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I am here, Jesus:
I see that you have been studying the teachings and prophecies of the Old Testament, and I should like to write you just a few words tonight on how I came to know that I was the Messiah who had been proclaimed as the Savior of the Israelites. Now, I have written to you before concerning what I learned from the Father, but I shall supplement this with material which will help to make things clearer to you.
The people of Israel had broken the covenant which God had made with them, and He foresaw that it would be necessary to actually bestow upon them His own Divine personality through His Love in order to purify and transform their souls so as to be free from the temptation of sin and evil. This is what the Father meant by giving the people a new heart, which He voiced through Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and pouring His Spirit out upon them. This, of course, was not His Spirit which functions in the realm of the intellectual or moral, but was the Spirit that conveys His Divine Love which He had shown He possessed for His people despite their sinful ways. For, through the prophet Hosea, He had revealed that He loved Israel, His people, as the husband loves the wife, though unfaithful. He was, therefore, going to pour out His Love upon His people through His Spirit -- the Holy Spirit -- and in this way give them a New Heart.
The Divine Love in my heart kept telling me that I was the Messiah who should come to bring salvation to the people through the Love which should not only be given to me, but to all those who should return to the Father and seek it through earnest desire, as people seek to do righteousness and kindly acts because they so desire to do them. The obtaining of the Father's Love was a soul action springing from the emotions and the will exercised by the emotions, and comprised trust in the Father's Love and mercy, and prayer to Him that it would be bestowed on sincere seeking.
Many of the prophecies about the Messiah's coming made by the prophets dealt with times previous to my coming and nearer to their own times, and dealt with Zerubbabel, by Haggai and Zechariah, after Cyrus, the Persian king, permitted the exiles to return to Jerusalem; and also Onias, in the days of the Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes. At the same time, it was given to me to understand that the prophecies of God's spokesmen were applicable not only to their own generation but could also apply just as forcibly to later times, when these times brought into operation circumstances like unto those which were originally referred to. And this can be seen in Isaiah and Jeremiah, in seeking to keep Judah free from the wars between Egypt and the Eastern empires Assyria and Babylonia.
I knew from the Love glowing in my soul that the prophecy of the New Heart was being fulfilled in my soul and I began to see that many of the Messianic passages in the (books of the) prophets referred to me as well as to predecessors. I saw that I fulfilled many of the requirements, such as being of the House of David, being born at Bethlehem, that I came at a time when Judah was a dependency of a foreign power, and that the prophecies of Daniel brought the time of the coming of the Messiah to my own days.
While Isaiah's passages of the suffering servant referred to Israel, a man as the personification of Israel fitted perfectly into the Messianic picture; for, in Hosea, God had pictured Israel as an adulterous woman, and in Isaiah as a vineyard, and in Jeremiah in various forms; and it seemed that when God referred to Israel, He meant one who would represent Israel through suffering for the salvation of all of God's children. By Israel, He meant one of His children who would suffer because of his faith. And, thus, when God meant Israel, He meant the Messiah.
The one sign that I waited for was the desecration of the Temple, prophesied in the Book of Daniel; and when Pilate did that early in the year A.D. 26, I knew that what had occurred in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes had not been limited to his day, alone, and had been repeated in my own, and made me realize that I must come forth and proclaim the rebestowal of the Father's Love -- the New Heart -- as proclaimed by the prophets, and that I had been anointed the Messiah of God.
I also knew that from the life of Jeremiah and his troubles as well as the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel, that I would be cut off, but this would come as a result of the sins of mankind and not because I was fated to be crucified or because I voluntarily assumed the sins of all mankind and saved mankind from sin by paying the penalty for sin with my blood. Now, I know this is what is being taught, but it is all wrong and has no basis in fact.
I will stop now, for it is late and you should get some sleep. So, with my love to you and the Doctor,* and to all my workers, I will say good night and sign myself,
Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens
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* Dr. Leslie R. Stone.
