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1. The First Coming of Jesus Christ
By Kurt Simons | May 19, 2007
1. The fundamental teaching of both His First and Second Comings is that God - that is, the Lord God Jesus Christ - is a person, one person. Like us, who were created “in His image” (Genesis 1:27), He has a soul -Jehovah (or Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddi, etc.) in the Old Testament and the Father (or I Am, Ancient of Days, etc.) in the New, and a body that came to earth, Jesus Christ. All those names refer, body and soul, to the same Person. That person has a spiritual influence on us, and on everything else in creation, termed in the teachings of the Second Coming the “Divine Proceeding.” That influence, that “proceeding,” is typically translated in the Bible as the Holy “Spirit,” but the actual word used in the New Testament is Pneuma, which is Greek for “breath,” in keeping with such teachings as Genesis 2: 7, Psalm 33: 6, and John 20: 22. This “Holy Breath,” or influence on the world, is from that same one Person, Jesus Christ. (Note that the Holy Spirit is never mentioned in the Old Testament since it couldn’t exist until Jesus came.)
2. Jesus Christ, in the teachings of His Second Coming, has also told us that He is not simply loving, but love itself, and the origin of our ability to love, since, again, He created us in His “image” (Genesis 1: 27). However, the fundamental nature of true love is that it is reciprocal. So God’s “motive” for creation wasn’t just to make a universe full of people whom He could love; He also wanted them to love Him in return. But He faced a logical problem: If He created people so they had to love Him, they would be robots programmed to love Him and He would just be loving Himself by remote control. His elegant solution to this problem was to create us in spiritual free will. It was to make that free will possible that He created the physical universe. A key part of that free will is our ability to believe in Him or not. In the spiritual universe He is blatantly obvious everywhere. However, in the physical universe, we are free to either see Him in every star and blade of grass, or to see existence as a random molecular accident. More to the point, we are free to either learn to love good, and so love God in return, or to develop a love of evil and try to turn our back on His love.
Those who get in the habit of loving and following Jesus in this life will continue to love Him after death, where they will choose - still in free will - to go to heaven. Those who have done their best to live by their principles but who have not known Jesus will also choose heaven. People who want to stay in evil after death can’t stand heaven, however, so Jesus allows them to choose hell instead, where they also live forever. Hell is the final demonstration of the greatness of His love. As C.S. Lewis observed, “Hell is [God’s] last service to those who will allow him to do nothing better for them.” (C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress) “I believe that the damned are rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain). So Jesus allows people to choose what they think will make them happy even when He knows they are making a mistake, in this case an eternal one. But He never stops loving them, even when they turn away from Him - “ “If I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there.” (Psalm 139:8) Jesus still loves them, but He won’t violate their free will and take them back out of hell because if He short-circuited their free will He would destroy them as individuals.
3. Clearly, the God of the universe would not come to our tiny speck of a planet unless there was a profoundly good reason. From the time of the “fall” in the early days of the human race’s history, people had gotten into evil, as demonstrated at great length in the stories of the Old Testament. So many people did this that, over time, the human race as a whole developed an evil heredity in the spiritual plane that was passed on from generation to generation just like physical heredity is passed on in the natural plane. This evil heredity grew steadily worse over the generations until, by the time of Christ, it was interfering with free will itself. A key indication of how bad things were is found in the accounts in the Gospels of people being possessed by evil spirits - i.e. taken over by such spirits who over-rode their free will (e.g. Luke 8, Mark 9, 16: 9 Matthew 4). If nothing had been done about this situation, the time would have come when everyone on earth would have been so possessed and gone to hell. Ultimately, in fact, the human race’s heredity would have become so evil that the human race would have died out on the physical plane as well. A similar situation had happened once before on a smaller scale, in the story of the Genesis flood, which was a symbolic story about people spiritually drowning in a flood of evil at that time. But the situation at the time of Jesus’ birth was far worse, bad enough to cause God Himself to take on human form and come to earth.
