- 5 - • It is, therefore, one of the fundamental teachings of the true Christian faith that humans cannot proclaim the truth out of their own consciousness. They can do so only as instruments of God’s spirit world. Even Christ as a mortal could not ascend of his own volition to the source of the truth. As a man, he had no more inherent knowledge of the truth than other humans. What he had known in the days when he, as the first-created spirit, dwelt with God had been as completely obliterated from his memory by his entry into a material body as the knowledge of a previous existence is obliterated from the recollection of other humans, although there was a time when they too had dwelled with the Father. • The property of matter by which the recollection of one's previous existence is wiped out exerted the same effect upon the incarnated Christ that it exerts upon every other spirit incarnated in human form. Thus, after his incarnation also Christ was dependent upon the spirit messengers sent to him by the Father. He acknowledged this when he said: John 1: 51: ‘You shall see the messengers of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ He was but God’s envoy, and had no advantage over the Divine envoys that had preceded him, for they, too, had been instructed by God’s spirits. Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and all of the Old Testament prophets did not preach things that had evolved in their own minds, but all of them, in Peter's words, ‘spoke God’s word under the guidance of a holy spirit.’ A spirit of God inspired them with what they were to say. Christ repeatedly assures his hearers that he speaks not of his own knowledge, but only what he has heard from the Father. It was the Father Who gave him the required teachings, through His spirit messengers who constantly ascended and descended above the Son of Man. John 8: 28: ‘You will realize that I do nothing of myself but only speak as my Father has taught me.’ John 8: 26: ‘I speak to the world only those things that I have heard from Him.’ The same fountainhead of truth from which Christ had drawn was to serve all those who came to spread his gospel after him. First his Apostles, who were not simply to repeat what they had learned from Christ as they interpreted it. Misinterpretations easily slip in when humans are called upon to repeat what someone else has said. Of a hundred listeners to the same speaker, every one of them, when asked to repeat his remarks, will in one point or another say something different from what the speaker said or meant. • Hence, also the Apostles were to be instructed anew by the spirits of the truth about the things that they had learned from Christ as a man, to make sure that his words suffer no distortion from their erroneous interpretation. They were to receive from God’s spirits both confirmation of the teachings proclaimed by Christ and certain new truths that Christ had had to withhold from them, either because under God’s Plan of Salvation these truths could not be proclaimed before the Redeemer’s death, or because the
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