Chapter 7 - Christ – His life and His work

- 32 - Nevertheless, Christ did not heal everyone who appealed to him, for there are cases in which sickness is a punishment sent by God, to be suffered by the patient for a period commensurate with his offense. Christ’s powers of clairvoyance and clairsentience enabled him in every instance to tell whether or not the supplicant’s plea should be granted. Moreover, a belief in God and in him as God’s envoy was the prerequisite for every cure that he effected. Not in all cases was the cure permanent, for many individuals relapsed into their former ailment as soon as they lost their faith in God and in Christ, the main purpose of the healing being to bear witness to the truth of the message Christ proclaimed. In connection with ‘raising the dead’, I must tell you something that may surprise you. In all cases of so-called 'raising the dead', both those mentioned in the Old Testament and those performed by Christ, the spirits of those who were thus raised had not actually passed into the Beyond. • No one who has actually died can again come to life; his spirit can never again take possession of the body from which it departed in mortal death. This is a Divine law that admits of no exceptions. As soon as a spirit crosses over into the Beyond, its race on earth is run. Its earthly destiny is irrevocably decided. Only by rebirth can this spirit ever again take on human form. All individuals recalled to life by Christ were spirits that had indeed emerged from their bodies but still remained connected to them by a slender band of od. This band of od was so feeble that the spirit could not have returned to the body either by its own efforts or by virtue of any human attempts at resuscitation, and so real mortal death would have ensued very shortly by rupture of the odic band. In the case of Lazarus, the odic band had already become so weak that not even the minimum of life force could be conveyed to his body that was necessary to prevent the setting in of decay. • Neither the odour of decay nor the so-called livid spots on a corpse are infallible symptoms of final decease. The fact that the raised ‘dead’ were only seemingly dead is clearly indicated by the words of Christ when he recalled the daughter of Jairus to life: Matthew 9: 24: ‘The girl is not dead, but only asleep.’ These words have been explained as a jest. Christ did not jest in such matters, least of all when he was engaged in proving the Divine character of his mission to the people. In the case of Lazarus, too, he called the attention of his Apostles to the fact that it was not a real death, for on hearing of the man’s sickness, he said to them, John 11: 4: ‘This sickness will not end in his death, but will serve to glorify God.’ When, as far as one could judge, Lazarus had died, Jesus said again: ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; I go, that I may wake him out of sleep.’ (John 11:11) When once more his Apostles failed to understand him, and lengthy explanations that they would not have understood seemed useless, Christ finally said: “Lazarus is dead’. (John 11:14) This was not a strictly accurate statement of Lazarus’ condition, but it was the only one that he could use, for at the time Lazarus was already in his tomb, and people considered him dead. Had this really been the case, Christ would not have said a few days earlier, ‘This sickness will not end in death’, nor could he, after the entombment, have

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