THE SPIRIT LETTERS

There is a great wave of discontent among some people on the earth today in regard to the usefulness and correctness of homosexual relationships, and even marriages. The Apostle Paul long ago wrote of these matters to the Romans, as recorded in Rom. 1:18-32, in a way that expressed the Lord’s viewpoint leaving no doubt about these things: “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness: Because that which may be known of GOD is manifest in them; for God has shown unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the  world are clearly seen,  being understood by the things that are made, even HIS eternal power and GODHEAD; so that they are without excuse; because that when they knew GOD, they glorified HIM not as GOD, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible GOD into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.  Wherefore GOD also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies  between themselves. They changed the truth of GOD into a lie (Compare the Old Testament Book Leviticus Ch. 18), and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, Who is forever blessed. (Rom. 18-25). 

The Bible discloses that many times GOD has given over HIS will to HIS children to observe that they will do, all of man’s earth experiences being a test of the knowledge and understanding of each,; what he will do in each situation that confronts him during his earthly appearances.

Apostle Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, is quoted in 1 Cor. 6:13-20 as having commented to the Corinthians: “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body. And God has raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His own power. Know ye not that bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then take the member of Christ and make them the members of a harlot? GOD forbid. What, know ye not that he which is joined to a harlot is one body? for he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man does is without the the body, but he who commits fornication sins against his own body. What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which you have of GOD, and you are nor your own? For you are bought with a  price: therefore glorify GOD in your body, and in your spirit, which are GOD’s.”

And consider 1 Cor. 7:1-17, which adds that “every MAN should have his own wife, and every WOMAN have her own husband;” which makes excellent sense because a man and a woman may together bring a child into the earth dimension, whereas neither a man nor woman alone is able to bear children able to carry their DNA into future generations, a crucial factor in sustaining mankind’s generations. An old saying claims, “It is a wise man who knows his own father, if his family’s generations are not properly maintained.” This is one way of saying that unstable relationships will produce more of the same, because the vibrational patterns of the flesh — the hormones in men being radically different from the hormones in women — are stamped into permanence, perhaps even by the union of a homosexual to a non-homosexual mate. As Paul commented: “I keep under my body and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway!” (1 Cor. 9:27).

MESSAGE 46 - BOOK 5

The spiritual meaning of our Beloved Lord’s Prayer, understood in the context of Beloved Apostle Paul’s comment, biblically defined in 2 Cor. 3:3-6: and cf. Rom. 2:29, in which Paul writes: “But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter, whose praise is not of men, but of GOD.”

We understand from our beloved Bible and Scripture of Truth, that GOD is a Spirit (Jn. 4:24); our Beloved Father of all things that are, ever were, or that ever will be, so that we have one Lord, Jesus Christ the Son of GOD, one faith, and one baptism. And we have one GOD and Father of all, who is above all, and in us all, and through us all, and unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ’s [sacrifice on the Cross] (Ephesians 4:5-7). The Holy Bible thus advises us that when we pray, to enter into our secret door, and pray to our Father which seeth in secret, and shall reward us openly. And we are counseled that when we pray, not to use vain repetitions as do the heathen, for they believe they will be heard for much speaking.

We are to pray the Lord’s Prayer in this manner:

“Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy Will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not any more into temptation, but deliver us from evil; For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen”

Praying the Lord’s Prayer is powerful beyond words to describe it! GOD’s Holy Spirit Energy enters into those who fervently pray it, quickening them in spirit in powerful ways that can only be understood by praying it fervently and often. Praying to the Lord “to give us our daily bread” implores GOD to give us HIS Holy Spirit Energy that quicken us into immortality. And when we ask HIM to “forgive us our debts as we forgive us our debtors,” we seek to repent the sins we have committed against others, so they will no longer be held against us. And when we pray to GOD that we no longer be led into temptation, we ask HIM to lead us into pathways free from the influences of Satan the negative archangel

We are advised not to lay up earthly treasures, but rather to lay up heavenly treasures that are beyond the power of thieves to break into and steal; for the treasures we choose to focus upon during our earth experiences will indicate where our hearts really are. Therefore we are advised that we should take no thought about earthly things — what we shall drink or eat or wear — but rather to seek the Kingdom of GOD and HIS Righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto us. Therefore take no thought for tomorrow: for tomorrow shall take thought for things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Mt. 6:20-34).

It is said that there is a providence that cares for fools and children, and that it is sometimes extended to cover those who walk blindly in the darkness, groping for the Light. But some are gifted to see the truth who find the Light and follow it wherever it leads. There is a great and harsh testing going on in the earth dimension, designed to ascertain which souls will be quickened of spirit and raised up to eternal life in heaven. As written:

“Despise not the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked of Him. For whom the Lord loves, He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives (cf. Prove. 3:11). If you endure chastening, GOD deals with you as with sons; for what son is he the father does not chasten? But if you are not chastened, whereof all are partakers, then ye are not sons. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but HE for our profit, that we might be partakers of is holiness. Now no chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteouness unto them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees: and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of The Way; but let it rather be healed. Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. (Heb. 12:5-14).

Whenever man has contemplated the origins of his existence, a vast array of ideas and theories have occurred to him. For example, when the so-called Scientific Age dawned, the brilliant Charles Darwin emerged from his studies to present to the world a novel idea: that man had not been the product of a Divine Creator, he had simply evolved on the earth from organisms that had long before appeared as the product of a natural developmental process of some kind at that time unknown and not at all understood.

Our species, he asserted, had grown up from some now uncertain transient primitive creatures with roots that extend far back in time and mainly out of sight in the dim past. It was not just an idle compilation of factors. Mr. Darwin presented compelling substantiating evidence to back his conclusion that mankind had evolved from some remote animal ancestry not in our time able to be accurately traced. His hypothesis was presented in such a reasonable way, and supported by fossil remains and other forms of material evidence, that it immediately attracted many of the foremost scientific minds of his time from among many who sought some definitive reasonable explanation for man’s having been brought into existence on the earth..

The theory considered the development of man’s physical flesh body, which carried only remote implications of his mental development without delving deeply into that aspect of man. The presumption was that as the body developed, the mind must have also concurrently developed proportionately along with it. Mr. Darwin did not include in his Evolutionary Theory anything about the invisible spirit in man, about which biblical writers had addressed as early as the time of Job (32:8,14-18). Long before Darwin’s time, Apostle Paul had taught that the worlds were framed by the Word of GOD, so that things which are seen were not were not made of things which do appear (Heb: 11:3). We understand from the teachings of Apostle John that, “GOD is a Spirit” (Jn. 4:24), and that HE is the Creator of all things. This suggests that GOD and HIS Spirit is an all-powerful form of Divine Energy, of which the spiritually illuminated Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “But to us there is but one GOD, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in HIM: and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by Him” (1 Cor. 8:6). And beloved Paul wrote to the Ephesians that there is: “One Lord [Jesus Christ], one baptism [of Spirit]; one GOD and Father of All, who is above all, and in all, and through you all, and every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ” (Eph. 4:5-7).

Obviously, Darwin’s Theory militated against those who held unyielding fundamental religious beliefs — including the understanding that men are the Spirit-children of GOD the Father, which children had been made of GOD’s Holy Spirit Energy by GOD’S Son, who manifested as  Jesus Christ on earth. By that understanding, GOD the Father and HIS Son, Jesus the Christ on earth, were, respectively, man’s Creator and Maker.

The Holy Bible is a historical compendium of man’s experiences and learning as he developed spiritually

on the earth, not physically! Charles Darwin’s theories relating to man’s physical development were strangers: they did not encroach upon one another. Darwin’s Origins of Man did not remotely touch upon man’s spiritual development.

After Apostle Paul underwent his powerful spirit-altering rebirth experience on the Damascus Road, he began to write of revelationary matters he had learned, doing so in a series of biblically-recorded illuminating Letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians and others; most likely including the Book of Hebrews. These writings detailed man’s developing spiritual knowledge and understanding, and the effects of it on those who moved beyond man’s flesh development to an understanding of the illuminating effects upon mankind of Jesus Christ the Son of GOD’s impact upon all who would understand Him to be the Son of GOD incarnate — man’s Savior, Intercessor to GOD, and High Priest in heaven. Paul did not write about man’s skeletal or flesh aspects or his physical development from ancient times, as did Mr. Darwin. Their respective works were directed to two vastly different dimensions of realty: Mr. Darwin’s to temporal earth physicality, and Apostle Paul’s to man’s eternal heavenly spiritual reality.

Charles Darwin’s works describe man’s flesh development as it evolved in the earth dimension. Apostle Paul’s revelations are spiritual: they describe what he learned through the Spirit from the Holy Ghost, sent by GOD; and by Christ after power over heaven and the earth was given to Him by GOD (Mt. 28:18). For this reason, Paul inscribed the all-important principle: 

“Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living GOD; not in tablets of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. And such trust have we through Christ to GOD-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of GOD; Who also has made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” (2 Cor. 3:3-6).

To Be Continued…

Message Sixteen - Book Three - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF *

“What the two oldest gospels report of the public life of Jesus takes place in the course of a year. It is in the spring, with the parable of the sower, that Jesus begins to proclaim the secret of the Kingdom of GOD. At harvest time He is hoping that the heavenly harvest also, like the earthly, will begin (Mt. 10:37), and He sends out His Disciples to make a final proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom. Shortly thereafter He abandons His public activity and lingers along with His Disciples in the heathen territory in the neighborhood of Caesarea Phillipi, probably until near Easter, when He starts on His journey to Jerusalem.

“At the last meal which He takes with His Disciples, He gives them to eat and to drink wine which He has consecrated by prayers of thanksgiving, and declares that He will no more drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when He will drink it new in His Father’s Kingdom. Thus, at His last earthly meal He consecrates them to be His companions at the coming Messianic meal. From that time onward, as persons who carry within them the certain assurance they are invited to the Messianic meal, gather together in continuation of that last supper, for ceremonial meals at which over the food and drink, prayers of thanksgiving are offered up for the speedy coming of the Kingdom and the Messianic meal.

“Jesus expects, then, through the effect of His atoning death, to bring in the Messianic Kingdom immediately, without any preliminary tribulation. He tells His judges that they will see Him as the Son of man seated at the right hand of GOD and coming in the clouds of heaven.

“Since on the morning after the Sabbath the Disciples find the grave empty, and in their enthusiastic expectations of the glory in which their Master is soon to appear, have visions of Him as risen from the grave, they are certain He is with GOD in heaven, soon to appear as Messiah and bring in the Kingdom. [They were not to know the "times" and "seasons," which GOD had put in HIS own power" (Acts 1:7)].

“What constituted the celebration, then, was not Jesus’ words of institution so-called, which spoke of bread and wine as His body and blood, but the prayers of thanksgiving over the bread and wine. These gave both to the supper of Jesus with His Disciples, and also to the solemn meal of the primitive community, a meaning which pointed forward to the expected Messianic meal.

[There was also the consideration that Christ the Son of GOD as Jesus held the eternal Priesthood of GOD, that of Melchizedec (Gen. 14:18-19; Heb. 6:19-20).]

“Thus we get also an explanation of the fact that the celebration of the Supper in the earliest period is designated a “Eucharist,” or thanksgiving. There is in Apostle Paul’s writings another doctrine of an entirely different character, according to which believers experience in themselves in a mystical way the death and mythical resurrection of Jesus, and thereby become sinless, ethical persons. [Paul had personally experienced this conversion on the Damascus Road (Acts Chapters 9, 22, 26). It was after that illuminating experience that he wrote his hugely important update to the Corinthians, strikingly distinguishing between those who have undergone such spiritualizing experiences, and so receive "the things of GOD;" whereas the un-spiritualized natural man cannot discern or comprehend them because they are spiritually discerned].

“Jesus takes upon Himself the sins of others and endures His excruciating pain without, for the most part, their understanding of why He does so. But GOD knows why, or HE would not have put His Son through such a terrible testing ordeal. Just as Jesus announces the Kingdom of GOD not as something already beginning, but something that lies in the future; so He does not think He is already the Messiah. He is, however, convinced that at the appearance of the Messianic Kingdom, when the predestined ones enter upon the supernatural mode of existence intended for them, He will be manifested as Messiah.

“This knowledge about His future dignity remains His secret. To the people He comes forward as the announcer of the approaching Kingdom of GOD. There is no need for His hearers to know with whom they have to do. When the Kingdom appears they will learn it. His self-consciousness displays itself only so far that to those who confess to Him and accept His message about the Kingdom, He promises that the Son of man (of whom, as though He Himself were not identical with Him, He speaks in the third person) will recognize them immediately as His own.”

* OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS, By Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Pub. By Henry Holt & Co., Lmtd., Translated by C. T. Campion. 1933, 1949.

Series to be Continued in Message 17 - Book Three - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF.

