, and also the cults of Isis and Mithra and Cybelle and others, which were to sacrifice an animal to the god Dionysius or Orpheus or the others and to eat its flesh and drink its blood under the impression or illusion, shall I say, that in this mystical rite the animal thus sacrificed represented the god himself and by eating its flesh and drinking its blood, the devotee became at one, at least temporarily, with the god himself. These Greek ideas, together with others which included drinking wine and eating bread as a memorial to a god, as well as acting out the passion of the life and death of the god Dionysius, eventually found their way into the ceremony of the Christian thanksgiving, which soon adopted the conception of the transubstantiation of the blood and flesh from the pagan rites for the deification of me as the Son of God, equal to God Himself and the second part of the trinity. And thus we have the combination of these elements to form what is known as the Eucharist.
I have already written you that the writers, who were Greek and of the second century, sought to put the stamp of genuineness upon the ceremony of the Eucharist by finding it connected with the Old Testament of the Hebrews, and they were quick to make use of Melchizedek to establish their doctrines. It is from conceptions and combinations such as these that the Eucharist was born and I may repeat now and emphasize the fact that it has no authority from my teachings nor from those of the apostles and that all writings in the gospels and in the writings of Paul and Peter and John were never written by them in their present form, but represent interpolations and revisions in order to give authority to current views which reflected the popular ideas and sentiments of the Greeks.
Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens
