Chapter 17
ALL THE
WAY
Charles Fillmore
Keep a
True Lent
WHEN WE SING, "I'll go
with Him all the way," we do not always
realize the mighty import of our words.
Jesus went all the way from the human
to the divine. He went all the way to
immortality. He raised not only His own
consciousness from despair and
hopelessness to assurance and
confidence in the presence and
continued help of a loving Father-God,
but He opened the way for the whole
race to do likewise. When we determine
to follow Him all the way we undertake
the mighty work of the ages, a
revolution of character before which
the famous tasks of Hercules pale into
insignificance.
As a matter of fact no
one has ever followed Jesus all the way
in the revolution in our race thought
that He initiated. Many devout, sincere
men have attempted to do so, but Jesus
is yet to be understood and imitated in
His work of salvation.
In the first place we
have not understood the depth of our
bondage to error and evil, nor the
enormity of the consequences if it is
allowed to continue. But Jesus knew how
the human mind wraps itself up in its
own error thought and brings darkness
and desolation beyond redemption,
unless the light of divine
understanding is released in the
consciousness. Jesus knew how to
quicken this inner light by being
Himself the great Light, and He showed
us how to attain the same spiritual
brightness. In the face of ignorance,
superstition, and persecution He boldly
proclaimed: "I am the light of the
world." "Ye are the light of the
world." "Even so let your light shine
before men; that they may see your good
works, and glorify your Father who is
in heaven."
To understand Jesus'
experiences in their spiritual
significance and their effect on our
human bondage we should become better
acquainted with the real character of
the man and His relation to us, because
the many claims of Jesus' spiritual
superiority made by His followers and
Himself must have a basis of
Truth.
That Jesus had elements
of greatness far beyond those of any
other man that has ever lived on this
earth is universally accepted by both
the religious and the secular world.
Some Christians claim that He came
direct from heaven; that He was very
God incarnate. Other Christians see in
Him simply the fulfillment of the ideal
man designed by Divine Mind. Neither of
these views quite meets the logic of
unbiased reason considered in
connection with the events of Jesus'
life.
If Jesus was very God
and had all power, why did He suffer
the agony in Gethsemane and cry out to
His Father for help? If He was a mere
man, an evolved representative of our
race, why did He lay claim to an
existence prior and superior to the
Jesus incarnation, "And now, Father,
glorify thou me with thine own self
with the glory which I had with thee
before the world was." "Before Abraham
was born, I am."
He claimed the whole
human race as His "flock" and compared
them to sheep with Himself as the
shepherd:
I am the good
shepherd; and I know mine own, and
mine own know me, even as the
Father knoweth me, and I know the
Father; and I lay down my life for
the sheep. And other sheep have I,
which are not of this fold: them
also I must bring, and they shall
hear my voice; and they shall
become one flock, one shepherd.
Therefore doth the Father love me,
because I lay down my life, that I
may take it again. No one taketh it
away from me, but I lay it down of
myself. I have power to lay it
down, and I have power to take it
again. This commandment received I
from my Father.
But they did not
understand. "There arose a division
again among the Jews because of these
words. And many of them said, He hath a
demon, and is mad; why hear ye him?
Others said, These are not the sayings
of one possessed with a demon. Can a
demon open the eyes of the
blind?"
Men in Jesus' time could
not understand how what appeared to be
an ordinary man could be the beginning
of a whole new race of men as Jesus
claimed to be. So they thought He was
crazy when He made the assertion. We in
our day do not fully understand how one
man and one woman increase their
species. It is a divine mystery, yet we
bear witness to it.
In the 1st chapter of
John's Gospel it is written: "He was in
the world, and the world was made
through him, and the world knew him
not. He came unto his own, and they
that were his own received him
not."
The fact is that the
relationship which Jesus bears to the
human family is quite beyond our
present intellectual
comprehension.
In order to understand
the status of Jesus we have to
visualize a universe like that in which
we live as having existed during
billions of years in the past, as
having fulfilled its mission in the
evolution of a superrace of men, and as
then passing away leaving as its fruit
God-men with creative power. Jesus was
one of the God-men of that ancient
creation, and it was His destiny to
bring forth from the depths of Being a
race of potential gods, place them in
an environment where they could grow as
He grew and become, like Him, a Son of
God. As stated by Paul, "we are also
his offspring."
The beginning of our
race evolution is given in the allegory
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Jehovah is Christ, who formed man out
of the dust of the ground and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of
life.
When the Adamic race
reached a point in their evolution
where they had personal-will volition,
they began to think and act
independently of the Jehovah or Christ
Mind. Then the sense consciousness
began to rule and the materialization
of the body resulted.
Degeneration of the
whole man followed. Loss of ability to
draw constantly on the one and only
source of life threw the whole race
into an anemic condition. Their bodies
began to disintegrate, and death came
into the world. Then Satan, the mind of
sense, began to rule; sin was in the
saddle. The people like sheep had gone
astray; they were lost in the
wilderness of sense; they were in the
throes of race extinction. New life had
to be imparted; a blood transfusion was
imperative. Christ then began a series
of physical incarnations, beginning
prehistorically and ending with His
Jesus incarnation.