Message Sixty - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [COMPLETING Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

Completion of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

COMPLETING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

Our most credulous and accepted historians were subjected to the same common laws which govern the operations of the human mind. For example, we have three different versions of Apostle Paul’s vision and his conversion by the Christ Spirit on the Damascus Road. We have two of these recorded from his public speeches, and one from the letter from Luke; probably from the lips of Luke, given in private conversation. All three accounts vary from one another in words and circumstances. The four Evangelists all provide the inscription on the Cross of Jesus, yet they disagree in the precise form of the wording.

Matthew notes that the accusation we: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews,” but Mark recites the superscription as, “The King of the Jews.” Luke claims that it was: “Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews.” Here, then, is a distinct variation in the recorded testimony. It is impossible that more than one of these inscriptions is precisely verbally accurate. But that fact creates no feeling of distrust: possibly not one in a hundred Christian Churches are aware of the discrepancy, or, if they are aware of it, give it a single questioning thought.

It is an immaterial variation, and incompetent discrepancy often found in human testimony, and nothing could be more unreasonable and or absurd than to allow the least shade of doubt to pass over the mind as to the reality of the inscriptions because of this immaterial difference.

The first three Evangelists have given us Jesus’ Prayer in His agony at the Garden of Gesthamene, but each of them couched in different words. Yet no man in his sober senses would think of doubting the actual occurrences of that thrilling but poignant scene, on that account. In fact, if anything in all of mankind’s history of the past can be said to bear the spiritual impress of truth, it is in this whole transition related in the Holy Scripture of Truth.

Series Concluded, of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS

[The entire set of these messages are available in the Blog website:

http://thespiritletters.com .

Message Fifty-Nine - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[ Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

The relationship which the Apostles understood themselves to have and sustain with Jesus as witnesses is illustrated in Peter’s speech to Cornelius and his friends: “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power so that He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with Him. And we are witnesses of what He did, both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem – Him who they hanged on a tree. But God raised Him up on the third day and revealed Him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God – even to us who ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead.”

When Jesus bowed His head upon the Cross, and declared, “It is finished,” the Gospel was complete. He had discharged His office as a teacher. Nothing of substance could be added to it, and nothing could be removed from it – it was palpable truth to all who were sufficiently quickened of Spirit to receive it and to comprehend its spiritual value. The system was perfect, and the duty of Jesus’ followers became to promulgate it to the world at that time, and for all who were to come afterward: “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, which the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.” They were occasionally instructed as to what to do, but never that we read of, to preach any new doctrine which had not already been taught by Jesus Himself.

It may seem strange to those who are accustomed to dispute about words and phrases, that Jesus should have left nothing written; nothing of which we an identify as the very words He spoke. The stickler for creeds and formulas may lament that all the disputes in after ages were not anticipated and prevented by a written declaration of the Savior, which might have been so plain that no dullness could have misconstrued it, nor ingenuity perverted it.

We are fully justified, I believe, in asserting that no precaution would have proved effectual. Human language is essentially ambiguous, every word having a variety of significations, that any one meaning of which becomes probable only because it better suits the connection, purpose, or the sentiments of the reader who considers it. Language is always presumed to be addressed to reasonable beings in a way that they will comprehend it. That is the case with Jesus’ plainest instructions. We are always obliged to use our reason in order to decide in what sense his words are to be understood.

When He tells us, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren an sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple, ” are we then to interpret this literally, and say that no man can be Christian without hating father and mother, sisters and brothers? Of course not! Why? Because it is not reasonable to believe that Jesus intended His followers to prove false the most important relationships we sustain in this earth life. We conclude, therefore, that He did not use the word “hate” in a literal way, but in a figurative sense of loving them less than Himself and His cause – which conclusion we draw from that which is biblically inscribed at 2 Cor. 3:3-6.

Similarly, we interpret the precept which commands us to cut off our hands and pluck out our eyes; not as a literal command, because reason dictates that Jesus did not intent it to be literally undertaken. So, whatever Jesus might have left written, there would have perpetually remained the same difficulty of interpretation. We should still be obliged to rest on probability, just as we do now – but relying on the Holy Ghost the Spirit of truth to convey the truth to us through the Spirit. The only way to be as certain as we can be that we understand a sentence of scriptural writing in its true sense, rests upon the level of spiritual knowledge and understanding to which we have attained: comprehension of it depends upon our own state of inspiration. And there is no way to be certain we are inspired, without the power of miracles; or unless some miracle is wrought in our own life for our sake.

Even had Jesus left His Gospel written in His own hand, we still would have been relegated to rely upon human testimony, assured that the records of it had been accurately preserved. The matter, then, is better left as it stands. As it is, we understand from recorded human testimony what Jesus did, taught, and suffered. What more competent witnessing could we possibly have than those who were with Him on close terms during His entire ministry?! In what better form could we have this testimony than the Gospel of Matthew, written by one who was with Him from the beginning, and who was present at His Crucifixion; who ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead, and who devoted his life to propagating Christ’s religion?!

What more unobjectionable testimony could we have than that of Beloved John, who was one of the disciples of John the Baptist – who saw the transfiguration on the Mount, and leaned on Jesus’ bosom, and shared his most intimate friendship? As collateral proof, what more authentic than the memoirs of Luke and Mark, who were the constant companions of the Apostles, and heard them repeatedly rehearse the wonderful story and teachings and miracles of Jesus?

Considered in the light of human testimony, those who thoroughly understand the principles of evidence, remind us that such testimony is the more weighty and compelling because of the slight variations from each other. Those who are familiar with proceedings in the courts of justice, tell us that it is utterly out of the question to expect absolute consistency in the statements of a number of witnesses – no matter how honest and competent they may be. Agreement in the main facts is all that can be reasonably expected, and nothing will cause suspicion of collusion between two witnessed than for them to make, word-or-word, the same statement. It is not human nature for people to tell the same story twice in the same words and in the same order.

Series to be Continued and Concluded in Message 60 of Rev. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Eight - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[ Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

The new religion which Jesus was sent to teach was not only to be preached by Himself in that generation, but was to perpetuated through all time. He had been shown that His own ministry was to be brief and to have a tragical end. I could only be perpetuated by choosing Disciples while He lived, and training them to take up the work where He would lay it down. They were to receive His New Covenant Gospel from His lips, as Jeremiah had prophesied in Jer. 31:31-34, and proclaim it to the world, after which their days would be numbered. They would in turn commit it to others, who should be prepared to commit it to still others who came after them, and thus it was destined to be handed down to instruct new generations in future times. Had there been no organization of this kind – had Jesus chosen no Apostles and Disciples – Christianity would have perished on the very threshold of its existence.

Accordingly, not long after the commencement of His mission – after a night of prayer to God, doubtless seeking Divine guidance and direction – He chose “His Twelve” from among His immediate followers, and ordained them as His assistants and successors in the propagation of the new faith. To these He explained more fully the principles of His new religion – which to the as yet un-spiritualized multitudes, for fear of violence, He veiled under the dress of parable and allegory. He sent them out during His ministry as heralds of what was to come, in order to prepare the minds the people by their instructions, to enable them to receive and His more perfect teaching.

The twelve Apostles Jesus chose were men of but slender literary and intellectual cultivation, without wealth or influential connections. At first consideration it may seem utterly on any principle of human policy that He should have made such an unusual selection; and quite as unaccountable that He, Himself, should have chosen to pass through His ministry under an exterior so exceedingly humble. That He should have – in the language of His Apostles, have made Himself of no great reputation, but to have taken virtually the form of a slave. But, upon reflection, we find that His behavior was dictated by the highest wisdom, for His external humility emphasized His moral and spiritual glory. He really was so great – the Son of God in flesh – that nothing external could have added to the grandeur of His character.

Strikingly, without availing Himself of a single external advantage, Jesus Christ established a religion which disappointed the hopes of His own nation and even perhaps some of His prospective followers: He told them from the first that they were to reap no worldly advantage from their connection with Him. They were utterly without those material rewards by which a cause is usually carried forward: things which actually would have obscured the reality of Jesus’ mission from God His Father. Instead, He radiated the moral power which truth always carrieswith it, and those remarkable attestations which are the strongest evidence to the unsophisticated mind of man on a mission from the Most High.

It may at first seem strange that – when He might have gone up to Jerusalem and chosen His followers from among the most learned, gifted, and accomplished of the rabbinical schools which at that time were flourishing there, that He should have made the choice that He did. Over them He would have manifested the same immeasurable superiority, and might have wielded them to accomplish His purpose as easily as those humbler individuals He actually chose as His companions. Between Him and the intellectual and cultivated there would seem to have been a closer sympathy than with those uneducated Galileans, who – as far as we are at this late time able to see – were mere children in His Presence.

But this arrangement, like every other, was founded on the highest wisdom. The function for which they were appointed to fill did not call for either particular talents nor extensive learning. They were not to originate anything nor add to what He taught. Their office was simply that of witnesses of what He had said, done and suffered: “And you shall also bear witness,” said He to His disciples, “because you have been with me from the beginning.”

After His Resurrection, He said to them: “Thus it is written, and thus it behooved the Messiah to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and omission of sins should be preached in His name among gll nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses of these things. You shall receive power, and after that the Holy Ghost is to come upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”

This being the office of Jesus’ Disciples, intellectual cultivation a necessary prerequisite. The qualities most necessary for a witness are simplicity, integrity, and courage. Through them the world had received Christ’s New Covenant Gospel. And the more transparent the medium through which it is conveyed, the less coloring it takes from the mind through which it was – and is – transmitted.

Consequently we have the most simple and childlike narrative that the world has ever read. We do not see the historians at all. All we see is Jesus Christ, His doctrine, His character, His life and His miracles. There is no attempt to introduce the philosophy or opinions of the times – with the exception of the beginning of the Gospel of John: and it is unnecessary to note that those lines have created more controversy in the Christian Church than all the rest of the letters.

What Jesus wanted of His followers was principally to be His witnesses to the world and to the faith of the successive millions of the Christian Church has depended. The Gospels or less than their testimony. Jesus Himself left nothing written. All that we know about either Him or His doctrines, we have received through them. Without their testimony, we would not know what He taught and how He lived. It was on the strength of what they had seen and heard that they claimed to be the religious teachers of the world in their time.

Series to be Continued in Message 59 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Seven - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

Soon after the conversation above-reported in Message 56, Jesus returned to Galilee, and, passing through Samaria, engaged in that remarkable discourse with the woman of Samaria at the well of Jacob.

On His arrival at Nazareth, His previous residence, He attempted to preach in the synagogue where He had been accustomed to worship. The people listened to the first part of his discourse with pleasure and admiration; although, according to the strong propensity of human nature, they were disposed to look down on Him as the son of a carpenter. At the first hint, however, of the doctrine that the new dispensation was not restricted to the national religion, but was to be extended to the Gentiles as well as Jews, they became violently enraged. They might have been led to suspect that He was not altogether enlightened in the national faith of a Messiah who was to destroy the heathen, from His manner of quoting that striking passage of Isaiah’s: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach glad tidings to the poor; He has sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are bound, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord….” At this crucial point He stopped short and did not finish the rest of Isaiah’s prophecy: “And the day of vengeance of our God.”

Had Jesus quoted the last part of that sentence without an explanation that it applied to Himself, they might have understood Him to be sanctioning their expectation that He was to destroy, and not save, the other nations of the earth. They might even have cried out, “Hosanna to the son of David!” But not only did Jesus pass over this most important part of their Messianic traditions, so comforting to them under their political oppression at that time, but He went on to intimate that the heathen were only to be spared, but not to be admitted into the Kingdom of the Messiah: “I tell of you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the day of Elias, but unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sion, unto a woman who was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the das of Eliseius the prophet, and none of them were cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

This was too much! A Messiah who would tolerate, or even look favorably, upon the heathen, was not to be endured. “And they all sat in the synagogue when they heard these things, and were filled with wrath, and rose up, ran Him out of the city and led Him to the brow of a hill whereon the city was built, intending to cast Him down headlong. But He passed through them, went on His way down into Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and taught there on the Sabbath day.”

The fame of His miracles and doctrines went on to increase, until the synagogues became too small to contain the crowds which flocked to hear Him. He began, therefore, to teach them in the open air. On one occasion He preached to them from a ship, while they stood on the shore; and once He spoke from a rising ground, that His voice might be better heard by so vast a multitude. His discourse on this occasion was of the same character as the one He delivered in His Sermon on the Mount. Let us examine its contents to mark the wonderful wisdom it displayed: eternal truths couched in language precisely adapted to current-day circumstance as well as at that early time. It helped to cure a Jew from errors into which he might have fallen, and Christians felt as if it had been addressed directly to them.

In the vast multitude that had assembled from all parts of Judea, there were doubtless men of different sentiments cherished by the Jewish people at that time. They were united in but one common sentiment: that the Messiah should be a temporal deliverer who would cleanse Jerusalem and the holy land of the Roman standards which were perched on every tower, and redeem the people of God from the degrading tribute they were yearly compelled to pay. They were heated up to the point they were ready to take up arms in the holy cause of patriotism and religion. They awaited but the signal of Jesus’ hand to take up their line and march to the City of David, where they were convinced that He would stand highest in a new monarchy over which He would install.