How the First Coming Worked
So God needed to save our spiritual freedom by removing the bias toward evil caused by that accumulated evil heredity. How? The obvious answer would appear to be that God can do anything, so He could have used His Divine power to reset the balance between good and evil. But it’s not that simple. If He did that, He would be violating that spiritual free will that is fundamental to meaningful human existence. Specifically, He would be interfering with the free will of the people who had chosen the evil that created this problem. God would never go against His own rules of creation. In fact, He can’t, since they are part of Him. There is also the logical problem that if God had to break His own rules of creation to fix this situation, that would mean that He had made a mistake in setting up those rules in the first place, which would be impossible since He knows the future. (Since He is outside time and space as well as within it, to Him all time, including the future, is now.)
What God did do was to come to earth as not just the son of God (e.g. Mark 15: 39) but also the Son of Man (e.g. Matthew 16:13, 27), with the Son of Man part having the human race’s evil heredity. In other words, He was conceived and born like any human baby. Every baby receives a soul from God via the father’s seed and a series of coverings for that soul, including a body, from the mother’s seed. What was different in Christ’s case is that the soul was God, Jehovah. Although, we are told, Mary was a good woman personally, her role in this process was to provide Jesus with the same evil heredity that the rest of the human race had at that point. Getting access to that heredity, in other words, is the reason he had to have a human mother.
The significance of Jesus having a human “half” from Mary was that the hells who were causing all that widespread evil in the world could never have gotten anywhere near the Divine Itself. But they could attack and tempt the human part of Jesus, just as they attack all other human beings. And attacking that part of Him is just what He allowed them to do. In fact, He set up a huge back-and-forth cycle: The first step was that He would allow the hells to attack His human part - and they did this from the day of His birth, long before the events of the Easter story. (In fact, the whole Biblical Easter story is just an iceberg tip, only hinting at the huge spiritual events going on then.) In order for these hell attacks and temptations to work, His human part had to some extent lose awareness of the Divine within Him. In other words, at those times He would enter into a state of obscurity. The teachings of the Second Coming call this the state of “exinanition,” or being “poured out,” prophesied in Isaiah 53:12. When He was in this Son of Man “obscurity mode,” He spoke of or prayed to the Father as if that was someone else (e.g. Matthew 16: 16, John 14: 6, 28). It seems incredible that Jesus could fall into such obscurity, but that’s what His human half had to do to make possible the equally incredible process of the hells tempting God.
After Jesus let some of the hells tempt Him, He would overcome the temptation and, as He did so, He would get that part of hell back under control and stop it biasing people toward evil. He did this spiritual housecleaning by means of the power of His Divine soul. When He was in this “clarity” or “overcoming” mode He was fully aware that “I and my Father are one” (Matthew 23: 9, Mark 12: 29, 32; John 8: 58; 10:30; 14: 7-9; 19: 39; 20: 28). He was in this mode when He performed His miracles (True Christian Religion 104).
As Jesus went through this temptation-overcoming and obscurity-clarity cycle again and again, and the hells were one after another put in their place, Jesus’ clarity mode became more and more predominant. Finally, when He had put the hells back in order, He became fully “glorified” (e.g. as in John 13:31-2, as opposed to His earlier statement that He was not yet glorified (John 7: 39)) and He became clear all the time Who He was - God incarnate. This full and final awareness was indicated by His final statement on this matter in His final appearance to His disciples after the resurrection, that “all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18).
People sometimes wonder what exactly happened to Christ’s body in the tomb. The teachings of the Second Coming reveal that His body’s disappearance was the final component of Jesus’ glorification process. All during that process He was replacing His physical human substance with Divine Human substance. This process has been compared to having a linen handkerchief in which you replace the linen threads, one at a time, with threads of gold. All the way through the conversion process, the handkerchief remains intact, but at the end it has been completely changed, from linen to gold. Similarly, all the way through His life on earth (i.e., not just during the last three years), the Divine soul in Christ was steadily replacing Christ’s human substance with Divine substance. At the end, as Mary and the others saw in the tomb, the physical human substance simply ceased to exist, presumably because it no longer received the inflowing power from the Father/Divine soul that is needed to keep matter in existence every moment on the physical (as well as spiritual) plane (see Correspondences. The Great Lost Secret). The Divine substance of His body was thus “glorified†into heaven, with no physical “left-over.”
