- 24 - 7. 2 Jesus’s assignment as God’s envoy After this first trial, which he had passed triumphantly, Jesus began his career of teaching the multitudes. He collected about him a few men known to you as the ‘Apostles’, who though poor and simple were willing to accept the truth. It had been his intention to initiate them into the mysteries of the Redemption, but he soon found that even they were the weak products of their times and unable to endure more than a fraction of the truth. The first thing Jesus had to do was to convince not only his disciples, but the people as well, that he was God’s emissary. He had to tell them who he was and what mission he had to fulfill, and he had to prove his claims through the power of Him Whose emissary he claimed to be. The same had been true of Moses, whose mission was in every respect the counterpart of that of the Messiah, whose coming he predicted in the words: Deuteronomy 18: 15: ‘The Lord God will raise up a prophet like me from your midst.’ Moses had been sent by the Lord to lead a single people out of the land of bondage into the Promised Land. The bond slaves were the Israelites; their taskmasters were the Egyptians under Pharaoh. Those whom Christ came to deliver from bondage were all the spirits that had fallen away from God; their taskmasters were the Powers of Hell, under Lucifer. Before Moses could succeed in solving the problem before him, two things had to be done. First, he had to persuade his people to agree to leave the land of their bondage and to accept him as their leader. Next, and far more difficult, he had to compel the Egyptians and their king to allow the Israelites to depart, for it goes without saying that Pharaoh and his subjects would not part willingly with the cheap labour of their slaves, male and female. In the same way, the Redemption through Christ depended on two things: • In the first place he had to persuade the fallen spirits that had reached the level of incarnation in human form but were still languishing under the bondage of Evil to declare themselves ready to abandon its ways. • Then there remained the much harder task of compelling the Rulers of Evil under Lucifer to surrender those of its subjects who desired to return to God. With Moses as with Christ, the task involved two clearly distinct steps. As regarded Moses personally, it was incumbent on him above all to remain firm before Pharaoh, and to allow himself to be diverted from his God-given mission neither by threats nor by enticements, lest God’s plan come to nought through his fault. The people of Israel, on their part, had to do their share by declaring themselves willing to leave and by holding themselves in readiness for the journey. It then was up to God to grant them a decisive victory over Pharaoh and to accomplish their deliverance. The manner in which this was to be achieved did not concern either Moses or the people; that was for God alone to decide. So too with Christ.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI1MzY3