Thus they collected around Him with hearts bursting with national pride and ambition. What must have been their astonishment and disappointment when the first sentence fell from His lips: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of God which you have for so long expected is not an empire of war and conquest, nor is it that of the Jews, to be exercised over foreign nations. It does not come as a cure for outward misfortunes, or for political evils, or for the relief of proud hearts rankling under oppression; but speaks comfort to those who are bowed down under the sorrows of life: ‘Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ You expect the Messiah to vindicate the weak against the strong, to repel injury, and to revenge insult; that He will set up His empire with the sword and defend it by the sword. But I say unto you, blessed are the meek, for the shall inherit the earth. The gentle are those who are to flourish in the days of the Messiah. They shall delight themselves to the abundance of peace. You come to me expecting a sign from heaven; to be fed with manna from the skies, as your fathers were in the desert. I can promise you nothing of the kind! The blessings of my kingdom belong to those only who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. You expect, under the Messiah, a reign of bitterness and vengeance – that He will rule like a rod of iron, and dash his enemies into pieces like a potter’s vessel, but I come to pronounce blessings on the merciful, for I assure them that they shall find mercy from their eternal judge.

[Note: the smashing like potter’s vessel was not due for fulfillment at that time. It is due to come later when the Lord brings the Tribulation upon the earth.] Those of you who observe the laws of Moses, submit to innumerable ceremonial ablutions, and thus imagine yourselves pure and prepared for the kingdom of God. I assure you that no such purification will be of any avail in that kingdom; but blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The remedies which you propose for mortal ills are essentially defective. You imagine that they can be cured by evil, instead of evil being overcome with good. But I say unto you, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. They shall share the blessings of the new dispensation; not those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness!”

Series to be Continued in Message 58 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Six - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[ Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

That which was already in place – the Old Testament – could not simply be effaced. A major question became: how could the old dispensation, so long accepted, be superceded by the New one? Certainly it could not be accomplished immediately – it could only be done by degrees; by engrafting the new upon the old wherever it was practical – as the spiritually-illuminated Apostle Paul inscribed in his letter to the Romans, in Romans 11:11-36 – by infusing into the current language and thought new principles which might influence the whole mass, thus superceding rather than destroying what was already in existence. The new dispensation needed to be grafted on to the old, as new branches are grafted onto old trees.

The Jewish religion was already in existence, as the stock upon which Jesus could engraft His own. He had been expected, but in another character from that which He could assume. The whole phraseology was in use which designated what He was to accomplish. What would the highest wisdom have dictated him to do? What does the man do who has a house to build, but has an old one already on the spot? Does he begin by giving it to the flames? or by throwing it all aside? No, he selects from whatever is sound, and incorporates it into his new structure.

This is precisely what Jesus Christ the Son of God did with regard to the religion of the Jews, using the expectations and phraseology which were already in existence as to the Messiah and the new dispensation. To have outrightly rejected them would have made the task of introducing the new religion much more difficult. The course directed by wisdom was to adopt the existing phraseology, giving it such good sense as would correspond with his real character and office.

The Jews were accustomed to call the Messiah “the Son of Man,” from the vision of Daniel, noted in Daniel Chapter Seven, in which he saw one “like the Son of Man” invested with great power and dignity. He was likewise call the Son of God, based on the Second Psalm. Jesus assumed these appellations, and, by assuming them, claimed all that was associated to the Messiah, who was expected to be a king, and His new dispensation a kingdom. While this was not true in the material flesh sense, it was nevertheless spiritually true in the loftiest sense of the proudest Jew. It is hard to imagine any language Jesus could have used that would have given a clearer concept of what Christianity was actually intended and designed become. The Jewish phraseology of the kingdom to come was as near as any Jesus could formulate. What it actually was develop to become, those who understood its underpinnings acquiesce in the propriety of Jesus’ use of the Messianic language as it then existed, giving it an interpretation that makes it the symbolic expression of the highest spiritual truth.

Some of His first discourses exemplify principles showing the miraculous knowledge of Jesus – the full understanding He had of the whole system from the beginning, and the manner in which He expressed the glorious and eternal truths of Christianity through the Messianic phraseology of that time.

Jesus’ Ministry began in Galilee, but at what particular time of year we are not informed. Of his first tour through that country – during which He attended the marriage-feast at Cana – we have only a general notion. Of His discourses nothing now remains but their commencing sentence: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Multitudes soon gathered around Him, and His fame quickly spread throughout all of Syria.

His first recorded discourse is that which He held with Nicodemus at Jerusalem, at the first Passover, which occurred after the commencement of His ministry – as related in John, Chapter Three. This conversation introduces us to one of the most interesting scenes in the New Testament. It illustrates practical proof of the miraculous wisdom with which Christ was endowed, which made Him equally at home with the learned and extremely experienced member of the Jewish Senate at Jerusalem, and the humble, simple peasants and fishermen at Galilee. Much was written of His declaration: “And it came to pass that when He was in Jerusalem, at the Passover on the feast-day, many believed on His name when they saw the miracles He performed. ”

“Marvel not that I said unto you that you must be born again. The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell when it will come or when or where it will go: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. Spiritual birth – true religion – is not confined, as you Jews suppose, to one tribe or one family. It is as free as the air; and the kingdom of God, which you expect to be a national thing, will spread over the earth as does the air, without any regard to the boundaries of nations and kindreds! Its empire is the soul, everywhere free, everyone capable of receiving it – not more in those whose material flesh bodies have descended from Abraham than those who have never heard of his name. If you really desire to enter into the kingdom of God, to be my disciple, come here not by night – go openly and be baptized. Be a Christian, not outwardly only, but inwardly. Hear my doctrines, receive my Spirit, and trust no more your descent from Abraham.”

In the course of the conversation, Jesus mentions two other facts no less offensive to the Jewish prejudices of Nicodemus: the Crucifixion of the Messiah, and the extension of His kingdom to the Gentiles – as biblically disclosed in Isaiah 49:5-9, 20-23; Isa. 60:3-6 and Isa. 62:2. Jesus declared: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believes on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world as you Jews suppose, but that through Him the world might be saved” Such was the transcendent wisdom of the Savior, from the very commencement of His mission. Before the wisdom of this youthful teacher, the learning, age and experience of Nicodemus were overborne and subdued, and he must have retired convinced no less by Jesus’ discourses than by His miracles, that He was a teacher come from God.

Series to be Continued in Message 57 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Five - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[ Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

There is no subject which literature approaches with such diffidence as the personal character and history of Jesus of Nazareth. There is no theme on which language is found so inadequate and imperfect. Here we have a person in human form, possessing every attribute of humanity, except sin, and exhibiting perfect goodness in combination with infallible wisdom; clothed with extensive power over physical nature, and a knowledge of futurity at once extensive and circumstantial; the declared object of a train of miraculous interpositions running back to the very foundation of the world. Himself the beginning and cause of a new order of things, embracing the whole world and all succeeding times; His doctrine destined to sway the minds of millions of the human race, to form their opinions, mold their characters, and shape their expectations – to reign in their minds and judge their actions as well as to purify their consciences, cleanse them from the stains of sin, and prepare them for His own society and the presence of God in the spiritual world.

Worthily to speak of such a Being is a task before which I confess my speech falters and my vocabulary seems meager and wholly inadequate. This difficulty remains, regardless of whatever view we adopt of His metaphysical rank in the universe. From the fierce controversy as to the nature of Jesus Christ – so early raised, and which more than any other cause has disturbed its harmony – I am happy to escape. That belongs to the history of opinions, and volumes upon volumes would not contain their endless diversity. What men have thought of the person of Jesus, and what He actually was, and did, and taught, and brought to pass, are two things entirely distinct. The former is a matter of mere speculation, and the latter embraces all that is necessary.

We read of Jesus, that, immediately after his baptism by John the Baptist and His transfiguration, directed by Divine impulse, He retired into solitude, where He spent forty days in preparation for the great work in which He was about to engage. [Note: the New Testament describes this experience as His spiritual rebirth, during which He met His adversary, Satan, and was not overcome by the devil’s lies, deceits and wiles. He was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Serpent himself – as noted in Mt. 4:1 and Lk.4:1-2. It amounted to a Spiritual conversion, on emerging from which He knew who He was, the requirements of His earth mission, and even that His ultimate fate was to be killed and "taken up" on the third day – events of which He had apparently spoken nothing previous to that occasion. After His Crucifixion, Ascension to God’ right hand and empowerment over heaven and the earth – noted in Mt. 28:18 – He spoke through Apostle John in the Revelation, to declare that just such an "hour of temptation" was to come upon all the world, to try everyone; and that those who would persevere to the end in faith and belief in Him, would be made pillars in heaven, needing to "go no more out" into the earth dimension. When this spiritual rebirth experience converted Saul of Tarsus by the Christ Spirit, he turned around, ceased persecuting Jesus’ Disciples, his name was changed to Paul to reflect his dramatic change, and he set about teaching and preaching Jesus Christ’s New Covenant doctrine – as related in Acts 22-1-10. Paul, the one Apostle called and chosen after Jesus’ Crucifixion and empowerment, testified that he had been forgiven his persecution of Jesus’ followers because he had done it while acting "ignorantly and in a state of unbelief" – 1 Tim. 1:13. His experience was patterned after that of Jesus, and became a model of what newly-converting Christians could thereafter expect to undergo. As biblically noted long before, "Those the Lord loves, He chastens and scourges every son He receives" – which is noted in the Book of Hebrews, 12:5-10, esp. verse 6; and note Acts 14:22.]

From Jesus’ solitary sojourn in the wilderness, he came back to the world with a system of religion entirely new. It followed the predictions of Prophet Jeremiah – found in Jer. 31:31-33 – differing from everything that had gone before, being spiritual and at the same time universal. Its plan was perfect from its inception: it needed not to “grow up” and take such a form as circumstances might dictate in the future. Like that of the Divine Mind itself, it was predestined to ultimately transform everything according to its unalterable purpose.

It was with reference to this fullness of knowledge by which He was exalted; not only above all the prophets who had preceded Him, but all those He used as instruments in propagating and establishing His religion. Thus it was said of Him, “God gives not the Spirit by measure unto Him,” and, “The law was given by Moses, but Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ.”

The Divine Plan being thus communicated to the mind of Jesus Christ the Son of GOD, it was necessary that He should have the power to carry it into effect. Having receives this Divine Commission, it needed to be authenticated. Although the plan was Divine, such was the ignorance and spiritual blindness of mankind that it is unlikely that the world would have recognized and embraced it as Divine, had it not been authenticated by miracles. Mankind wants not only truth, but authority to substantiate it – a fixed and reliable certainty that it is truth. If it is not embraced with sufficient confidence it will not fulfill its purpose.

Jesus returned from His forty days’ seclusion, possessed of supernatural wisdom – the result of His unique spiritual rebirth – which protected him against mistakes, and enabled him in all circumstances to say and do specifically what His present condition required. He knew, for instance, the circumstances of his death, the success of His religion, and the spiritual power with which He was to be exalted, He came with supernatural control over the order of nature, such as is most striking to the unsophisticated understandings of mankind, to persuade them of the connection of its possessor with God. His touch healed the sick, His Will changed the elements, his command stilled the tempest, and His voice raised the dead. But what was striking to those with whom He associated, He could read men’s most secret thoughts, and even tell them of the transactions of their past lives, and foresee what they were thereafter to do – as noted in Mt. 20:20-23; Jn. 1:45-51; and Jn. 21::18, 21-22.

Series to be Continued in Message 56 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Four - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

John the Baptist cautioned Jews not to think that they belonged to the Kingdom of God solely because they were descended from Abraham. He told them that “God is able to raise up children to Abraham from a source that at that time seemed as improbable to them as the stones beneath their feet – even from among the Gentiles, which at that time was unthinkable. John declared, “A discrimination is about to take place; not between the children of Abraham and the people of other nations, but between the good and the evil – even among Jews themselves!”

“The axe lies at the root of ALL trees! Every tree, therefore, which brings not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water, but He that comes after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear, and He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. He shall raise those who obey Him to a higher level of spiritual knowledge, perfection and power; and punish those who disobey Him with the severest suffering. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge his grain, and gather the wheat in His garner; but He will burn up the chaff with an unquenchable fire – as was also later inscribed in Mt. 3:1-12. The meaning of this was that the Messiah’s Kingdom was to embrace the good only, who were to be gathered into a separate community, while the evil were to be abandoned to the destruction which their own wicked disobedient course would inevitably bring upon them.

Jesus not only preached the Kingdom of God as a separate society, distinct from the Jewish nation, but He actually began to set it up. The baptismal rite which He instituted was not an idle and meaningless form; nor did it simply signify anyone’s profession of repentance necessary to prepare them for the kingdom of the Messiah – which at that time was imminently expected to appear – but it represented a readiness to believe in Him and obey Him whenever He should make Himself known.

Thus John’s baptism actually began what his words began to predict; to separate the righteous from the wicked unrepentant; to prepare the righteous for eternal life, while leaving the wicked to the consequence of their sins. He began to establish the Kingdom of God, the initiatory right of which was baptism – just as circumcision was the initiatory rite of God’s ancient church. Thus the Kingdom of God came not with observation – as reported in Deuteronomy 30:11-20 – while men were saying, “Lo here,” and Lo there,” the Kingdom of God was actually right in the midst of them; precisely as Prophet Jeremiah had foretold in Jer. 31:31-34: God’s Word was written right in their hearts and in their consciences.

But despite all of John’s knowledge of the nature of the Kingdom, and of Christianity; and even after his having baptized Jesus of Nazareth with his own hands, and receiving the divine testimony of which he had been shown; so possessed was he with the Jewish beliefs and prejudices infused into him of the splendor and power of the Messiah, that he felt the need to confirm what appeared to be apparent to him, and sent two of his own disciples to Jesus to inquire if He was actually the Messiah who had for so long been expected.

Jesus sent them back, bidding them to tell all they had seen and heard, thereby leaving John and his disciples to form their own judgment. One of the apparent reasons for John’s lingering doubts is found in a comment attributed to Jesus: “Blessed is he whoever is not offended in me: who does not consider the lowliness of my appearance compatible with the loftiness of my pretensions.”

John the Baptist was a good and holy man, who lived just long enough to see the rising twilight of the new dispensation for which he had been sent to prepare the way. He fell victim and to the intrigues and revenge of a wicked woman – Herodias, the wife of one of the sons of Herod the Great. She had accompanied him, her husband, to Rome, and there became acquainted with Herod the Tetrarch of Perca. After her return to Judea, she abandoned her husband, and with her daughter, Salome, went to live with Herod, in open defiance of the laws of God and man.

John the Baptist, the intrepid prophet of righteousness, reproved such flagrant iniquity in high places, and said to the royal transgressor, “It is not for you to have her!” For this bold testimony on behalf of righteousness and against evil-doings, he was consigned to the Castle Machaerus, on the confines of Palestine and Arabia. But the sleepless revenge of Herodias followed him there, and he died as a well known martyr to the truth. Thus perished John the Baptist, the morning star of Christianity, and his dying eyes caught scarcely a glimpse of the glory that was revealed.

Series to be Continued in Message 55 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Three - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

It appears that John the Baptist had no particular individual in mind when he commenced his mission, but was informed by God, who had sent him, to preach repentance, and that he should point out the manifestation of the Messiah by way of some miraculous appearance. He had apparently in some way known the Baptist before as a man of great piety and excellence, for when Jesus came to him to be baptized, John declared, “I have need to be baptized of thee! and comes thou unto me?” But as to the Messiah, he had no knowledge about Him, for he testifies, “I knew him not” – that is, as the Messiah – “but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said to me: upon whom you shall see the Spirit descending and remaining on Him, the same is He that shall baptize with the Holy Ghost.”

John asssembled around him a company of disciples whom he instructed in the mysteries of religion, and many of them apparently remained with him after he was cast into prison, until he was beheaded by Herod. It is reasonable to conclude that his teaching foreshadowed, although imperfectly, the general system of Christianity that followed. Jesus said of John the Baptist, “Among them born of women, there has not a greater arisen than John the Baptist – which opens the door to understanding that John had before been the great Prophet Elijah. John’s teachings bear a strong resemblance to the early discourses of Jesus Christ’s, such as: “And the people said unto him, ‘What shall we do then?’ and he answered and said unto them, ‘He that has two coats, let him impart one unto him that has none; and he that has meat, let him do likewise.’” On another occasion, the tax gatherers came to be baptized, and said to Him, “Master, what shall we do? And He replied, “Exact no more then is appointed of you.” And the soldiers likewise demanded of Him, asking “and what shall we do?” And He told them, “Do violence to no man, neither accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.”

That John preached the essential doctrines of Christianity would appear from what we read: “And a certain Jew named Apollos, born in Alexandria, an eloquent man and well versed in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in the way of the Lord, and, being fervent in Spirit, he spoke and taught diligently in the things of the Lord, but knowing only the baptism of John. And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue, where Aquilla and Priscilla heard him, and called him unto them and expounded the way of the Lord more perfectly.” In the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Acts it was written: “And it came to pass that while Apollo was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper coasts, came to Ephesus, and, finding certain disciples, said to them, “Have you received the Holy Ghost since you have believed?” And they replied, “We have not so much as heard whether there actually is any Holy Ghost!” And Paul said unto them, “Unto what, then, are you baptized? And they replied, “Unto John’s baptism.” Now, here are two cases in which those who had heard nothing but the doctrines of John are said to have been Christians, to have been taught the truths of the Lord, and have been disciples. This illustrates that those who had followed John the Baptist’s teachings and doctrines, after Jesus’ Ascension, did not receive the Holy Ghost’s cleansing by spiritual rebirth. It was only after they learned of Jesus’ doctrines that such a “saving experience” – of the kind noted in Acts 8:14-17 – came about. Apostle Peter reached the understanding that water baptism was no longer necessary after Jesus’ spiritual empowerment, it having been superceded by Christ’s Spirit Baptism – as illustrated in events recorded in Acts Chapters Ten and Eleven.

It follows, then, that John the Baptist taught the essential preparatory truths of Christianity. Because the object of the Gospels was to record the teaching of Jesus, that of John is passed over in a comparatively cursory manner. But, that John taught often and much – as well as prophesied the coming of the Messiah, we have every reason to believe. His disciples, however, mingled some of the old forms with their new doctrines, for they fasted often: an observance which Jesus declared, “Agreed no better with the new religion He taught than a piece of old cloth with a new garment; or new wine with old bottles” – as noted in Mt. 9:16-17; Mk. 2:21-22; and Lk. 5:36-39.

The mind of John the Baptist furnishes a remarkable example – which we often meet with – of partial divine illumination – the clearest knowledge on some points and absolute ignorance on others. By the light of inspiration he foreshadowed in a few words the fundamental concept of the kingdom of heaven. He foretold its approach and showed it to be something entirely different from the expectations of Jews, as it had been handed down from remote ages. Yet as to its details, he seems to have been only vaguely aware: he appears to have had no certain knowledge that Jesus was in fact the Messiah; even though he baptized Him and received the heavenly sign of which Jews had been forewarned.

One truth which he announced bears evident marks of supernatural origin, because it contradicted the conceptions and prejudices of the age. This was that the Messiah and His Kingdom were not to be “national” – not to belong as a matter of right and exclusion, to the posterity of Abraham alone. There is a maxim – as common as the letters in the alphabet – in the writings of the rabbis, “There is a part for all Israel in the world to come” – that is, in the Kingdom of the Messiah, merely because of their lineal descent from Abraham. There was more. That it was to be a kingdom selected from not only Israel, but also from other nations – a new community by no means co-extensive with the seed of Abraham – they had not the slightest idea or understanding.

As above noted, Apostle Paul explained that to be one of Christ’s was to be one of Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise given to Abraham: and thereby heirs of that promise which joined Jews to the Gentiles in a spiritual way that too often goes unnoticed. Paul specifically explained that relationship to Galatians in Chapter Three, verses 6 to 29.

That it was designed to be a moral and spiritual kingdom was far from the Jewish conception in John the Baptist’s time, but he taught: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. Bring forth, therefore, fruits worthy of repentance. And say not , “We have Abraham for our father, for God is able from these stones to raise up children from Abraham.”

Series to be Continued in Message 54 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-Two - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[ Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

Josephus speaks generally about the troubles of these times, without specifying their causes. And now Judea was full of robberies, and as the several companies of seditious would light upon anyone to head them, he was created a king immediately to lead them: he was created a king immediately to head them up to do mischief to the public. This was exactly the state of the country during the ministry of Jesus; which explains his caution in proclaiming himself the Messiah, as well as His withdrawal as soon as the multitude collected about Him and manifested any tendency to sedition or disturbance. It is recorded of Him, that after the Miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, and the declaration made concerning Him: “This is of a truth that prophet which should come into the world.” When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take Him by force and make Him a king, he departed again into the mountain alone.

In another similar situation, when He had healed a man at the pool of Bethesda, “And he that was healed wist not it was; for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place.”

Such being the expectation of the Jews, as we learn from profane history, a man of singular abits and appearance began to preach in a retired part of Judea, where there were but few towns, declaring, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This man, John the Baptist, was of the sacredotal tribe – that is, born in the tribe of Levi, as noted in Lk. 1:15 – and he had been consecrated to God from his infancy by the vow of the Nazarite. His habits and dress were those of a hermit, his food such as he could pick up in the fields and woods John was literally a voice of one calling in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God!”

John professed to have been moved by divine impulse to proclaim the imminent appearance of the Messiah. A man of such singular appearance, bearing such an important message, produced a great sensation, and excited the strongest curiosity. Crowds from all parts of Judea flocked to see and hear him. Some believed him to be the Messiah, and his fame soon reached Jerusalem with the result that the Jewish authorities send a deputation of priests and Levites to inquire who he actually was – as Apostle John noted in 1:19-23. John conceded that he was not the Messiah, but had been sent to introduce him, saying, “I came to point him out to Israel.” This was of great importance because Jews were watching events closely to determine who their Messiah was to be, and when He would appear.

The true reason for the Baptist’s appearance – his being raised up by Divine Providence – was doubtless to prepare the Jewish mind for the great message from God which they were about to receive; to reshape their ideas from the many traditions which had grown up through the years, to help them convert into a spiritual condition in which they would be able and willing to accept the new dispensation that the Messiah was about to establish. As Jeremiah had foretold: there was to be New Covenant – not according to the covenant God had made with Israel when He had brought His chosen people out of Egypt. It was to be a spiritual covenant in which He would put the law right in their inward parts – as God had foretold to and through His Prophet Jeremiah, in Jer. 31:31-34.

Apostle Paul, after having been spiritually quickened on the Damascus Road by the Spirit of the Risen Christ – as described in Acts Chapters 9,22, and 26 – declared to the Galatians that since Christ’s empowerment, a man is not justified by the works of the law of Moses, but by faith in Jesus Christ – Gal. 2:16. Paul explained that the blessing of Abraham came to the Gentiles through Jess Christ, that they might receive the promise of the Spirit through Faith. That the promises were made to Abraham and his seed, and that the law of Moses, four hundred and thirty years after God made the promise to Abraham, could not make that promise of no effect.

Paul explained that by the works of the law no man should be justified – but rather justification comes through faith and belief in Jesus Christ, but that those who are His must not be found to be sinners – Gal. 2:16-17 – that before faith came we were kept under the law, thereby shut up in the law unto the Faith which was afterward revealed. Paul explains that the law was, in effect, our spiritual school-master to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith…and that now those who have baptized to “put on Christ” are the children of God, as noted in Gal. 3:23-27. And, Paul explained: since then “There is neither Jew nor Greek, nor bond nor free, not male nor female, FOR ALL ARE ONE IN CHRIST JESUS – if ye be Christ’s, ye are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise God gave to and through him!

The effect of John the Baptist’s preaching was precisely what Providence intended. He produced a strong impression upon the public mind, and though he wrought no miracle, he was considered to be a prophet. He presented a strong contrast – probably by design – to the pretenders to divine mission who appeared at about the same time. It was on this account that the multitudes which gathered about him created no uneasiness in the public authorities. A man like John, who clothed himself in such course attire a country where the higher classes were studious of ornament, and all who had any pretensions to official dignity were distinguished by gorgeous apparel, would naturally escape all suspicion of political ambition.

A religious teacher evidently sincere and pious, and withal free from fanaticism and enthusiasm, especially after the cessation of prophecy for four hundred years! would necessarily produce a great impression. He must have recalled to the minds of his countrymen the days when Elijah – in like simplicity and grave austerity – as disclosed in 2 Kings 1:7-8 and Mt. 3:1-4 – stood up as a prophet of God, and the champion of religion. Some, indeed, mistook John to be Elijah risen from the dead, who, their traditions affirmed, was to come to anoint and inaugurate the Messiah. It was written that John the Baptist had lived before as Elijah, “If they would receive it” – Mt. 11:7-15, and see Mt. 17:12-13; Mk. 9:11-13; Lk. 1:15-17. Not many were prepared to receive such a startling message in that early time.

Series to be Continued in Message 53 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Fifty-One - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

CONTINUING HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

One concept of the Kingdom of the Messiah prophesied to come, projected in Psalm 2:9-12, was the he was not only to reign over the Jews – who were faithfully waiting for His manifestation in flesh – but who was to destroy all other nations: “Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers tale counsel together against the Lord God and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from Us. He that sits in the heaven shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall HE speak to them in HIS wrath, and vex them in HIS sore displeasure. Yet I have set MY king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will, says the Son, declare the decree; the Lord God has said unto me, ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of ME and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’”

It is noteworthy that Hannah, the extremely spiritual psychic daughter of Prophet Samuel, had in her time already prophesied this occurrence. as recorded in 1 Sam. 2:2,10; as had David, in Psalm 110: 1-4-6. They foresaw it as being accomplished by one who would “descend from heaven.” And David had added that this would be a “Second Lord, who was his, David’s Lord, who was to descend from the “higher Lord’s” right side. In order to accomplish this, it was first necessary the this elevated Prophet would walk on the earth as Moses had foretold – to fulfill predictions which would terminate the spiritual supremacy of the lineage of Judah – as clearly and specifically projected in Genesis 49:10. And this Prophet was to speak the Words of God the Father so that His people would gather around Him. The Messianic Son of God is to return – subsequent to His flesh appearance as Jesus – when He returns in the cloud in which He appeared over Israel during the Exodus; but at the time of Deliverance; as spelled out in Lk. 24:21-28; Acts 1:8-11; and in Jn 14:1-4.

These above Psalm Two verses were interpreted almost universally by the Jews to refer the Messiah; and even more readily as the title “Anointed” is translated in the Septuagint Christos, so that there it reads, “Against the Lord and against His Christ” – as seen in Rev. 12:10. The Messiah was, therefore, to reign on Mount Zion, one of the mountains on which Jerusalem was built, to reign over the Jews, and by God’s assistance, subdue the heathen by war and conquest – to break them in pieces with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces as if they were a potter’s vessel. Such was the kingdom which the great majority of Jews expected their Messiah to set up.

The phrase “kingdom of heaven” is extracted from the second chapter of the Book of Daniel. After foretelling that there were to arise four great monarchies – the Babylonian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman, the last of which should be a kingdom of iron – he goes on to foretell: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.

Another passage foretells, “I saw in the night a vision, and behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds in heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before Him. And there was given unto Him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom one which shall not be destroyed – as Daniel foretold in Daniel 7:-14, 25-27.

From this last passage was probably derived the opinion, once commonly held, that the Messiah would never die. Jesus was quoted to have declared on one occasion: “And if I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me.” The people reportedly answered Him, “We have heard out of the law that Christ abides forever; and how, sayeth thou the Son of man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of man?”

The new dispensation under the figure of a kingdom was the subject of the commencing petition of one of the chief prayers recited in the Synagogues from Sabbath to Sabbath, and had been so for ages. There was a time specified in the Book of Daniel of seventy weeks, which was to intervene between the building of the second temple – by Zerubbabel and Joshua son of Josedech after the Exile – and the times of the Messiah , which, interpreted according to the prophetic style, a day for a year, would project His appearance somewhere near the time when John the Baptist began to preach – as noted in Daniel 9:23-27.

So prevalent had this expectation become that it had spread beyond the holy land. Tacitus, a historian who wrote in Italy, records that among many there was a persuasion that in the ancient books of the priesthood it was written that at this precise time the East should become mighty, and that those issuing from Judea should rule the world. Suetonius, another Latin historian, writes: “In the East an ancient and constant opinion prevailed that it was fated that there should issue at this time from Judea, those who should obtain universal dominion.”

This constant expectation of the Jews had already caused no little political disturbance. It was this proud anticipation of universal conquest which made them so restive under the government of the Romans. That they were destined to reign over the world – and whose Messianic King was to have the heathen for His inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession, and who was to break them with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel, not to mention that they should be in vassalage to a foreign power, was more than they could bear.

Josephus relates that about the time of the birth of Jesus, when Cyrenius was sent to take a census of Judea, that Judas, a native of Gamala in Galileee, rose up and resisted the Roman commissioner, and raised a great rebellion. He is mentioned likewise by Gamaliel in his speech before the Jewish Sanhedrim, when Jesus’ Apostles were brought before them for preaching Jesus as the Messiah, immediately after His Ascension: “After this man, rose up Judas of Galilee, in the days of taxing, and drew away much people after him; he also perished, and all, as many as obeyed him, were dispersed..”

Series to be Continued in Message 52 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.5

Message Fifty - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

HILLEL’S SEVENTH LETTER

The Expectation Of The Jews

Not only was the expectation of a remarkable personage on the earth universally prevalent among Jews at the time of the appearance of Jesus Christ, but the phraseology was already in use which designated what He was to be, and what He was to accomplish. At that time there was a Messianic phraseology derived from different portions of the Old Testament which embodied all their anticipations. Whatever inspiration necessarily accompanied the first composition of these prophecies, there was evidently none need in their interpretation.

This much was absolutely certain: a Messiah was predestined to manifest in flesh on the earth, and there was to be a new dispensation, although nobody knew ahead of time precisely what it was to be. But it had been clearly and unmistakably foretold in the writings of Prophet Jeremiah at Jer. 31-31-34; and in the work of the writer to the Hebrews, in Chapter Eight. These writings caused religious and spiritually-inclined minds to set to work to try to understand what had been predetermined to transpire. There were many advance notions in this respect, and each individual formed his own notions about whatever passage of the Old Testament he thought would apply to this remarkable coming event, as well as would accurately describe him and his office.

Not only the imagination, but the passions were invoked in the formation of the personal expectations of each individual who interpreted what the Holy Scriptures foretold. Certain pious individuals thought of him as a religious reformer, so that the new state of things to come would be a condition of higher religious perfection. Rabbis interpreted the Messiah’s appearance according to Jeremiah’s startling prophecy: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not according to the covenant I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it on their hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his his neighbor, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

This seemed to be the expectation entertained by the Samaritans: if the woman with whom Jesus talked at the well of Jacob – as noted in Jn. 3:4-30 – is to be considered as voicing the sentiments of the nation in general. The universal expectation seems to have been that this remarkable individual was to be a prophet like unto Moses, but even greater. In accordance with this sentiment, Apostle Peter, in one of his discourses – after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – cites a particular prophesy of Moses, as applying to Jesus of Nazareth: “A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall you hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that every soul which shall not hear that prophet shall be destroyed from among the people” – an admonishment written into the Book of Deuteronomy at 18:15, 18-22. These were sentiments of those who had seen Jesus’ miracle of feeding the five thousand with but a few loaves and fishes: which bore such a compelling resemblance to the feeding of the Israelites in the desert. Then those men – when they had seen the miracle which Jesus accomplished, exclaimed: “This is in truth that prophet foretold to come into the world!”

Another and much larger class gave the Messianic prophecies a more worldly meaning: that the great personage whose coming they shortly expected was to be a king, but greater than any who sat on the Jewish throne. It was evidently this expectation that Jesus’ Disciples relied upon through his entire ministry. And even after his Resurrection, they seemed for a while to have entertained the same hope. One of the first questions they asked him after he arose was; as noted in the Book of Acts at 1:6-8; “Wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And at the Last Supper they disputed which of them should be the greatest – that is, who should be ranked highest in the new kingdom that he was expected to establish.

It was with this idea that he was hailed by the multitude into Jerusalem with the shout, “Hosanna to the son of David.” This was the idea that Nathaniel intended to express when he said – upon receiving the evidence that he was a prophet, as noted in John 1:45-51: “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou are the king of Israel!” That it was his temporal character to which Nathaniel here referred, we have sufficient evidence in the information that directed his attention to Jesus: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write; Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph!” The part of the old Testament from which this title and expectation were taken was principally the second Psalm. The person described in this poem is represented as exalted by God to be a king on Mt. Zion in Judea. The surrounding heathen are represented as being enraged. But God has nevertheless determined that He shall reign; and, as a king sets his own son upon his throne while he yet lives, so has God, as Supreme King of Israel, exalted this Son to share His authority, and pledges His own power to support His Throne: a principle established in Psalms 2:6-1).

Series to be Continued in Message 51 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Nine - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and Others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third; Including all of Hillel’s Sixth Letter.

HILLEL’S SIXTH LETTER

The aim of all religion as a positive institution is to enlighten the understanding, and cultivate the devotion of its adherents. The mind must think and the heart must worship. So it must be throughout life. The cares of the world are continually effacing religious impressions, and truths once clearly seen are vividaly felt by lapses of time, wax dim and lose the influence of present material realities. The soul, moreover, feels the want of support and guidance of religion our daily life: every day it experiences the need to communicate with God, even though the strength of that desire varies from one human being to another. Such communications are as necessary to the soul as food is to the flesh body. All sound religions thus have their sacred rites and practices by which the heart reaches toward God and He communicates with the heart according to one’s spiritual state. Thus all religions have some mode of training the mind – which is the spiritual builder – to move the affections so they take hold of the memory and perpetuate themselves. This is derived from man’s innate consciousness. If God should extinguish all the lights of the world and blind every human eyes, religions would still remain in His Light.

But these outward institutions must all be adapted to the contemporary condition of man. Religion can only use those instruments which are furnished to hand. In the absence of writing, it must use ceremonies and forms that have a conventional meaning, and thus come to be symbolic of certain specific truths. Our patriarchal religion consisted almost entirely of prayer and sacrifices. The Mosaic religion, which came after the invention of letters, added to prayer and sacrifices a written code of duty – a formal declaration of truths and principles which set the foundation of the whole institution.

The patriarchal element was still strong and predominant in all our Church, yet there was no express mode of religious instruction. This was enjoined in the heads of families: “And these words which I command you this day, thou shalt teach them to thy children, and shalt talk to them when thou sittest in thy house.” And as the written laws were scarce and hard to get, it was said: “And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand as frontlets between thine eyes, and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house and upon thy gates.” Then the Levites were to stand and declare with a loud voice: “Cursed be the man that makes any graven image!” and all the people shall hold up their hands and say, “Amen!” And thus he went through the whole law. Then at the annual meeting upon the mountains at the new moon, all the people met and held up their hands and called-out, “Amen!” Thus it is seen that devotion predominated over instruction; and cultivation of the heart was made more prominent than that of the understanding.

But in the Hebrew commonwealth, Church and State were closely amalgamated. The code of Moses prescribed a like religious and civil duty. The Levites, of course, were the judges and magistrates, as well as the religious teachers of the people. But as books were scarce, we find that in the third year of the reign of Jehoshaphat, that he sent princes and Levites to teach the people, and they took the book of the law and went through all the cities of Judea and taught the people the law of the Lord in the form in which it existed at that time.

This same process was carried out in all Jewish life. The tabernacle in the wilderness – and afterward in the holy land – was intended as a perpetual memorial of God, and a symbol of His Presence. It called the people from idolatry, and reminded them that their worship was to be directed to Jehovah alone. Its services, and those afterward of the temple, were perpetually renewed every morning and every evening, in order that no pious Israelite should ever feel that the duties of adoration and gratitude could be omitted for a single day. We have every reason to believe that the morning and evening sacrifice was to the religiously disposed an essential an aid to devotion through the many centuries of the continuance of that imposing rite.

Then if we transfer these ceremonies to the people, this godly house was the rallying point of our political power; the consecrated seat of our religion and the heart of our national affections. It was built by Solomon more than a thousand years ago. It was constructed on Mount Moriah, in the southeastern part of Jerusalem, and built solely for the purpose of worship. It consisted of four enclosures, one within another on three sides, but having a common wall on the fourth side. Only one of these was covered with a roof, in our meaning of the term, and that was the last or innermost enclosure – the holy of holies, containing the ark, the cherubim, and the mercy seat. The outer enclosure, into which people of all nations were permitted to enter, but they were not permitted to go further. Within this was the court of Israel, which again surrounded on three sides that of the priests, where was the great altar, upon which the daily sacrifice was offered morning and evening.

We Jews wonder how we could do without the sacred ordinances! They are as important to us as the light of the sun, or as food or water to drink. But they are all gone now – the city, the temple, the doctrine, the priest, the law, and the nation, are all gone. Is it so that God has tired of His own appointments? Or could it be that He sees a defect in His ways? or has He become dissatisfied with the covenant He made with our fathers and to their children? I write you these letters, dear countrymen, asking you to consider these matters and discover the cause of our abandonment. Is it the cause that sent our fathers into Egypt? or is it caused by the same thing that caused them to be sent into exile in Babylon?

We should look and find out the cause, so we may seek a remedy. Let us remember the morning and evening sacrifice, and turn our faces toward the holy temple and pray. Although it is no longer in existence in fact, it lives in each of our hearts, which we believe will always be so. Though we may be thousands of miles away and be sold into bondage and bound in chains, we will not and cannot forget our land, our religion, and our God. He is the God of Abraham, and still as merciful, and we believe He will yet keep His covenant made with our fathers. And so shall I abide.

Series to be Continued in Message 50 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS;

Hillel’s Seventh Letter.

Message Forty-Eight - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third, and Continuing with Hillel’s Fifth Letter.

The difference between religious beliefs paralleled differences between man’s advancing spiritual knowledge and divers opinions of longstanding. One is necessarily proposed with diffidence; the other with confidence, which no uninspired teacher can counterfeit. Those who knew best about these things among the heathen had no means of guiding developments. But mankind demands knowledge and understanding and the heart craves it. It is not the same with the multitude as it is with the philosophers: a matter of quiet contemplation. They must act as well as to think and to feel. The sentiments of the heart and soul demand expression expression and they will have, through the actions of the hands and through the words they speak. Occasions continually arose demanding immediate action. Some public calamity would bow down the hearts of thousands in ways that appeared to indicate the portentous wrath of superior powers needing to be supplicated and appeased; but one byproduct was the instigation of superstition and witchcraft. Who would contrive such rites? Not the wisest, of course, but people of great boldness and inventiveness – and especially those who acted out of fear of the unknown. Once established, proscriptions of various kinds took the place of reason, and habit consecrated that which was at first lacking in propriety.