Implications
The glorification process that Jesus went through at the First Coming fundamentally changed the way people could relate to Him. Until He came, people had never seen God directly. As illustrated in many stories in the Old Testament, He communicated with people in this world either by means of a prophet or leader, or by temporarily speaking through an angel. Such an angel of God (more accurately translated “angel of Jehovah”) appeared to people directly or in dreams. Recall such an angel calling Hagar (Genesis 21: 17) and Gideon (Judges 6), or the angel who announced the birth of John the Baptist to Zacharias (Luke 1). By coming to earth and showing Himself in a human form and then reuniting that form with His Divine soul, Jesus opened up a new way of relating to Him in a direct and personal way. This is what the apostles saw, so dramatically, on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 7:2). It means that we are no longer to think of Him as the kind of mysterious and distant force of the Old Testament, or even as a Person we can only conceive of in some high and distant way. Jesus is as human as He was on earth, but now a Divine human. He is as caring, friendly, and approachable as He was while He was on earth. Because He is Divine, He can relate closely and personally to every individual person in the entire created universe, on both the natural and spiritual levels. In fact, He created us because of His will and ability to have such relationships and express His love for us. As with all aspects of His life, Jesus has told us of His battle with evil human heredity as a model that we can follow. In our case, if we ask Him to help us remove evil from our lives, we can pass on a spiritual heredity to our children that contains less evil than we inherited - a wonderful gift!
While we can no longer see Jesus in person the way the Apostles did, the teachings of the Second Coming tell us, surprisingly, that we can now communicate more fully with Him than they could. This is because the Apostles, who were simple people, only dimly understood who Jesus really was and what He had come to do. Only at the end of His life on earth, and in His appearances to them after He rose from the tomb, did they begin to realize that He wasn’t just a secular leader. Even then, they never had the scope, the potential, for understanding Him now open to us in teachings of the First and Second Comings. (There is one exception, however. There is reason to think that Jesus explained some of what would later be revealed at the Second Coming when He interpreted His life for the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27). The disciples already knew the events of His life, so it seems likely that He explained the deeper aspects of His coming.)
So, with this new gift of understanding resulting from both Comings, we can relate to Jesus Christ in a deep and personal way. He has communicated with us in His Word, the Second Advent Christian Bible, in enormous detail, He has told us about Himself and the universe as well as, most importantly, how to develop that love for and with Him that was the purpose of the creation of that universe. We know more about all these things than any people since the beginning of history. Love and communication are reciprocal: God communicates with us from love, and we can talk with Him in our prayers. His answers are more subtle now than they were when He spoke from the burning bush by the Sea of Galilee, but His subtlety shows His care for our free will. His answers are real.
For Further Reading
From the Books of the Second Coming
Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom - The big-picture explanation of God as He is in Himself, of how He appears in the spiritual world, and of the mechanics of creation at its different levels.
Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Providence - God runs the universe by a set of laws, on the spiritual level as well as on the physical level. Life does make sense, and God always has a plan for us, no matter what happens, even if we don’t always see or understand it.
The True Christian Religion, Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church Foretold by the Lord in Daniel 7; 13, 14; and in Revelation 21; 1, 2 - Along with many other topics, a review of God, with emphasis on His infinity/eternity, how He helps us out spiritually, and how free will works.
The Doctrine of New Jerusalem Concerning the Lord - A brief review of the teachings on the Lord God Jesus Christ, with extensive citations from Scripture.
Other Titles
C. Giles Reflections on Jesus Christ - An inspiring review of the background and logic of the First Coming.
Knowing Jesus, Loving Jesus - Some practical aids to doing this
To Chapter 2: The Last Judgment Already Happened - in 1757