IN THE NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES of a more typical evolutionary world, what is related here would be nothing you hadn’t already heard before, much less, controversial. But our world is anything but normal. Here, on our world, there is more or less abject confusion and ignorance of true cosmology— the ways and means of a universe of Spirit. As it is, the very idea of spiritual revelation generally lies submerged somewhere in the relative stagnation of religious traditions; its living truth succumbing to the confusing muddle of man’s fumbling evolutionary interpretations.
But Revelation is itself evolutionary in its bestowals, and throughout our history, revelations of religion have been successively more enlightening. Revelation propounded in the spirit world periodically sorts and censors the religions of evolution. To be effective, Revelation must portray teachings which are not too far removed from the thought of the age in which they are presented; in this way it is always in touch with evolution, and a part of cultural, positive, global change.
There are two basic reasons for believing in a God who fosters personal human survival:
1. Human experience, personal assurance, the somehow registered hope and trust initiated by the Indwelling Spirit.
2. The revelation of truth— whether by direct personal ministry of the Spirit of Truth—by the world bestowal of divine Sons, or through the revelations of the written word.
Revelation, as an epochal phenomenon, is periodic; as a personal human experience, it is continuous. Truth is always a revelation: “autorevelation”— the product of your own personal insight— when it emerges as a result of the work of the Indwelling Spirit; and “epochal revelation”— when it is presented by the function of some other celestial agency, group, or personality.
There have been only five events of religious revelation of “epochal significance,” i.e., revelations which were propounded by, and in, the higher spiritual realm and made manifest in our world.
1. The true concept of the First Source and Center was first promulgated on our world by a corps of one hundred corporeal spiritual beings. These were called the Dalamatian teachings. This expanding revelation of Deity went on for more than three hundred thousand years, until it was suddenly terminated by the planetary secession associated with what became known as the Lucifer Rebellion, and the resulting disruption of the teaching regime. The influence of the Dalamatian revelation was practically lost to the whole world. Of those who received those teachings, the red men held them longest, but the idea of the Great Spirit was a hazy concept in Amerindian religion when it was greatly clarified and strengthened through contact with Christianity.
2. Adam and Eve (corporeal spiritual beings— not the first two human beings) again portrayed the concept of the Father of all to the evolutionary peoples. These were the Edenic teachings. The disruption of the garden of Eden halted the course of the Adamic revelation before it had ever fully started. The aborted teachings of Adam were carried on by the Sethite priests, and some of these truths have never been entirely lost to the world. The entire trend of Levantine religious evolution was modified by the teachings of the Sethites. But by 2500 B.C. mankind had largely lost sight of the revelation sponsored in the days of Eden.
3. Melchizedek of Salem, a spiritual being invested in corporeal form, inaugurated the third revelation of truth on our world during the times of Abraham. The cardinal precepts of his teachings were trust and faith. He taught trust in the omnipotent beneficence of God and proclaimed that faith was the act by which men earned God’s favor. His teachings gradually commingled with the beliefs and practices of various evolutionary religions, and developed into those theologic systems present at the opening of the first millennium after Christ.
4. Jesus of Nazareth was— is— a spiritual Creator Son, and the creator of our “local universe.” He incarnated in human form in 7 BC, and presented for the fourth time the concept of God as the Universal Father, and this teaching has generally persisted ever since. The essence of his teaching was love and service, the loving worship which a creature son voluntarily gives in recognition of, and response to, the loving ministry of God his Father; the freewill service which such creature sons bestow upon their brethren in the joyous realization that in this service they are likewise serving God the Father.
5. “The Urantia Papers constitute the most recent epochal presentation of truth to the mortals of Urantia. These papers differ from all previous epochal revelations, in that they are not the work of a single universe personality, but a composite presentation by many beings. But no revelation— short of the actual attainment of the Universal Father—can ever be complete. All other celestial ministrations are no more than partial, transient, and practically adapted to local conditions in time and space. While such admissions as this may possibly detract from the immediate force and authority of epochal revelation, the “time has arrived on Urantia when it is advisable to make such frank statements, even at the risk of weakening the future influence and authority of the most recent of the revelations of truth to the mortal races of Urantia.”
