I am here, Jesus:

I shall write my message to you on one of the most puzzling passages in the gospel of Matthew that confronts every student of the New Testament, and that is the subject of divorce as Matthew is supposed to have written it.

All I can say is that Matthew did write the passage on divorce, but with certain differences that render the meaning and interpretation entirely different. In the first place, divorce itself, while not evil, merely gives recognition to a state that arises from an evil condition between two souls that are suffering from evil spirits or from the evil desires that beset these souls, and which cause such inharmony between them that they cannot endure each other's company and they desire to part. Now such an act of divorce, as I have said, simply recognizes such inharmony of soul as a reality, and it is not the solution to the problem of marriage which is beset by the difficulties caused by the actions of the evil souls. The solution is not divorce, but removal of the evil that afflicts the souls, and such evil can only be removed by a great effort on the part of the individuals in question, the exercise of their natural love, or better still, by the Divine Love entering into the souls of the marriage partners and thus causing the elimination of those evils afflicting their souls. And with the elimination of these evils the souls regain their pristine purity and harmony is regained in the marriage state.

It is for this reason that I did not approve of divorce, whereas Moses had to tolerate it because the Divine Love was unknown at the time of Moses and he therefore had to condone a situation which arose from the hardness of men's hearts and here in referring to Moses' law I referred to man's use of the bill of divorcement rather than that of the woman, who at this time was subjected to man's domination in things of conjugal status, and he was the aggressor much more often than the woman. When I appeared in Palestine to commence my ministry, it was possible for mankind to receive the Divine Love through the Holy Spirit and men with faith in my doctrine that the Kingdom of God was at hand, could, by applying my teachings, receive the Divine Love and obtain that transformation of their souls that would obviate the necessity of divorce through the transformation of their soul condition from one of evil to that of pure angels, with nothing but natural and divine love for the marriage for the marriage partner. At the least, the Divine Love operating in the souls of mortals could render these souls so free from evil as to make marriage harmonious.

When I spoke then of divorce in a way that showed that separation from a woman and marriage to another merely caused the man to commit adultery, and the man who married the woman thus put away, to also commit adultery, I meant to picture a condition of sin in an otherwise perfect condition of soul. In the state of the Jewish nation at the time, the action of divorce was a necessary evil and I had no intention of decreeing that divorce as had been granted by the law of Moses should be eliminated, for conditions affecting husband and wife were even worse in my day than in the time of Moses and the consequent use of my word as a law to be observed by Christians in later times was not my intention at all, since I was simply stating an ideal.

Furthermore, I never said that a woman should be divorced on the grounds of adultery, as the New Testament puts it, for this phrase "Except for adultery" was inserted later by a writer who, in accordance with later views, took a very harsh attitude towards marital sinners. This attitude does not represent my true ideas on the subject, for my real attitude towards the adulterous wife is very clearly dem

onstrated by the passage in John which portrays my words to the Jews who brought an erring wife before me; and these words were that she should be forgiven because no accuser, and that included the offended husband, was without sin.

All sinners, if repenting of their sins in good faith, could come before the Heavenly Father in trust in His Love and Mercy and this includes not only the thief and the murderer but the adulteress as well. So you see how well meaning but misguided writers who had no conception of my real teachings put an entirely different interpretation upon my sayings and actually put words into my mouth that I never said; and this defiling of my teachings has brought untold woe to mankind for many hundreds of years and has caused the writer terrible years of torture in the hells for his well-meaning insertions.

I would like to state that divorce is admissible where it terminates a state of fornication in the eyes of God even though a marriage is observed by man and that is when both partners married for other considerations except love, which is the only true justification for marriage; and where there are children, the divorce between such couples simply causes more hell on earth for parents and children and is one of the greatest causes of unhappiness on earth. Hence, couples should under all conditions seek to work out a solution for themselves and their children if this is at all possible through the exercise of their natural love and the purification of their souls, but as I have said before, through acknowledging that God is our heavenly Father and that He seeks to help mortals, if mortals will only turn to Him and seek His help with all the earnestness of their souls, into which the Divine Love can then be conveyed with its consequent elimination of evil from these souls and their transformation in the Divine Essence.

Into this most important phase of man's existence as in all the others, the Divine Love will bring peace and happiness and harmony and will result in the avoidance of the terrible hells reserved for man whose soul is damaged by his evil desires and inclinations.

II

I will continue with the New Testament and its truths and falsities, and I want to talk to you about the Divine Love in one of the passages concerning the rich young man who appeared to me and asked me how he could obtain salvation for his soul and the way the New Testament describes this meeting between us leads the reader to assume that my great message to mankind was nothing more than the ten commandments, for several of the most important ones concerning man's love of God are omitted completely and only those dealings with man's relationship to other men are given. When the young man declared to me that he had obeyed all of these commandments and that he wished to know what else he had to obey or what else he had to do to merit salvation, I told him to give away all his property, become poor and to follow me.

Well, this makes a very nice story in the New Testament and is one that is usually read with interest and accepted by all who understand that the ten commandments given to the children of Israel by Moses were in reality the laws of God pertaining to the moral code. But, they do not realize that if that were all that I had come to Palestine to teach, then there was no need of Jesus, for Moses had already given these commandments and I could do nothing more than to confirm what Moses had already proclaimed.

As a matter of fact, I did teach the laws of Moses because they lead to the pure but not divine angelic state which can be reached through obedience to the moral code, but my mission, as you know, was to teach not the law, but grace. That is to say, freedom from sin, not by obedience to law, but through the transformation of the soul through the Divine Love's being conveyed into that soul through the Holy Spirit. That is precisely what I taught the rich young boy who appeared to me in order to learn the way to salvation, for the love of man to man and love to the Father do not lead to salvation in the sense that they give man immortality and At-onement with the Father. I therefore taught the young man the new gospel of grace and the Divine Love, which was superior to loving God and reverencing God in the prescribed way, as found in the first three commandments of Moses, and later writers of the gospel, in their copying and recopying, could not understand my allusions to and teaching of the Divine Love superior to the laws of love to God, which was, as one might say, a very part of their being, and they gradually eliminated all references to this teaching as well as to those Mosaic commandments requiring love of man to God, for one could not be stricken out without the other, and allowing the gospels to deal merely with the relationship of man to man and avoidance of sin through material possessions and desire for them. And thus, it was that once again my teachings were nullified by these copyists in the most important aspect of my mission -- the announcement of the glad tidings of the rebestowal of the gift of Divine Love and the resultant decrease in the ability of man to understand my true mission.

One of the things which should be kept in mind, however, in the reading of the passage in Mark and Luke is that there is absolutely no reference to the vicarious atonement through my blood on the cross as the means of salvation when the direct question was put by the rich young man, and I point to this omission as a proof positive that the entire conception of the vicarious atonement was a much later conception and never formed part of the original writings of my disciples, but was an afterthought that took form and shape when the teachings of the New Birth had been eliminated and a new conception of salvation was introduced in a way to conciliate the old Jews, and they made me the sacrifice that would cleanse the sins of mankind through the shedding of my blood. You know that I have dealt at length with this subject before and so have my disciples in their message through Mr. Padgett but I have deemed it appropriate to refer to it again in connection with a definite incident related in the New Testament and to emphasize its falsity.

Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens