What Is The True Christian Religion?

Front matter

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WALTER BROWN MURRAY

What Is The True Christian Religion?

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

THE PLAN OF SALVATION

The world is filled with books, articles and sermons in defense of the so-called Plan of Salvation. Mankind in general has been so impressed by the arguments for its truth and correctness that it is firmly believed to be identical with Christianity. The Scriptures have been so used and quoted that the Plan of Salvation seems to be their legitimate and only explanation. It would seem to be impossible to disentangle truth from error in this case so that men may see that the religion of Jesus does not teach the Plan of Salvation. It will possibly horrify many people to be told that the Plan of Salvation is an invention of man and did not exist until the time of St. Anslem. 1033 to 1109, an Italian ecclesiastic who became Archibishop of Canterbury in England and was later expelled by the king and later wrote his book which developed the theory involved in the so-called Plan of Salvation. This was in 1098. over a thousand years after the Crucifixion.

St. Anselm's position was that of the Roman influenced by the idea of Law and Justice. The idea of the Atonement between God and Man ceased to be thought of as the relationship between a Heavenly Father and His Children and thenceforward became the idea of the relationship between a King and His Subjects. It was thereafter thought of as purely legal and the legalistic idea was profoundly impressed upon Christian teaching, so much so that the idea which the Lord impressed upon mankind in the parable of the Prodigal Son of our Heavenly Father standing with open arms to receive back His children into the haven of His love has been forgotten. In the legalistic idea it was necessary, because of the father's demand, that the elder brother of the prodigal should have come forward and offered himself as an object of punishment. It was necessary that the elder brother should have been duly punished as a substitute for his wayward brother. And as the wages of sin. or of wandering from the father's home, was death it was indispensable that the elder brother should have suffered the death penalty.

The Plan of Salvation demanded the death penalty for all sin, whatever it was that was done in violation of God's law. There was no escape. All who sinned after the sin of Adam came under this penalty, not merely Adam. It meant as well dill all of his progeny forever would perish. This did not mean merely physical death, but eternal death in hell prepared for the devil and his angels. This meant that the entire human race came under this penalty—innocent little children, infants, as well as all older men and women. God simply had to have His justice satisfied. Law had been broken. There could he no escape. The hideous injustice of such a curse upon the human race was explained as the justice of a Supreme Being who could do whatever He willed, regardless of human ideas of justice Men began to praise God because of His justice in condemning humanity to eternal death as the offspring of Adam. In the Middle Ages men praised God for the sufferings of little children in hell. A more monstrous idea oi the Divine Being could not have been imagined. Moloch, whose priests claimed that the only way to gain the favor of this monster was to place their infants and little children in the attended brazen arms of the idol and then to see the children withdrawn, shrieking with terror, into the burning fiery furnace within the image, was not so cruel. Moloch murdered only a few comparatively; God the human race.

This is the basis of the Plan of Salvation.

The human race was to be saved by the mercy of their Elder Brother, Christ, who would undertake to come no earth after some thousands of years and be murdered, the innocent for the guilty. The idea of the Plan of Salvation was to save mankind by substitution—the innocent Son of God for the wicked human race. It involved the murder of Jesus by the Jewish race. If the Jews had not murdered Jesus, there could have been no penalty paid for Adam's sin. A crime had to he committed in order for God to have mercy. He demanded the death penalty. He could not escape from His own dreadful situation.

The suggestion immediately comes to mind, a searching question it is, "What would have happened if the Jews had not murdered Jesus?" Had they accepted Him, as He sought to have them do, He could not have saved them, nor the human race. A crime had so be committed in order to permit God to save humanity. Blood had to be shed, innocent blood had to be shed, a sacrifice commensurate with the extent of the human race; Otherwise God. in His Infinite Justice, could not have saved humanity. But even then He did not agree to save them all. only certain ones who would plead that Jesus had died in their place. The rest would perish eternally in the tortures of hell. This is the Plan of Salvation, the idea of an Italian priest whose theory gained universal acceptance. This is still regarded by millions of the human race as identical with Christianity, as the plan of the Bible.

Immediately thousands of good men and women who accept this theory of salvation rise up to condemn a man who would thus enter what is to them as the temple of God and break down their image, their belief, try to discredit what is to them the plain and only teaching of the Sacred Scriptures.

And yet they know in their hearts that if a man will repent and turn from his evil ways, turn to his Heavenly Father, or to the Lord Jesus, which is for Christians, of course, the same, and therafter live a life of love to God and the neighbor, which Jesus said is the summing up of religion, he will be saved. The whole Bible can be brought forward to support this statement. Just one passage in proof of what has been said: "If the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done shall he live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?" What did Jesus say? "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out." He did not mention the Plan of Salvation.

Is not what is now being said the evident teaching of the Sacred Scriptures?

When does the Plan of Salvation come in? It is an attempt to explain the life and mission of Jesus, but utterly mispresenting it, as is evident. Then what is the true explanation of the life and mission of Jesus?

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

THE TRUE EXPLANATION OF THE REDEMPTION

There were three great objectives in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in coning to earth, or in what we call the Incarnation, or assumption of the flesh and of out human nature.

The first great objective was to release mankind from his captivity to the hells; for mankind had become an almost complete slave to the hells, or to the collective power of evil beings associated in the underworld, depraved men and women who had gone from this earth in their insane and malignant evil.

The means He used was to assume a human nature and a fleshly body from Mary in order to be able to approach the denizens of the underworld. As God is in Himself He is a consuming fire, and, using a material analogy, had He come unveiled before men and devils they would have been consumed more surely than mortals would be consumed by the near approach of the sun of our solar system.

It was indispensable therefore that He should veil over His glory.

It would have been possible for the Lord to have destroyed the enemies of the human race by His Divine Word, the Divine Truth. If "by the word of the Lord were the heavens made," certainly the earth and the hells could have been as easily destroyed.

The illusions of hell are mere phantasies; the power of evil is a phantasy; but men were entangled in those phantasies, believing good to be evil and evil to be good. They were hypnotized by evil beings, and were almost completely in the power of these evil beings. The wickedness of the earth would have quickly destroyed the race under the influence of insane and malignant beings.

It became necessary for the Lord in His assumed humanity to become champion of the human race and fight against the hells as a man, thus to assume the limitations of humanity, but with the power of Almighty God. There was no other way to meet devils without destroying them. In this way only could He become their rescuer or Redeemer.

The enemy of the human race was the underworld. In this way of human birth, "the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent's head." and the "serpent," or the collective power of evil in its malignity, "would bruise his heel." The seed of the woman was the Divine Truth embodied in a human being, the son of Mary. The Seed of the serpent was self-love. Beguiled by the senses, the celestial being of Eden, set up self-love and the pride of self-intelligence in the center of the Garden instead of the acknowledgment of God, which was the tree of life, as the source of life and happiness.

The promise to the man in Eden of a final rescue became the guiding principle of history. It was the promise of at-one-ment with God which was to be worked out in the history of the world. The story of the Bible is therefore the story of the fall of man by listening to the self-life, in time being brought back to oneness with the Divine through the work of a Human-Divine Redeemer, the seed of the woman.

Into a world almost lost came Jesus "God-in-Crist," "the Only-Begotten Son of God," bringing the otherwise unseeable and unknowable God into manifestation, so that God could fight against man's enemies of the underworld in this assumed and limited humanity on the plane of man's life.

This was the situation which brought Jesus into the world as the promised Messiah of the Jews, but really as the Deliverer of all mankind from the hells. All the promises of the Old Testament point to this deliverance. And there was to be but one Redeemer and Saviour, the son horn of the Virgin, God-with-us, "The Mighty God. the Everlasting Father." God in human form, "in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead." As Jesus said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father . . . The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." "I and the Father are one."

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

GOD REVEALED IN JESUS

The second great objective of the coming of the Lord into human life through the assumption of a human form on the plane of nature was to reveal God to man. God as He is in Himself is invisible. He dwells on a higher plane, indeed the highest plane of being, on the plane of Infinity and Eternity. As Paul said, "who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, not can see." Being Infinite He cannot be understood or conceived of by finite beings; for we can understand and conceive of an Infinite Being only by thinking of Him as being out of our bounds of thinking. We can think of anything only on the plane of finiteness, in defined terms or conditions, which bring a thing to us as an object of thought. The word "finite" means limited or bounded. We cannot conceive of the infinity of space, to our minds it must end somewhere. We cannot conceive of the phrase "from eternity" because we cannot conceive of anything not having had a beginning. Thus we cannot think of God either in His infinity or eternity. He must reveal Himself to us, and the only way in which He can do so is by coming into defined conditions, or into objective form. We may in out blindness deny that such a Being can exist but we cannot rationally deny Him as First Cause and as the Preserver of creation who must have made the laws of the universe and who needs must operate them.

God tried in Old Testament times to reveal Himself through the mediation of angels, who ate good men and women gone out of this life, or through the prophets who are the recipients of the Divine influx, but the time came when man became too gross and materialistic to be able to receive Divine enlightment from within. God had to become objective, an object of thought. God could reveal Himself only in human terms. And it was natural that He should so reveal Himself, for He is Primal Man in whose image and likeness we are made. He therefore assumed humanity through Mary, a virgin, in order that He might be uninfluenced and unaffected by the limitations which come through a human father in order that He might be in a true sense "The Only Begotten Son of God." God thus projected Himself into human life through the assumption of a limited human form on the plane of earth in order not only that He might rescue mankind, but also that He might return into the Infinite later without finite limitations from a human father, and henceforward be the Infinite God. Therefore it was expedient that He should go away from the natural human and ascend to the Father, again become identical with the Father. His disciples could not understand this, but He said to them: "The time cometh when I shall show you plainly of the Father." That time has come in this New Age when he does reveal Himself as the Father, "The Almighty," as "King of kings and Lord of lords," "God over all blessed forever."

The third great objective of the Lord in the incarnation was to provide an eternal means of contact with mankind, to provide, as it were, a great dynamo, a Divine Dynamo, which would forever make the otherwise invisible God accessible to man. Just as the electric dynamo makes the otherwise invisible and unknowable force called electricity available for man's needs, giving man its heat, light and energy for his uses, so Jesus, as God come forth to view, brings to man, who can thus conceive of God in human terms, the Divine Heat, (or Love); the Divine Light, (or Truth); and the Divine Energy, (the Power of God). We can thus approach God in His Divine Human, conceive of Him as an object of thought, secure His Love, Truth and Power. As Jesus said, "Without me ye can do nothing." "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go unto the Father." At another time Jesus said. "He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me. And he that seeth me, seeth him who sent me." The Lord tells us of this relationship in a living way in the Parable of the Vine and the branches.

The Son of God who is said to have been set down on the right hand of God after His resurrection was the Divine Human, or the Glorified Human, the Human made Divine, which remains forever the medium of understanding and contact through which God works on earth. It was not a separate Personality, but an Aspect of God after He had come forth to view before the sight of humanity. It was the only Aspect of Divinity that enables us to understand God and come into contact with God. "No man cometh unto the Father but by me."

There are in our thought always, and must forever be, two Aspects of God, God as He is in Himself and God in His Coming-Forth-to-View. "God and His Christ." We read in Revelation, "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. and He shall reign forever and ever." "He," not "they." One God in two aspects of the Invisible and the Visible; not unlike man as to soul and body. "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with man," as Jesus, "and He will dwell with them." as Jesus, "and they shall be his people, and God Himself shall be with them, their God.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV

THE INCARNATION EXPLAINED

Let us keep in mind that "God was in Christ." and that in Christ "dwelleth all the fulness of the Deity in bodily form." and that Christ was "God over all, blessed forever." That being so there was only one God, but in two aspects. God in Himself and God in His coming forth to view. "No man hath seen God at any time: the Only-Begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath brought him forth to view." They were not two distinct persons, even though spoken of as Father and Son, but Jesus was the projection of the Father into time and space for the purpose of rescuing humanity from the grasp of hell. God projects Himself. The son horn of Mary, "the Son of Man," was a self-imposed limitation in order to enable God to face men and devils—the only possible way—in order to meet men and devils on their own plane of manifestation without destroying them, to reveal God to man and overcome the underworld through temptation combats. Jehovah was the unseen God: Jesus was Jehovah come forth to view as Saviour; not two, but one. Hear. O Israel, the Lord. thy God is One." Jehovah said. "My glory will I not give to another," and also. "I, Jehovah, am thy Redeemer and thy Saviour." The name Jesus means Jehovah as Saviour.

Let us remember two things: there never was a Son of God in the beginning more merciful than the Father, and it is incredible that God could not forgive men without the shedding of blood. A king can forgive his rebellious subjects. Why cannot God do so? Our heavenly Father would not want His children to be destroyed in hell even if they deserved it. Certainly no earthly parent would desire it, nor permit it. The eternal Decrees of God making it necessary to vindicate Divine Justice by the murder of humanity, or else the murder of the Son of God, are an absurdity.

The early Christian Church understood that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was not to appease Divine wrath or Divine justice, as the church later came to believe, but the work of the hells in fighting God. The ransom paid was to the hells. How was this possible? Because hell had taken possession of the human race through the overthrow of man's free will. It was necessary for God no fight the hells. How could He do so? By assuming man's nature and form, as we have seen, in order that He might approach them without destroying them. It meant that God would have to identify Himself with humanity by taking upon Himself man's nature, subject to temptation, and that hell would have the power it had acquired through the ruin of man to make men suffer. Was there no other way? Jesus in His struggle in Bethsemane evidently asked the question, but He then saw that the only way was by submitting to the hells. "Not my will,"—not the human will,—not the will of the son of Mary.——"but thy will be done," the will of the Divine Love which would not destroy the hells by violence.

God identified Himself with the human race in His coming forth to view as Jesus. He had to be born of a virgin so as not to have a human father with resulting limitations when He should return to His full Deity. No man with a human father could ever be God. The Son had to be "the Only Begotten," unique in being merely the channel for God to enter the human race. He had to have the human nature and the body of flesh in order to be visible, tangible, directly in touch with humanity. He was absolutely different from all other men in having no limiting inheritance from a human father. But He took full possession of the planes of human life on earth and in heaven by becoming incarnate and made them forever His own by His victories over the hells who had invaded them. He thus provided an eternal basis on the planes of human life on earth and in heaven so that He could be fully present in them forever. He is truly now "Immanuel, God-with-us." He is "the tabernacle of God With men." He dwells with us now in His Divine Human, or human made Divine. We are His people, and God Himself is with us now, our God. He is "the mighty God, the everlasting Father. "King of kings, and Lord of lords." And we can never see any other God than the God we see in Jesus. As finite beings we have to see God in finiteness or not at all. As we cannot see the soul of another man except in his body, so we cannot see the Divine Soul except as made visible in Jesus. This is the plain teaching of the Bible.

Chapter 5

CHAPTER V

GOD DECLARES SUBSTITUTION IMPOSSIBLE

When the Israelites under Moses came out of Egypt they were obviously merely a race of slaves, without culture or education or knowledge of a cultural kind. They had been kept in the most abject slavery. How could God reveal Himself to them? Only by talking to them in language they could understand. They were primitive in their feelings, totally unspiritual. The revelations that came to them through Moses had to picture God in the terms of a man such as they could respect, capable of anger and revenge. Therefore God was presented to them then, and in later writings of the Old Testament, as one who took vengeance of their inventions. The law proclaimed from Mt. Sinai was given in a tempest of flame and thunder in order properly to impress a savage race.

But the basis of the covenant which God made with them through Moses was the Ten Commandments. If they kept the Ten Commandments, they would be prospered and happy. If they did not, the curses outlined in Deuteronomy would fall on them and their children. A tabernacle was built expressly under the direction of Moses to provide a holy place for the Ten Commandments. God said He would dwell with them there. It was a picturization of the fact that God would dwell with them as they kept the Ten Commandments. Let us keep in mind that Israel agreed keep the Ten Commandments and that was the basis of the covenant.

But they kept the Commandments no better than we do. They had to have something external in the way of worship to satisfy the savage love of the spectacular, something to appeal to man's love of the sensuous. Their father Abraham had worshipped God back in Ur of the Chaldees by means of animal sacrifices. He kept it up when he came into Canaan. He had also been an idolater, but was called upon to worship One God in the new land into which he came; yet it was not possible for him to have the true name of the Lord as Jehovah revealed to him. He was still too external despite his high quality of implicit obedience. Abraham's decendants still kept up the worship of God by animal sacrifices. it was a heathenish custom expressing the idea of reconciliation with God by shedding blood. It too often resulted in the shedding of human blood as expiation for offenses to Deity, under the superstitious belief that Deity could be pacified, appeased only by the vicarious yielding up of precious life. As we read of those ancient peoples trying to appease Deity in this way we have a deep pity for their grossly superstitious idea of what God requires of His children. Surely we have gone far beyond any such superstitious idea of God. Or have we?

Through Moses God gave the children of Israel many laws regarding health and sanitation and social relationships, but, in order to keep them from worshipping heathen idols, like those of Egypt and neighboring lands, and reverting to gross idolatry. He permitted them to have a worship through animal sacrifice; but, mark this, He utterly changed the spirit of it, making the animals to represent the offering up of their good affections, for animal life represents the emotional life of man, and making the meal offerings from the vegetable kingdom to represent their good thoughts; for the vegetable kingdom, represents the intellectual life of man. In this way worship through sacrifices was made possible, possible to a savage people unable to appreciate true ethical ideals. Their plural wives and easy divorce and spirit of revenge show how external they really were. They had the spirit of a savage race, but were held to some degree in check by Divine law.

To them God had to reveal Himself in the best way possible, but their spirit was not greatly changed ever after they came into the land of Israel. They did each man that which was right in his own eyes and worshipped the gods of the land. However, we perceive that as the centuries passed by the mark of a faithful Israelite was the performance of worship through animal sacrifice. Yet Christian worship has gone little further. While animal sacrifices were abolished for Christians following the founding of the Christian Church. the spirit of it was continued. The writers of the New Testament having been brought up in the remembrance of the worship of God through animal sacrifice tried to interpret the work of Christ wholly in the spirit of such worship. Paul especially dedicates himself to the task of explaining the work of Jesus in the language of mysticism, of Hebrew mysticism, based on the significance of the sacrificial system, which was, as we have shown, not the real basis of Old Testament religion, but a system permitted by the Lord because of the external nature of the people. And yet Paul caught the true idea when he said: "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." That being true God did not have to be propitiated. It was men who had to be reconciled to God.

Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI

THE DEATH ON CALVARY

The rejection of Jesus by the Jews was a representation of their rejection of the Word of God and of the Divine Being. It is perfectly true that God in Jesus completely identified Himself in His assumed humanity with the human race, taking upon Himself tendencies to sin through his human inheritance, and also bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, and bore our sinful tendencies in his own body on the tree: but he did not suffer as a substitute for us, nor pay the penalty or our sins. His death on the cross represented the rejection of the Divine Being and His Word by the Jewish nation. Jesus was the Word incarnate. "He came unto his own, and his own received him not." There was no God in heaven demanding the death of the sinner but willing to be appeased by the death of His son. Jesus was God in the flesh come to earth in a limited humanity in order to share with us our life and overcome our enemies of the underworld and set us free from their ruthless power. He poured out His life for us in that fierce combat against the hells, They had power because the human race had yielded to their suggestions of evil. He died to release humanity from their grasp by overcoming the hells as they tempted Him. And He overcame.

He became sin for us representatively, not actually, for He knew no sin. He did not assume our guilt, for He was a representation of the Divine Innocence, representatively the Lamb of God who bore the sinful tendencies of humanity, but not its sin. There was no other God to appease, for God is one, one in Essence and one in Person,—manifested in the flesh. He that saw Jesus saw the Father as one seeing you sees your soul manifesting itself through your body.

But it was not God that died upon the cross, but the son of Mary, the assumed human. God cannot die. Because we are God's children we cannot die, but our bodies can,—our carnal nature can. He assumed our humanity in order to share our life, in order to meet the hells and overcome in the limitations of that human nature, in order to reveal Himself to us in the only way possible. "He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin." He suffered vicariously for us, but did not become a substitute for us, because there is no such thing in human life or in God's universe as one person becoming guilty for another and suffering for him, substituting for him when it is known that he is not guilty. No court of law would permit it, nor would God do so. In fact, He says expressly in Ezekiel; "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the farther bear the iniquity of the sen. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him; in his righteousness that he hath done shall he live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God; and not that he should return from his ways, and live?"