Then again, religion has much to do with imagination. Most everything related to God is – as biblically noted in Heb. 11:3 – invisible. There is little of a concrete nature on which to fix our ideas, and in pure spirituality our imagination finds little of value to lay hold on. Still, it is impossible to keep our minds from conjuring up ideas of all spiritual kinds, and to altogether separate the idea of our corporeality from God.

How much more impossible, then, must it have been for the uninstructed heathen to understand spiritual truths, even when moved by the best of intentions? Therefore, there must have been vast diversities and great imperfections that developed in heathen worship – which we find to have been the fact. Certain of the existence of a God, yet uncertain of the mode of His existence, it was natural for the human mind to cogitate itself into a thousand vagaries and errors. It was natural that mankind should fancy that they had found God in those parts of the material universe where His attributes are most displayed. Hence, the most ancient species of idolatry is said to have been that which deified the remote heavenly bodies; the sun and moon and hosts of heaven.

The sun is perhaps the brightest emblem of God, except for the human soul – to many the mightiest instrument, the benignity of the Most High. He rises, and the shadows fall away. Joy, warmth and beauty meet him in the morning, and the shadows of night flee away. At his call, universal life arises, as it were, from universal darkness and death. The sun draws away the the curtains of darkness and bids man to come forth, and the face of nature is glad. When he hides his face it seems that all things mourn. When he hides his face from the western sky, darkness resumes her ancient dominion, and everything seems to be on hold, awaiting the return of the Light, The soul itself, deprived of its supporting sunlight, gradually loses its conscious energy and sinks into a profound repose.

What wonder, then, that in the native ignorance of mankind of the true nature of God, the wise should have worshiped the sun as the fittest emblem of God, and the ignorant to have worshiped it as God Himself. Such was probably the idolatry of the nations from among whom Abraham was called to worship of the Chaldeans and Egyptians. It is in the record of the Talmud that Abraham, when returning from the grotto in which he was born to the city of Babylon, gazed on a certain star, and said, “Behold, the universe!” But even as he gazed, the star sank away and disappeared; but Abraham felt that the Lord was unchangeable, and that he had been deceived. Then the full moon appeared, and he said, “This is our God! But the moon also withdrew, and he thought he had again been deceived. He devoted all the rest of the night to meditation, and at sunrise he stood before the gates of Babylon, gazed at a certain star, and said, “Behold, God the Lord of the universe.” But even as he gazed at it, the star also faded away, and Abraham was convinced that he had again been deceived. At sunrise he saw all the people prostrate before the rising sun, and exclaimed, “Thou surely are the creator and ruler of nations, but you, like the rest, have faded away, so the creator must be somewhere else.” How much more sublime and rational is the doctrine which he originated, and the sentiments that were afterward expressed by one of his followers, which revealed these orbs to be only manifestations of something far more glorious than they!

One great source of corruption was the priesthood. It seems natural that men would be chosen to conduct religious service. They become better acquainted with these rites than others, and become increasingly sacred by the power of association, which renders their ministration more satisfactory and more profitable to those on whose behalf they perform the offices.

A priesthood seemed to be so necessary, but there is nothing more dangerous to a nation than to have a priesthood governed by political parties of the nation, as was the practice of all nations except our own. Here the priest governed by the laws of Moses, and it was impossible for the priest or anyone else to change them. It is attributable to heathen priests that idolatry became os prevalent. Go down into Egypt, and you find men worshiping an ox. Cats and crocodiles occupy the place of the inferior gods, and are worshiped by the poor. Thus in all nations but our own, the dreadful state of idolatry prevails. The idolatry of Greece is no better – Athens contains many statues erected to imaginary gods. Her superstition is not only bigoted, but bloody, It was there that Socrates suffered death merely on suspicion of maintaining opinions subversive of popular faith.

Series to be Continued in Message 49 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Seven - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third, and Continuing with Hillel’s Fifth Letter.

HILLELS’S FIFTH LETTER

Man is made essentially human by the faculties of his mind, the emotions of his heart, and the incarnated spirit of the Lord, his Maker, which is an incremental permanent part of him. [Note: It is understood that when a flesh body expires after an incarnate earth experience, it undergoes a contemporary judgment (Heb. 9:27), designed to assess its spiritual state as of that time. It is then decided in higher dimensions what course that soul will follow from that point in its spiritual developmental pathway.]

One of the first and most spontaneous exercises of man’s reason is his investigation of cause and effect; and one of the first convictions developed in his mind is the truth that there cannot be any effect without a cause – even in cases so ambiguous and mysterious that they appear to be incomprehensible. The next is that the nature of the cause must correspond with the nature of the effect, and can certainly be known by it. This is true in the works of man. When viewing an exquisite painting it is impossible for us to doubt its having been the creation of intelligence. When Aristippus was cast up on a shore where there appeared to be no inhabitants, he wandered about until he came across some mathematical diagrams traced in the sand. “Courage!” he declared, “I see the finger of God pointing!” Men see in everything the traces of power and wisdom, and – if they are at all sensible – they cannot help but perceive the effects of superior power and wisdom therein. Actually, unbelief has not prevailed very much in the world; it is only a residual question as to what truth really is! Unbelief has been about as rare in the heathen as it is among those who have had a revelation. So much for abstract religious convictions.

Men are led to God by their moral nature and their seeking of knowledge and understanding.. On the first dawn of his faculties, man begins to experience certain moral perceptions. [Note: As Apostle Paul – after his spiritual enlightenment on the Damascus Road, disclosed to the Corinthians in 1 Cor. 2:9-14 – man is first a "natural man," un-spiritualized and devoid of a strong quickening force of God’s Holy Spirit until he receives it from the Son of God who, incarnate, was Jesus the Christ]. A spiritually- enlightened man finds that his moral nature resides not only in himself, but in others. It is a universal attribute of man; not a fortuitous endowment, but one given to man by his Creator as the law of His action. It can come from no other source. But the moral power in man is actually only the faculty to see them because they exist. God sees them as realities which he created in us. Our very consciousness of the power to choose between good and evil creates within us a sense of realization of, and the sense of responsibility to, the much higher dimensional being that made us – as noted in Heb. 5:12-14.

Connected with this idea of the existence of God – which seems to be necessary and universal – is that of the existence of a Providence, a super-intelligence, which not only made the world but oversees its government: knows its past, present and future, and – from a higher dimension of existence – observes not only all that is seen by mortal eyes, but likewise, all that passes through the human mind. It has been the general course of events that man has seen that vice is regarded by God with displeasure, and that He continues to punish it and limit those who commit it, and doubtless will continue to do so. The good man must always be the object of God’s approbation, and because He is infinite in His power, the good man expects to be proportionately rewarded as he moves along the Way God has made passable into higher dimensions. Such are the natural convictions of mankind, which result from the operation of his mind. Such also are the convictions of the heathen world. The great men of the old world, poets and philosophers, have in all ages entertained that opinion. They take for granted the existence of one superior being, and that all others, as inferior beings, are responsible to Him. This is not only the last and highest conclusion of human intellect, but likewise the consenting voice of even the most ancient traditions.

But, even in the best minds, the subject has been surrounded with great doubt and difficulties. God Himself is not an object of such questions. It is therefore in vain for the human mind to attempt to form an idea of the mode of His existence. Not being then, a matter of senses or of demonstration, the wisest of men – though he might arrive at some form of the truth, could not be absolutely certain that it was the truth. Wanting certainty himself, he could hardly impart certainty to others! He could not propagate his own doctrine with certainty.

The wisest of men, therefore, have wanted the authority which was requisite for the propagation of truth. So they have settled for certainty for themselves and authority for others. Now, certainty and authority are the very things necessary to make a religion powerful in the world. While religion was in the hands of philosophers – that is, the thinkers – it effected next to nothing insofar as guiding and directing mankind, because it remained a matter of opinion: merely a matter of opinion – only a dim and hopeful probability. Each man felt he had as good a right to his opinion as another; which weakened the authority and disparate opinions of each. Any religion that is able to take hold of faith and control the conduct of mankind, must have certainty and authority. And neither of these can be obtained without revelation, inspiration, and miracles.

Had Moses had not received Divine aid by way of inspiration and miracles, he would not have been able to accomplish what he did in the world. The doctrines he espoused would have rested on his own reason, and his precepts upon his own personal character, knowledge and influence. Another man of equal, but different, wisdom and the same weight of character, might have overthrown or blotted out what Moses had built up.

Besides, his manner would undoubtedly have been different. And, no man can inspire confidence in others who lacks confidence in himself. It follows that no man in high religious matters can have full confidence in himself, without conscious divine inspiration. It was reasonable, therefore, for Moses – when sent by God into Egypt to bring out his enslaved brethren, to demand miraculous credentials, without which he could neither have brought them out, nor established among them a religion he was commissioned to teach.. This distinction was perceived by the people, even though the reason upon which it was founded laid far beyond their comprehension.

Series to be Continued in Message 48 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Five - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

Continuing The Third of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third, And Commencing Hillel’s Fourth Letter.

This previously-related amazing feat by ten thousand Greeks, filled the world with their fame, and perhaps more than anything else convinced the Greeks that, as few as they were, they nevertheless held the destiny of Asia in their hands. It was not until forty years later – when all Greece had been subjected to Phillip, King of Macedonia – that the nation turned its attention toward conquest of the East. Philip had elected himself general-in-chief of all the Greeks for the prosecution of the war with their ancient enemies, the Persians. Just at the moment when the conqueror of Greece was contemplating an assault upon the Persian Empire, he fell by the hand of an assassin, leaving his kingdom to his son Alexander, who was at that time a youth of twenty. This happened three hundred and eighty years before the previously described events, and may be considered one of the great epochs of the world.

HILLEL’S FOURTH LETTER

Alexander, by his personal endowments as conqueror and statesman, did more in twelve years to affect the future condition of the world than any uninspired man who has ever lived. He was in no respect better than his modern rivals, and was animated by no better motive than personal ambition. In the hands of God, however, he became an instrument of lasting good to mankind. Endowed with an intellect of unusual power and comprehension, he received a thorough education from one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. At the age of eighteen he began to mingle affairs of state with study, and became a soldier as well as a scholar. At the age of twenty, when summoned to assume the reins of empire – the sovereign, in fact of the Greeks – he stood before the world a perfect representative of his nation.

He combined their genius and learning with their valor and conduct, and, entering Asia with the sword in one hand, and the poems of Homer in the other, he became the armed leader of Grecian learning, art, and civilization. Wherever he went, Greece went with him. His conquests were not so much those of Macedonian arms as of Grecian letters. Wherever he went, he carried with him the genius of Homer, the sublime soul of Plato, and the practical wisdom of Socrates; and not only monarchies sprung up in his wake, but schools of philosophy and academies of learning.

Entering Asia with an army of thirty-five thousand men, in the brief space of twelve years he made himself master of the whole Persian Empire, and of many nations which had never been subjected to the Persian yoke. He carried the Grecian language and manners to the Indus, and subjected to his power nearly as large a portion of the human race as existed at that time.

His first battle gave him Asia Minor. The second, all of Syria to the Euphrates, Egypt – the whole valley of the Nile – surrendered without striking a blow. The third great battle, on the banks of Euphrates, opened to him the whole of the Asiatic planes to the mountains which bordered the lands of the Scythian tribes. Wherever he advanced, the Greek language and literature took up their abode, and every city this side of the Euphrates in a few ages became the residence of the Greek philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and historians, until the whole circuitous shore of the Mediterranean became almost as Grecian as Greece herself.

Our beloved Palestine, of course, came under his sway, and the influence of his career on the fortunes of us Jews was more decisive, perhaps, than upon any other nation, for it was his conquest alone which introduced the Greek language in our holy land. And so much do the most important events turn on the slightest causes, that on the chances of one life – almost daily exposed to destruction by the dangers of war – depended the issue whether the records of the holy oracles would ever be sent to the perishing world through this beautiful language.

It has been declared that when the mighty warrior and statesman, Alexander, was approaching Jerusalem, Judea – our high priest at that time – came out to meet him in solemn procession. Alexander was so struck by his appearance that he not only spared the city, but granted to us Jews many favors that he did not show to others. He gave for this the reason that he had seen this same man in a dream before he left Macedonia, and that he had assured him of his conquest of the Persian empire.

From Syria he passed on to Egypt, and his conquest of that country had a greater influence upon the future condition of our nation than the conquest of Judah itself. This was because on his return from Ethiopia he sailed down the western branch of the Nile, and with the instinct of genius, fixed upon the site of a city between the lake Mareotis and the sea, which he called after his own name. It sprung up immediately to be one of the most magnificent cities of the world, reigning as a sort of queen of the East – as the mart of commerce and the seat of wealth.

