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The First Coming of Jesus Christ

By Kurt Simons | May 19, 2007

1. The fundamental teaching of both His First and Second Comings is that
God - that is, the Lord God Jesus Christ - is a person, one person. Like us, who
were created “in His image” (Genesis 1:27) and “likeness” (Genesis 5:1). He
has a soul - Jehovah (or Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddi, etc.) in the Old Testament
and the Father (or I Am, Ancient of Days, etc.) in the New, and a body that
came to earth, Jesus Christ. All those names refer, body and soul, to the same
Person. That Person has a spiritual influence on us, and on everything else in
creation, termed in the teachings of the Second Coming the “Divine
Proceeding.” That influence, that “proceeding,” is typically translated in
the Bible as the Holy “Spirit,” but the actual word used in the New
Testament is Pneuma, which is Greek for “breath,” in keeping with such
teachings as Genesis 2: 7, Psalm 33: 6, and John 20: 22. This “Holy Breath,”
or influence on the world, is from that same one Person, Jesus Christ. (Note
that the Holy Spirit is never mentioned in the Old Testament since it couldn’t
exist until Jesus came.)

2. Jesus Christ, in the teachings of His Second Coming, has also told us that
He is not simply loving, but love itself, and the origin of our ability to love,
since, again, He created us in His “image” (Genesis 1: 27). However, the
fundamental nature of true love is that it is reciprocal. So God’s “motive” for
creation wasn’t just to make a universe full of people whom He could love; He
also wanted them to love Him in return. But He faced a logical problem: If He
created people so they had to love Him, they would be robots programmed to
love Him and He would just be loving Himself by remote control. His elegant
solution to this problem was to create us in spiritual free will. It was to make
that free will possible that He created the physical universe. A key part of
that free will is our ability to believe in Him or not. In the spiritual universe
He is blatantly obvious everywhere. However, in the physical universe, we are
free to either see Him in every star and blade of grass, or to see existence as
a random molecular accident. More to the point, we are free to either learn
to love good, and so love God in return, or to develop a love of evil and try to
turn our back on His love.

Those who get in the habit of loving and following Jesus in this life will
continue to love Him after death, where they will choose - still in free will -
to go to heaven. Those who have done their best to live by their principles but
who have not known Jesus will also choose heaven. People who want to stay
in evil after death can’t stand heaven, however, so Jesus allows them to
choose hell instead, where they also live forever. Hell is the final
demonstration of the greatness of His love. As C.S. Lewis observed, “Hell is
[God’s] last service to those who will allow him to do nothing better for
them.” (C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress) “I believe that the damned are
rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” (C.S.
Lewis, The Problem of Pain). So Jesus allows people to choose what they
think will make them happy even when He knows they are making a mistake,
in this case an eternal one. But He never stops loving them, even when they
turn away from Him - “ “If I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there.”
(Psalm 139:8) Jesus still loves them, but He won’t violate their free will and
take them back out of hell because if He short-circuited their free will He
would destroy them as individuals.

3. Clearly, the God of the universe would not come to our tiny speck of a
planet unless there was a profoundly good reason. From the time of the “fall”
in the early days of the human race’s history, people had gotten into evil, as
demonstrated at great length in the stories of the Old Testament. So many
people did this that, over time, the human race as a whole developed an evil
heredity in the spiritual plane that was passed on from generation to
generation just like physical heredity is passed on in the natural plane. This
evil heredity grew steadily worse over the generations until, by the time of
Christ, it was interfering with free will itself. A key indication of how bad
things were is found in the accounts in the Gospels of people being possessed
by evil spirits - i.e. taken over by such spirits who over-rode their free will
(e.g. Luke 8, Mark 9, 16: 9 Matthew 4). If nothing had been done about this
situation, the time would have come when everyone on earth would have
been so possessed and gone to hell. Ultimately, in fact, the human race’s
heredity would have become so evil that the human race would have died out
on the physical plane as well. A similar situation had happened once before on
a smaller scale, in the story of the Genesis flood, which was a symbolic story
about people spiritually drowning in a flood of evil at that time. But the
situation at the time of Jesus’ birth was far worse, bad enough to cause God
Himself to take on human form and come to earth.

