By Santiago Kneeland
New conclusions have arrived!!!
One of the biggest challenges in presenting “not your grandma’s Jesus” has been to bring new information about his life. Nevertheless, this can seem like a fictional novel if we lack the context. What we the Urantia Book readers have come to appreciate about this revelation is the universal context of Jesus… Michael of Nebadon.
We understand that he’s not part of the original Trinity as traditional Christian religions have taught us, but rather a Creator Son who springs from the mind of the Eternal Son (the second person in the Trinity) and the Universal Father. As a Creator Son, he hails from Paradise, and together with the Divine Minister, envisioned and created our local universe. Part of the process of claiming full authority and sovereignty over their created universe, the Creator Sons have to go through a process of 7 bestowal missions; becoming the creatures they’ve created in order to experience the universe through them.
Another important aspect of the incarnation of Michael as Jesus is that he chose this planet as the battleground against Lucifer, in order to quelch the rebellion. Here’s where he faced the prince of inequity to “put him behind bars” and stop the rampant misconception he was spreading.
Finally, his personal desire to teach the mortals of this world that God is a loving Father, and not a vengeful overlord that demands our worship for mere satisfaction. That, as sons of the father and part of his universal family, we’re all loved. We can establish a personal relationship with God, and just as we strive to know him and become perfect like him, he experiences his universe through us. So, both God and Man have a mutual longing for each other.
The writing team believes that this is crucial for the retelling of Jesus’s sojourn on this world. The context of this “galactic” or “extraterrestrial” information brings to the story is crucial, if we want to understand his nature and purpose on this planet. This dispels erroneous concepts, such as the atonement, in which he’s portrayed as a sacrificial lamb for the redemption of our sins. That God so loved the world that he sacrificed his own son? What kind of father is that?
The work that we’re developing includes scenes that are “out of this world,” and that talk about these topics. It even presents the Divine Minister as Michael’s partner in the creation and administration of the local universe, which we believe will turn heads (especially young ones). We, as Urantia Book readers, have come to embrace it as the fifth epochal revelation because it “just makes sense!” Many of us are non practicing Christians, or may have even been disenfranchised from the church because we couldn’t reconcile the discrepancies that are in the Bible or religious dogma. We believe that if we settle the score and tie the loose ends that traditional Christianity tells us about God and Jesus, we will help people to better understand themselves, their relationship with God and their eternal destiny.
We’re very excited about these conclusions, and feel that we’ll be dispelling incongruencies that drive people to look elsewhere to find God, and not through Jesus and his life. Now that we’ve reached these conclusions, we’re ready to develop the plotline and screenplay for the first season of the Life and Teachings of Jesus.