We Jews were invited by the most liberal offers to populate this city. A large colony was formed, where only the Greek language was used. Hence it became necessary to have our scriptures translated into Greek, or we would have lost our knowledge of them altogether. It is said on good authority that the occasion of translating the Scriptures into the Greek language, it was the desire of Ptolemy Philadelphus to have a copy preserved in the Alexandrian Library, which was begun not long after his death. However that might be, we know that such a version was made, which is now the standard of the world. It was made about three hundred years ago, and by this translation our theology has gone to the entire world. Thus it becomes clear that Divine Providence works the nations of earth like a machine!

Another important factor perceived in God’s Providence is the rising of the Roman Empire. While all these events were transpiring in the East, a nation was rising into notice in the south of Italy, which was destined to exert even more extensive influence upon the world by her arms than Greece did by her learning.

Series to be Continued in Message 46 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Five - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

Continuing The Third of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews and others, Written by Historian Hillel the Third, And Commencing Hillel’s Fourth Letter.

This previously-related amazing feat by ten thousand Greeks, filled the world with their fame, and perhaps more than anything else convinced the Greeks that, as few as they were, they nevertheless held the destiny of Asia in their hands. It was not until forty years later – when all Greece had been subjected to Phillip, King of Macedonia – that the nation turned its attention toward conquest of the East. Philip had elected himself general-in-chief of all the Greeks for the prosecution of the war with their ancient enemies, the Persians. Just at the moment when the conqueror of Greece was contemplating an assault upon the Persian Empire, he fell by the hand of an assassin, leaving his kingdom to his son Alexander, who was at that time a youth of twenty. This happened three hundred and eighty years before the previously described events, and may be considered one of the great epochs of the world.

HILLEL’S FOURTH LETTER

Alexander, by his personal endowments as conqueror and statesman, did more in twelve years to affect the future condition of the world than any uninspired man who has ever lived. He was in no respect better than his modern rivals, and was animated by no better motive than personal ambition. In the hands of God, however, he became an instrument of lasting good to mankind. Endowed with an intellect of unusual power and comprehension, he received a thorough education from one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. At the age of eighteen he began to mingle affairs of state with study, and became a soldier as well as a scholar. At the age of twenty, when summoned to assume the reins of empire – the sovereign, in fact of the Greeks – he stood before the world a perfect representative of his nation.

He combined their genius and learning with their valor and conduct, and, entering Asia with the sword in one hand, and the poems of Homer in the other, he became the armed leader of Grecian learning, art, and civilization. Wherever he went, Greece went with him. His conquests were not so much those of Macedonian arms as of Grecian letters. Wherever he went, he carried with him the genius of Homer, the sublime soul of Plato, and the practical wisdom of Socrates; and not only monarchies sprung up in his wake, but schools of philosophy and academies of learning.

Entering Asia with an army of thirty-five thousand men, in the brief space of twelve years he made himself master of the whole Persian Empire, and of many nations which had never been subjected to the Persian yoke. He carried the Grecian language and manners to the Indus, and subjected to his power nearly as large a portion of the human race as existed at that time.

His first battle gave him Asia Minor. The second, all of Syria to the Euphrates, Egypt – the whole valley of the Nile – surrendered without striking a blow. The third great battle, on the banks of Euphrates, opened to him the whole of the Asiatic planes to the mountains which bordered the lands of the Scythian tribes. Wherever he advanced, the Greek language and literature took up their abode, and every city this side of the Euphrates in a few ages became the residence of the Greek philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and historians, until the whole circuitous shore of the Mediterranean became almost as Grecian as Greece herself.

Our beloved Palestine, of course, came under his sway, and the influence of his career on the fortunes of us Jews was more decisive, perhaps, than upon any other nation, for it was his conquest alone which introduced the Greek language in our holy land. And so much do the most important events turn on the slightest causes, that on the chances of one life – almost daily exposed to destruction by the dangers of war – depended the issue whether the records of the holy oracles would ever be sent to the perishing world through this beautiful language.

It has been declared that when the mighty warrior and statesman, Alexander, was approaching Jerusalem, Judea – our high priest at that time – came out to meet him in solemn procession. Alexander was so struck by his appearance that he not only spared the city, but granted to us Jews many favors that he did not show to others. He gave for this the reason that he had seen this same man in a dream before he left Macedonia, and that he had assured him of his conquest of the Persian empire.

From Syria he passed on to Egypt, and his conquest of that country had a greater influence upon the future condition of our nation than the conquest of Judah itself. This was because on his return from Ethiopia he sailed down the western branch of the Nile, and with the instinct of genius, fixed upon the site of a city between the lake Mareotis and the sea, which he called after his own name. It sprung up immediately to be one of the most magnificent cities of the world, reigning as a sort of queen of the East – as the mart of commerce and the seat of wealth.

We Jews were invited by the most liberal offers to populate this city. A large colony was formed, where only the Greek language was used. Hence it became necessary to have our scriptures translated into Greek, or we would have lost our knowledge of them altogether. It is said on good authority that the occasion of translating the Scriptures into the Greek language, it was the desire of Ptolemy Philadelphus to have a copy preserved in the Alexandrian Library, which was begun not long after his death. However that might be, we know that such a version was made, which is now the standard of the world. It was made about three hundred years ago, and by this translation our theology has gone to the entire world. Thus it becomes clear that Divine Providence works the nations of earth like a machine!

Another important factor perceived in God’s Providence is the rising of the Roman Empire. While all these events were transpiring in the East, a nation was rising into notice in the south of Italy, which was destined to exert even more extensive influence upon the world by her arms than Greece did by her learning.

Series to be Continued in Message 46 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Four - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

Continuing The Third of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

We naturally turn our eyes toward Greece, the devoted object of all this expense. There she lies, with her beautiful island laved by the crystal waters of the Aegean Sea. There is Athens, with her exquisite arts, her literature, and her science, with her constellations of genius just ready to burst upon the world. There was Sparta, less cultivated, but the bulwark of Grecian independence. There was Lonidas, with his three hundred. There, in a little peninsula, lay the intellectual hope of the world – the germ of free government forever and ever.

Is this brave and gallant people to be crushed at a single blow? Shall the Persian banners float on the hills of subjugated Greece? Is it to announced in Susa that order reigns in Attica? Is Asiatic despotism destined to overwhelm, in one long night of oppression, the very dawn of human greatness? In that contest, literature had her stake. The very existence of these men depended on the issue of this vast enterprise, whose works have been the study and delight of all succeeding time – that whole galaxy of genius whose clustering radiance has since encircled the earth. Standing now and gazing back upon this epoch of history, we are caused to tremble, for all these were nations given to idolatry!

Everywhere are ceremonies, temples, priests; but both priests and people, the noble and the base, the learned and the simple, all alike grope in Cimmerian darkness as to the knowledge of the true God. There is but one exception to this, in our time, in all the world – the temple in Jerusalem.

We turn our eyes eastward to Palestine, and there we see the temple of the true God just rising from the ruin of seventy years’ desolation. Its builders, a feeble company, have just returned from a long captivity. The very language in which their holy oracles were written has become obsolete. Their speech is now Chaldean, and their religious teachers are obliged from Sabbath to Sabbath to interpret from a dead language for the records of their faith. This may answer for a small territory, and for a feeble few, as existed at that time, but whole world needs light; and how shall the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man unite to carry God’s wisdom around the world so that all may know the living and true God?! If Xerxes prevails, this can never be. Forbid it, intellect! Arise, Oh God, and let thine enemies be scattered, and those that rise up against the liberties of Thy people be driven off like the chaff which the wind drives away.

So, Xerxes did not prevail; the soil of Palestine would not bear the tread of a foe to the religion of the true God. The Jewish nature, breathing the invigorating air of freedom – disciplined by science and animated by enlightened patriotism, grows up to a strength, a firmness and courage which hosts of slaves can never subdue; and by which the tenfold cord of oppression is rent asunder like the bands that bound the limbs of Samson!

This army, though it was raised up by Xerxes, is actually under the command of the God of heaven: it cannot, it must not, it shall not conquer. It is to teach the Greeks that they are masters of the world. It invites them to roll back the tide of conquest on Asia, and carry Grecian banners, arts, science, and language into the East. They shall penetrate to our holy land; into their language our holy oracles shall be translated; in their language shall be recorded the words of eternal life, and laden with the priceless treasure that language shall come back to Palestine, bearing light and truth and salvation to nations and to generations yet unborn.

This diffusion of the Greek language took place by means of conquest. Although the action was man’s, the Holy Scripture tells us – in Daniel 10:12-13 – that it was caused to enter into the Divine Plan of Providence, it being a subject of prophecy! In a vision seen by Daniel, in Section 7, in the first year of Darius Hystaspes, it is written: “Behold, there shall stand up three kings in Persia, and the fourth shall be far richer than them all; and by his strength and through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia.”

Of this gigantic assault of Xerxes against Greece I have given my account in my last letter. After the retreat of Xerxes into Asia, there was no attempt of the Greeks to make reprisals for many years. Unfortunately they were divided among themselves, and exhausted their energies in mutual quarrels. But the ages immediately preceding the Persian invasion were the most wonderful in intellectual development the world has ever seen. More great minds were produced within that century than in any other within recorded history.

Providence seems to have restrained that wonderful nation until her intellectual treasure-house was full, and then to have sent her forth conquering – not to destroy, but to enrich the inhabitants in the lands she overflowed; not to extinguish civilization by brute barbarism, but to carry intellectual light to those who at that time sat in ignorance and darkness.

Little occurred of crucial interest between the Persians and the Greeks for nearly eighty years. The Greeks went on to create the most beautiful literature that human genius has ever produced, and their mutual contentions perfected them in the science and practice of war. At that time an event took place which gave them an even stronger proof of their considerable superiority over the Persians than even their victories over Xerxes. Cyrus the Younger was sent by his brother Artaxerxes to Asia Minor as the governor of the western provinces. Here he became acquainted with the martial flavor of the Greeks, and decided, with their aid, to march to Susa and dethrone his brother. To accomplish this, he assembled an army of more than one hundred thousand – thirteen thousand of whom were Greeks – and advanced into the plains of the East. He was met there by his brother and his army of nine hundred thousand, was defeated, and left dead on the field.

Thirteen thousand Greeks – now reduced to ten thousand – found themselves two thousand miles from the nearest Grecian city, where they could find safety. They were without even one day’s provisions, in the midst of the enemy’s country. Undismayed in this appalling situation, they determinedly commenced their retreat, cutting their way through enemies in front, while desperately guarding against foes threatening their rear. They crossed over snow-covered mountains, through trackless forests, and over treacherous rivers rapid and deep, and eventually reached home safely!

Series to be Continued in Message 45 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Three - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

Continuing The Third of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

In light of the foregoing, it is seen that the Persian kings and their vast armies, bearing war and subjugation to the remotest lands, were in fact realizing ideas which had been matured by Zoroaster in his cave; ideas which he in turn had derived from Moses.

Thus, through our exiled fathers the hand became the executive brain to establish worship of the true God, and in the revolution of the wheels of nature – as seen by Prophet Ezekiel – the soldier is the machine of the thinker. Our armies are assembled and battles fought to carry out a few ideas with which men of letters have filled the mind of the nation, and scholars and sages, prophets and imposters, good men and bad, kings and generals, armies and revolutions. All are used to accomplish the purposes of that eternal Mind, Who sits supremely over all – the mind which we, as the only nation known on earth recognize as Divine Providence.

The ambition of Cyrus and his successors – although in a manner they did not perceive – was the means by which our Father introduced among the enslaved and ignorant multitude of the East the civilization of the arts, and the learning which Greece, with her wonderful genius, had matured. Cyrus, whose sudden irruption into Babylon terminated Belshazzar’s feast and fulfilled so terribly the writing on the wall, had already extended the Persian Empire over the greater part of Asia Minor. Belshazzar, the last king of Babylon, attempted to strengthen himself against the growing power of the Persians, by forming an alliance with Croesus, King of Lydia, so famous for his riches. This monarch ruled in accordance with the doctrines of Zoroaster – a combination, as we have seen, of Judaism and the ancient Persian religion; which explains his extraordinary partiality toward the Jews, and his zeal in rebuilding the only temple on earth dedicated in his name to the God of heaven.

Croesus – made arrogant by his great wealth and command of an army of nearly half a million – resolved to encounter the Persian power, which had lately become formidable. To make assurance doubly sure, he sent to inquire of the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, and received for an answer: “If Croesus pass the Holys” – the boundary between Lydia and Persia – “he shall destroy a great empire.” He went, of course, and then found that the empire destroyed was his own! He was defeated by Cyrus, and his whole kingdom fell into the hands of the conqueror five hundred and forty years ago.