How the First Coming Worked

So God needed to save our spiritual freedom by removing the bias toward evil
caused by that accumulated evil heredity. How? The obvious answer would
appear to be that God can do anything, so He could have used His Divine
power to reset the balance between good and evil. But it’s not that simple. If
He did that, He would be violating that spiritual free will that is fundamental
to meaningful human existence. Specifically, He would be interfering with the
free will of the people who had chosen the evil that created this problem.
God would never go against His own rules of creation. In fact, He can’t, since
they are part of Him. There is also the logical problem that if God had to
break His own rules of creation to fix this situation, that would mean that He
had made a mistake in setting up those rules in the first place, which would
be impossible since He knows the future. (Since He is outside time and space
as well as within it, to Him all time, including the future, is now.)

What God did do was to come to earth as not just the son of God (e.g. Mark
15: 39) but also the Son of Man (e.g. Matthew 16:13, 27), with the Son of Man
part having the human race’s evil heredity. In other words, He was conceived
and born like any human baby. Every baby receives a soul from God via the
father’s seed and a series of coverings for that soul, including a body, from
the mother’s seed. What was different in Christ’s case is that the soul was
God, Jehovah. Although, we are told, Mary was a good woman personally, her
role in this process was to provide Jesus with the same evil heredity that the
rest of the human race had at that point. Getting access to that heredity, in
other words, is the reason He had to have a human mother.

The significance of Jesus having a human “half” from Mary was that the hells
who were causing all that widespread evil in the world could never have
gotten anywhere near the Divine Itself. But they could attack and tempt the
human part of Jesus, just as they attack all other human beings. And
attacking that part of Him is just what He allowed them to do. In fact, He set
up a huge back-and-forth cycle: The first step was that He would allow the
hells to attack His human part - and they did this from the day of His birth,
long before the events of the Easter story. (In fact, the whole Biblical Easter
story is just an iceberg tip, only hinting at the huge spiritual events going on
then.) In order for these hell attacks and temptations to work, His human part
had to some extent lose awareness of the Divine within Him. In other words,
at those times He would enter into a state of obscurity. The teachings of the
Second Coming call this the state of “exinanition,” or being “poured out,”
prophesied in Isaiah 53:12. When He was in this Son of Man “obscurity mode,”
He spoke of or prayed to the Father as if that was someone else (e.g. Matthew
16: 16, John 14: 6, 28). It seems incredible that Jesus could fall into such
obscurity, but that’s what His human half had to do to make possible the
equally incredible process of the hells tempting God.

After Jesus let some of the hells tempt Him, He would overcome the
temptation and, as He did so, He would get that part of hell back under
control and stop it biasing people toward evil. He did this spiritual
housecleaning by means of the power of His Divine soul. When He was in this
“clarity” or “overcoming” mode He was fully aware that “I and my Father are
one” (Matthew 23: 9, Mark 12: 29, 32; John 8: 58; 10:30; 14: 7-9; 19: 39; 20:
28). He was in this mode when He performed His miracles (True Christian
Religion 104).

As Jesus went through this temptation-overcoming and obscurity-clarity cycle

again and again, and the hells were one after another put in their place,
Jesus’ clarity mode became more and more predominant. Finally, when He
had put the hells back in order, He became fully “glorified” (e.g. as in John
13:31-2, as opposed to His earlier statement that He was not yet glorified
(John 7: 39)) and He became clear all the time Who He was - God incarnate.
This full and final awareness was indicated by His final statement on this
matter in His final appearance to His disciples after the resurrection, that “all
power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18).

People sometimes wonder what exactly happened to Christ’s body in the

tomb. The teachings of the Second Coming reveal that His body’s
disappearance was the final component of Jesus’ glorification process. All
during that process He was replacing His physical human substance with
Divine Human substance. This process has been compared to having a linen
handkerchief in which you replace the linen threads, one at a time, with
threads of gold. All the way through the conversion process, the handkerchief
remains intact, but at the end it has been completely changed, from linen to
gold. Similarly, all the way through His life on earth (i.e., not just during the
last three years), the Divine soul in Christ was steadily replacing Christ’s
human substance with Divine substance. At the end, as Mary and the others
saw in the tomb, the physical human substance simply ceased to exist,
presumably because it no longer received the inflowing power from the
Father/Divine soul that is needed to keep matter in existence every moment
on the physical (as well as spiritual) plane (see Correspondences. The Great
Lost Secret). The Divine substance of His body was thus “glorified” into
heaven, with no physical “left-over.”

