When our heart fills with love, when our soul longs to bring transforming truth to the planet, when our mind is replete with treasures that we find through Part IV, we increasingly become ready to devote part or all of our lives to the goal of bringing a new revelation of Jesus to the world.
A paragraph from the last Paper in The Urantia Book seems to justify an aggressive effort to bring Part IV or the book as a whole to the attention of the world–now.
196:1.2 (2090.3) The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices of living as will enable it to “follow after” the Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father’s will and of consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment? Does institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.
Please read a key sentence again with me. “What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions!”
I find a subtle but significant puzzle in the phrase: “through this revelation.” Why don’t the authors simply say, “What a transcendent service to present this revelation to the church that bears Jesus’ name and to all other religions! Doing this would recover the Son of Man from the tomb of traditional theology and present him as the living Jesus . . . .”
When we read the slightly puzzling phrase in the original paragraph, it would be normal to feel a faint, momentary, vague ripple of uneasiness—and keep going. The rest of the paragraph is clear, which makes it easy to connect the dots of clarity, and fill in the gap ourselves to makes feel OK with this somewhat puzzling sentence. The alternative is to stop and ponder.
I believe that this puzzle is solved by the same key that unlocks a similar puzzle in another paragraph. 195:10.16 (2086.2) The great hope of Urantia lies in the possibility of a new revelation of Jesus with a new and enlarged presentation of his saving message which would spiritually unite in loving service the numerous families of his present-day professed followers.
In its fullness, I believe that this “new revelation” and “new and enlarged presentation” include The Urantia Book. But if the world is not yet ready for it, then what is to be done? 195:10.1 (2084.1) THE WORLD NEEDS TO SEE JESUS LIVING AGAIN ON EARTH IN THE EXPERIENCE OF SPIRIT-BORN MORTALS WHO EFFECTIVELY REVEAL THE MASTER TO ALL MEN. It is the the revelation by spirit-born mortals that that I believe will prepare the world for Part IV.
This puzzling sentence discussed above finds it solution here. For the present time, the transcendent service of the revelation of The Urantia Book is to equip spirit-born morals to present the Son of Man as the living Jesus. This is an essential for now and always. The time is ripe for it.
Other articles in this series on principles of epochal revelation management supply the context for my interpretation. In them I consider other appearances that seem contrary to my findings.
Happy study. Happy prayer. And happy revealing!