This conquest brought the Persians into collision with the Greeks, and was the cause of those wars which were raged with such bitterness for the generations between the two nations, finally resulting in the destruction of the Persian monarchy. The Greeks, though natives of Europe, had planted many colonies on the Asiatic coast. These colonies, though infinitely superior to the effeminate and luxurious Asiatics in every physical, intellectual, and moral attribute, were altogether unable to resist the overwhelming weight of an empire that stretched from Ethiopia to the Caspian Sea, and from the Indus to the Bosphorus.

They were obliged to submit, like the rest, and pay an annual tribute to their conquerors, no less to the humiliation and annoyance of the mother-country than themselves. The yoke at length became so oppressive that they resolved to throw it off. To effect this, they applied to Athens and Sparta for aid. Then, having received assistance from these most considerable states of Greece, they rebelled, marched to Sardis, took it, and accidentally set the city on fire, by which it was totally consumed.

The loss of this city, the richest in Asia Minor, exasperated Darius, King of Persia, to the highest degree, and kindled in his breast such a flame of resentment that he resolved upon revenge. Lest in his multifarious affairs he should forget the offenders, he appointed officers whose duty it was each day to repeat to him as he dined: “Sir, remember the Athenians!”

Resolved to punish those presumptuous republics which had dared to brave the whole power of the Persian Empire, he assembled a fleet and army sufficient – or so he supposed – to crush so small a country at a single blow. After an ineffectual attempt to reach Greece by the circuitous route of Thrace and Macedonia, a second armament was fitted out, composed of the flower of that army which had borne conquest on their banners from the Euphrates to the Nile, and transported by sea directly toward the little republic of Athens – which was at that time able to send into the field but from ten to fifteen thousand men.

The Athenians met and vanquished them on the plains of Marathon, leaving six thousand dead on the field. Thus ended the first attempt of Persian despotism upon the liberties of Greece. This may be said to have been the first demonstration ever seen on earth of the benefits of free government. A few ages of absolute political liberty had trained up a race of men such as had never before been seen. Intelligence combined with physical force, through discipline and an enthusiastic love of country, had for the first time been brought to contend hand in hand with the pampered sons of Eastern luxury and the spiritless automata of despotic government.

The result was what it will ever be. The orientals fell like mowed grass before the swords of the free. But this defeat, so far from discouraging the conqueror of the Indies, only roused him to mightier efforts. He immediately resolved to invade Greece with a larger army than before; but in the midst of his preparations he fell before a mightier conqueror, and left the inheritance of his kingdom and his revenge to his son, Xerxes, But Xerxes was destined to further add to the glory of Greece; although it would have seemed fruitless for him, in succeeding to the mightiest monarchy the world had ever known, to have sought to extend further the boundaries of his hereditary dominion.

Asia was not enough to satiate his boundless ambition – Europe must also be subjected to his power. His father’s quarrel with the Greeks furnished him with a convenient apology for such enormous injustice. He spent four years in preparation, ruling over the most fruitful portion of the globe, and his simple habits enabled the earth to sustain many more people than can be supported in the more luxurious mode of civilized nations that succeeded it. For four years he called upon all nations to furnish quotas of troops, ships and provisions – all for what? To crush one small nation!

Series to be Continued in Message 44 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-Two - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF [Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

The Third of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews, Written by Historian Hillel the Third.

As all nations of the earth lacked the knowledge of the true God except us Jews, so it devolved upon us as a nation to extend this knowledge to all the world, which was brought about by the following plan: First, by the universal diffusion of the Greek language, and, Secondly, by the conquest of the world by the Romans. Another cause almost as essential was the scattering and bigotry had almost made us a barren tree as to any general good for the world.

So ancient were our habits and fixed our customs that spiritual life was almost extinct; therefore it was necessary for us even to learn a new language, that the knowledge of the true God might be infused into a new medium, and thus be spread from land to land. It was necessary that the true medicine of life would be dissolved in an element which flowed on every shore and in every stream that all men might taste thereof and be saved. It was also necessary that a foreign language be forced upon us; for nothing but conquest and constraint could overcome our bitter prejudices. It will be the object of this letter to show how this was brought about.

The great designs of God were advanced by our misfortunes as well as by our prosperity, and in God’s purpose of preparing the world for the advent for a higher life and greater attainment in godliness, each even had a ripening tendency. Whether we worshiped in Jerusalem in peace, or wept by the rivers of Babylon, everywhere and under all circumstances we taught a knowledge of the true God; and everywhere our nation has cherished the hope of triumph in the expectation of a coming Messiah. The first great empire to which Judea fell prey was Babylonia. Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar five hundred and fifty years ago; and the remnant of the people was carried to Babylon and the neighboring countries, whither the main body had been removed eighteen years before. The glimpses of those times and countries are very short, but enough to show us that the residence of our fathers in those countries was not without effect.

It is impossible to put out the light of a Jew’s eyes, or to extinguish the fire that burns in his heart: and the life of our fathers made lasting effects both on the people they were with, and themselves also. One person especially adorned that dark period of God’s exiled Church. The prophet Daniel gives us almost the only sight we get of mighty Babylon. His writings furnish us with a number of great truths. He passes before us from youthful beauty to extreme age. We see him rising, like Joseph, by early wisdom, piety, and integrity; from slavery is to be the chief minister of State, and it is altogether probable that it was through him that Cyrus was prompted to restore our people to our holy land again. The edict was issued in the first year of his reign, immediately after the capture of Babylon, which Daniel had foretold by interpreting the writing on the wall.

But the restoration of our nation, an event so wonderful and strange in the history of the world, though properly attributed to the providence of God, was brought about by means more circuitous than is generally supposed. Fifty or a hundred thousand Jews did not live in Babylonia, Media, and Persia for seventy years – making such a singularly religious impression – for nothing. Our people appear to have been treated with much more respect among these oriental nations than in the western world. The probable reason for this was that the Persians – like their neighbors, the Arabians – had not forsaken the patriarchal religion nor sunk into such gross and degrading idolatry as those nations which had wandered farthest from the paternal hearthstone of the human race.

It is in this period of our nation’s sojourn in the East that the famous reformer, Zoroaster, appeared. I look upon him as the second Moses, though without inspiration; but availing himself of the light of the true revelation. He attempted not to introduce a new religion, but to refine, purify, and build up the religion of his country by introducing into it the most important principles of the true faith, and thus, with a mixture of these base and noble motives, to benefit his country and reflect glory on himself. The secret of his success was that he taught the theology of Moses, and it was so simple and yet so sublime and consonant at the same time with the best conceptions of mankind that it clothed this imposter with the veneration of his countrymen, and sanctified even his crimes and follies.

It was from Moses that Zoroaster derived the idea of one living God, the maker of heaven and earth; but he corrupted this pure doctrine by making two subordinate gods, the authors respectively of good and evil. From Moses he received an utter abhorrence of all images and of the temples in which they were worshiped; but he introduced – in connection with the true faith – the doctrine of evil spirits dividing the government of the universe. So it happened that there was not only an impress of the religion of our fathers part of the religion of our fathers upon that of the Persians, but a version of the Persian religion upon that of our nation.

The Jews, as would appear from the book of “Tobit,” first learned in their captivity those ideas of the agency of evil spirits in the world, of which we find traces in their histories. Cyrus was a Persian, and in all probability had been instructed in the doctrines of Zoroaster – a combination, as we have seen, of Judaism and the ancient Persian religion; hence this extraordinary partiality for building the only temple on earth which was dedicated in his name to the God of heaven.

But the influence of Zoroaster did not end there. The successors of Cyrus were educated in his religion. The priests and teachers of his religion were called Magi, and exerted a powerful influence in the State. Darius Hyastaspes, son in law and successor of Cyrus, warmly espoused the religion of the Persian philosopher, and when Zoroaster was slain by an eruption of the Scythians, he amply avenged his death, and rebuilt the fine temples which the Scythians had destroyed – especially, and with more splendor than before, the one in which Zoroaster had ministered. It was this enmity to idolatry – thus derived through Zoroaster from Moses, which was the only redeeming principle that the Persian monarch showed in all his extensive conquests.

Cambryses, son of Cyrus – madman and tyrant that he was – derives a sort of dignity from his zeal against idolatry. His indignation at seeing the Egyptians worship a living brute does honor at least to his Persian education; though in other respects he was a cruel and detestable tyrant. When Darius and Xerxes marched their mighty armies into Europe, the only idea which these expeditions were intended to carry out was the destruction of idolatry, which they everywhere threatened to overturn and eliminate.

Series to be Continued in Message 43 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS.

Message Forty-One - Book Four - SOMEWHERE BEYOND BELIEF[Continuing Rev. W. D. Mahan’s enlightening book, drawn from ancient records, entitled HISTORICAL RECORDS CONCERNING JESUS THE CHRIST MESSIAH] Chapter Eleven

Continuing the Second of The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providence To The Jews, Written by Hillel the Third.

There is an incident related by the sacred historians which may seem symbolic of the mission of the whole dispensation which that sacred inclosure contained. It is the fifth section of Samuel: “And the Philistines took the ark of God, and they brought it unto the house of Dagon; and they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the Lord. And they took Dagon and set him in his place again, before the ark of the Lord. And the head of Dagon and the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold. Only the stump of Dagon was left unto him.

In that same manner, all idolatry is predestined to fall before the Word of the Almighty. When Dagon fell, it was a dreadful faltering for us Israelites. Let me tell you that what was achieved in the Temple of Azotus was gradually accomplished throughout the land of Israel. Many times Dagon has been set up in his place again, but many times idolatry has revived. The ark of God has been in the hands of the enemy – it is now there at this time as I write – and the true religion about to be extinguished, when the Almighty interposed to vindicate His honor and reestablish His worship, and at last obtained a triumph by the very means which at first threatened to overthrow it forever.

As I have said, the objects of our national existence were greatly promoted by the building of the temple at Jerusalem. It was a splendid edifice, calculated to awaken the curiosity, to attract the attention, and command the respect of the world. It furnished a place of appropriate convenience, beauty, and dignity for the celebration of our daily sacrifices and our national rites. It made more interesting our three yearly festivals when all males were obliged to present themselves before God. It gave us what we all need at this time – a fixture of our religion, a local habitation to our religious applications and associations. It connected the sentiment of religion with another no less strong – that of patriotism – and enlisted both of them in the maintenance and defense of the national institutions of Moses. And it also led to the formation of a national literature which gave expression to these two most powerful sentiments of the human heart, and thus operated to call forth and strengthen them in each succeeding generation.

Still the Mosaic institutions, assisted by the magnificence of the temple service, failed to extirpate entirely the propensity of idolatry. Occasionally it sprang up and overspread the country, until at last the Almighty saw fit to suffer that temple to be overthrown; His people to be carried off into captivity, and worship to be suspended for seventy years; and His judgment accomplished what His mercies could not do. The very measure of Divine severity which at the first sight threatened to sweep worship of the true God from the face of the earth, and give up the world to the interminable dominion of idolatry, was the means of establishing it on a firmer basis then ever.

Although Jerusalem was overthrown and the temple razed to it foundation, the Jews carried the true Jerusalem in their hearts forever. Wherever we go, whether in the splendid cities of the east, or amid the fascinations of Egypt, or the tests of thd wandering shepherd, still our affections will be in the holy land, and, like Daniel, we will turn our faces toward the land where our fathers worshiped the God of heaven.

Nehemiah, when serving in the courts of the princes, lamented when he heard that the walls of Jerusalem were thrown down. There in slavery our fathers had time to reflect upon the cause of the calamities that had befallen them. There they read in the book of Moses – which was their companion of the exile – the awful curses God had threatened them if they forsook the worship of the true God, and felt them to be fulfilled in themselves. There they read the prophesy which had been written by Moses more than a thousand years before in the book, iii, section 22: “If thou will not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord thy God will scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth to another, and among these nations thou shalt find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest; but the Lord will give thee then a trembling heart and failing eyes, and sorrow of thy mind, and thy life shall stand in doubt before thee – thou shalt fear night and day, and have no assurance of thy life. In the morning thou shalt say, ‘Would God that it were morning,’ and at evening thou shalt say, ‘Would God it were morning!’ for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.”

Thus were our fathers smitten to the heart by the fulfillment of such awful threatenings. All propensity to idolatry was forever cured. Never after this period could the allurements of pleasure or the threats of pain; neither dens of wild beasts nor the fiery furnace, neither instant death nor lingering torture, ever induce them to offer sacrifices to idol gods! This same Providence which had scattered them in foreign lands, now restored them to their own. Their temple was rebuilt, the daily sacrifice was resumed and was never intermitted; with the exception of about three years under Antiochus Epiphanes.

But now let us look at our present state, and see how we, their children, have fallen: the ark once more is taken from us; Jerusalem lies in ruins, trodden down by the foot of the Gentiles; ruin has driven her ploughshare through the crumbling walls, and we are scattered to mix and mingle among all nations.

Series to be Continued in Message 42 of Rev. W. D. Mahan’s HISTORICAL RECORDS, Historian Hillel’s Third Letter.