Implications

The glorification process that Jesus went through at the First Coming
fundamentally changed the way people could relate to Him. Until He came,
people had never seen God directly. As illustrated in many stories in the Old
Testament, He communicated with people in this world either by means of a
prophet or leader, or by temporarily speaking through an angel. Such an angel
of God (more accurately translated “angel of Jehovah”) appeared to people
directly or in dreams. Recall such an angel calling Hagar (Genesis 21: 17) and
Gideon (Judges 6), or the angel who announced the birth of John the Baptist
to Zacharias (Luke 1). By coming to earth and showing Himself in a human
form and then reuniting that form with His Divine soul, Jesus opened up a new
way of relating to Him in a direct and personal way. This is what the apostles
saw, so dramatically, on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 7:2). It means
that we are no longer to think of Him as the kind of mysterious and distant
force of the Old Testament, or even as a Person we can only conceive of in
some high and distant way. Jesus is as human as He was on earth, but now a
Divine human. He is as caring, friendly, and approachable as He was while He
was on earth. Because He is Divine, He can relate closely and personally to
every individual person in the entire created universe, on both the natural
and spiritual levels. In fact, He created us because of His will and ability to
have such relationships and express His love for us. As with all aspects of His
life, Jesus has told us of His battle with evil human heredity as a model that
we can follow. In our case, if we ask Him to help us remove evil from our
lives, we can pass on a spiritual heredity to our children that contains less evil
than we inherited - a wonderful gift!

While we can no longer see Jesus in person the way the Apostles did, the
teachings of the Second Coming tell us, surprisingly, that we can now
communicate more fully with Him than they could. This is because the
Apostles, who were simple people, only dimly understood who Jesus really
was and what He had come to do. Only at the end of His life on earth, and in
His appearances to them after He rose from the tomb, did they begin to
realize that He wasn’t just a secular leader. Even then, they never had the
scope, the potential, for understanding Him now open to us in teachings of
the First and Second Comings. (There is one exception, however. There is
reason to think that Jesus explained some of what would later be revealed at
the Second Coming when He interpreted His life for the two disciples on the
road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27). The disciples already knew the events of His
life, so it seems likely that He explained the deeper aspects of His coming.)
So, with this new gift of understanding resulting from both Comings, we can
relate to Jesus Christ in a deep and personal way. He has communicated with
us in His Word, the Second Advent Christian Bible, in enormous detail. He has
told us about Himself and the universe as well as, most importantly, how to
develop that love for and with Him that was the purpose of the creation of
that universe. We know more about all these things than any people since the
beginning of history. Love and communication are reciprocal: God
communicates with us from love, and we can talk with Him in our prayers. His
answers are more subtle now than they were when He spoke from the burning
bush or by the Sea of Galilee, but His subtlety shows His care for our free will.
His answers are real.

For Further Reading

From the Books of the Second Coming

Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom - The big-
picture explanation of God as He is in Himself, of how He appears in the
spiritual world, and of the mechanics of creation at its different levels.

Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Providence - God runs the universe by
a set of laws, on the spiritual level as well as on the physical level. Life does
make sense, and God always has a plan for us, no matter what happens, even
if we don’t always see or understand it.

The True Christian Religion, Containing the Universal Theology of the New
Church Foretold by the Lord in Daniel 7; 13, 14; and in Revelation 21; 1, 2 -
Along with many other topics, a review of God, with emphasis on His
infinity/eternity, how He helps us out spiritually, and how free will works.

The Doctrine of New Jerusalem Concerning the Lord - A brief review of the
teachings on the Lord God Jesus Christ, with extensive citations from
Scripture.

Other Titles

C. Giles Reflections on Jesus Christ - An inspiring review of the background

and logic of the First Coming.