Why does the
all-powerful God have to resort to the
limitations of law to attain creative
ends? We can only reply that there is
no evidence anywhere in nature that any
end has ever been accomplished except
through the work of law. As men make
civil laws and enforce them with
penalties, even to death, so the human
race has formed laws of physical birth
and death, laws of sickness and
physical inability, laws making food
the source of bodily existence, laws of
mind recognizing no other source of
existence except the physical, the
material.
The total of these race
laws has formed a race consciousness
separate from and independent of
creative Mind, and when that Mind
sought to help men spiritually, the
mind of the flesh opposed it and made
every effort to solve its problems in
its own way.
The way of the flesh
always proved futile and disastrous
because of human selfishness and
greed.
Thus it became
absolutely necessary for Christ, the
Father of us all, to make closer
contact with our physical or fleshly
consciousness and pour into it a new
life current. So Christ Himself, the
Jehovah of the Old Testament,
incarnated in Jesus and brought to our
immediate attention both spiritually
and physically the abundant life of
primal being, Elohim God. Hence the
proclamation of Christ in Jesus, "I
came that they may have life, and may
have it abundantly."
Modern scientists
explain that the atoms that build
molecules, cells, and tissues are
composed of electrical units; that
these units seem to contain the
elements that convey life to all
creation; that the cells of our body
are energized by these life-giving
atoms; and that the ether filling all
space is heavily charged with this
life-giving electricity. Science does
not say that this omnipresent energy is
divine life, nor does it admit that it
is moved by mind, either divine or
human. But spiritual discernment
reveals that there is but one life and
one intelligence penetrating and
permeating man and the universe and
that where there is evidence of life
there is evidence of Being.
Consequently the life-giving atom is
the life-giving God, whom we conceive
according to our degree of spiritual
unfoldment.
If we have developed the
mind of the Spirit, we see and feel the
quickening life of the energy at the
center of the atoms of our body. All
spiritual concepts begin in the mind
and are translated into atomic life in
the body. Here we have the point of
contact between the Christ life and the
race life. It also explains why our
life as a people was no longer
receiving the energy flow from the
parent stream. Like the prodigal son,
we had gone into a country far from the
Father, and there was a famine in that
land. We were starving for the divine
substance and got no satisfaction out
of the husks, the food of the
swine.
Because of the gulf
between the Mind of Being and the sense
mind of the race, no life flow was
possible. Then Christ incarnate in the
flesh through Jesus offered His body as
a life or electrical transformer. The
atomic units of His body were sundered
and sown as points of life and light in
our mind and body atmosphere, to the
end that anyone who concentrates his
thoughts on Christ in faith will
attract as a spiritual magnet one or
many of His body atoms. These Christ
atoms, appropriated by the individual,
become food and drink and form the
nucleus of a regenerated body for the
person appropriating them.
This casting forth of
His life and body for the regeneration
of His people is promised in the use of
the bread and wine as symbols, in the
Last Supper, as described in the 26th
chapter of Matthew. "And as they were
eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed,
and brake it; and he gave to the
disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is
my body. And he took a cup, and gave
thanks, and gave to them, saying, Drink
ye all of it; for this is my blood of
the covenant, which is poured out for
many unto remission of
sins."
Thus Jesus gave His life
and body substance as a kind of blood
transfusion to a dying race, and the
agony in Gethsemane was the
contemplation of the wrenching of the
central ego of the trillions of living
electrons, protons, atoms, molecules,
and cells composing His organism. Thus
the body and life elements of the
Christ body were sown as seed in the
soil of our race mind, and it is our
privilege to appropriate and
incorporate these precious elements
into our mind and body.
The body of Christ Jesus
is not to be subject to permanent
disintegration and death; in the
creative processes of God it must be
made part of our redeemed body and
restored to its parent source, the
Christ. As He said, "Therefore doth the
Father love me, because I lay down my
life, that I may take it
again."
Here also we have made
clear the mystery of salvation through
the blood of Christ. It is not a
miracle nor a personal sacrifice, but a
meeting of a crisis in the race
evolution by the transfusion of life
from a Father to His perishing
children. Understanding this in the
sense of its scientific reality should
make us every one more energetic in
taking advantage of our only means of
escape from the ills of the flesh and
insuring our ultimate salvation. "Pray
that ye enter not into temptation" is
translated by Fenton, "Pray, for fear
trial should overtake you." The same
idea is brought out in the Lord's
Prayer, which in the King James Version
reads, "Lead us not into temptation,"
but which, according to good
authorities should be, "You would not
lead us into temptation, nor forsake us
in trial." The petition is for strength
to overcome trial.
As Paul so tellingly
wrote to the Philippians: "Finally,
brethren, whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honorable,
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
things are pure, whatsoever things are
lovely, whatsoever things are of good
report; if there be any virtue, and if
there be any praise, think on these
things."
