In Jesus Christ history reaches its end. The end it reaches is, paradoxically, a new beginning. In his life, death, and resurrection, mankind exhibited the purpose of its existence. For this kind of man, appearing in Christ's historic experience, was all creation conceived in the providence of God from the beginning. Man reaches his summit in Jesus, and in him all humanity finds meaning and purpose. In him mercy and judgment are met together. Not only does man find his end in Jesus, but his renewal and redemption also. The resurrection of Christ demonstrated that the material world and man's being itself are capable of anew and eternal dimension of existence. By faith that new and eternal life may be appropriated by all through repentance-and, what is more significant, in such faith is found the power to repent.

The prophets looked forward in Messianic zeal to a reign of righteousness which would end the moral ambiguities of history. Then the enmity of men and beasts would cease, and each man would long enjoy the fruits of his own labor. No more would the wicked triumph and drive the righteous to the wall. At best they hoped the righteous Israel would be given a new heart and so deserve their victory over godless powers.

In our day it is expected by many who cling to the dogma of historical progression that enlightenment and education and dear-bought experiences, together with science, will gradually overcome the mutations of time and in the end overcome the moral and spiritual ambiguities it contains. Men will grow less selfish and more kind as time goes by.

But neither of these alternatives is quite true to the testimony of our Lord. In the first place, not only must the chosen people be a choosing people, but they must be willing to recognize that sacrificial suffering alone is the instrument by which history can be redeemed. As their Lord, who issued a New Testament in his blood, his people must be willing to be "crucified with him." No action is fully Christian and redemptive that is done solely with the hope of future reward, or squaring accounts, or the avoidance of punishment. In Jesus, the just live by faith in the power of love to win answering love, and persist in the revelation of that love without thought of justice and at whatever the cost.

On the other hand, our Lord recognized the inviolability of human freedom and even asks the question, "When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" To the harvest of time the tares grow with the wheat. Great structures of infidelity and idolatry will be abroad when he shall return, and these will be broken down by a display of divine power augmenting natural forces. Both the just-rewards idea and the progressive theory are out of harmony with the spirit of prophecy because both misconceive the nature of man. And the nature of man cannot be properly evaluated without the continuing revelation of Jesus Christ. No human philosophy has ever arrived at the conclusion embodied in the life of Jesus-namely, that he is the divine offering of God's mercy to enable a sin-sick world to overcome its sins.

The Revelation of Love

No one can deny that judgment hangs over the history of man-judgment in the form of consequences brought upon courses of conduct. But only the testimony of Jesus enables us to see in such judgment the never failing love of God, of a God who suffers for our sakes and with us, and who at the point of his most intense suffering offers us his own power with which we may be made new. In this regard we may remember the wonderful promise concerning our day made through Nephi.

And blessed are they who shall seek to bring forth my Zion at that day, for they shall have the gift and the power of the Holy Ghost; and if they endure unto the end, they shall be lifted up at the last day, and shall be saved in the everlasting kingdom of the Lamb; and whoso shall publish peace, yea, tidings of great joy, how beautiful upon the mountains shall they be. -Book of Mormon, I Nephi 3: 187-189

To what "end" are the seekers after Zion to endure? The end reached by our Lord, when he said, "It is finished." "Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end." The "end" came when love did all that it could do to reveal to men the meaning of their own lives. If Zion endures to that end-she shall be "lifted up" at the last day.

Baptism

The revelation of Christ discloses him to be the end and the beginning-the Alpha and Omega of time. The events of his life are not merely events without significance, but principles with a promise-words of eternal wisdom. If those principles are apprehended by faith as a way of life, and not merely as a mode of thought, then they become embodied again in each human being so apprehending them. Every act and word forming the content of his life would display that total meaning which is the frame of reference in which all acts and all words of all men find their end. What, for instance, is the meaning of baptism? Tremendous significance must be attached to it if what we have said above is true. Jesus was baptized. He was immersed by John in Jordan. Here was humanity acknowledging in him its need for death, cleansing, and resurrection. This was the fulfillment of all righteousness. It still is. Thus may every man receive acknowledgment of his sonship with God. From the days of Adam this was true.

And it came to pass, when the Lord had spoken with Adam our father, that Adam cried unto the Lord, and he was caught away by the Spirit of the Lord, and was carried down into the water, and was laid under the water, and was brought forth out of the water; and thus he was baptized. And the Spirit of God descended upon him, and thus he was born of the Spirit, and became quickened in the inner man. And he heard a voice out of heaven, saying, Thou art baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost; this is the record of the Father and the Son, from hence forth and for ever; and thou art after the order of him who was without beginning of days or end of years, from all eternity to all eternity. Behold, thou art one in me, a son of God; and thus may all become my sons. Amen. -Genesis 6: 67-71, Inspired Version.

Miracles

The miracles of Jesus attest the fact that indeed the kingdom of truth had come to men. We think of the man born blind. "Who sinned?" asked the disciples. The answer Jesus gave was that his blindness was part of a redemptive purpose that the works of God should be manifest. All of us are blind to some extent. We need the touch of the Master-and sometimes his second touch. The work of Freud, Jung, and others has confirmed the fact that in the abyss of the individual's unconsciousness there are blind and irrational forces at work. Only the light of Christ can give these forces intelligent direction. Only he can give sight to the blind. So the man born blind might well stand for all of us. Christ's touch healed him. The "accidents" of nature yield to his touch and become the occasion of his glory. When we think of what he did and of what happened to him, remembering that he is the truth-the eternal truth-we are amazed at the depth of his wisdom, and humbled at the revelation of the future that dwells in him.

Judas betrayed him. But Jesus permitted it, and even protected him in this deed by keeping from the others the dark purpose he knew lurked in his betrayer's soul. For what might have transpired if Peter had known why Judas left the Passover? So God always respects man's agency and abides by the consequences such betrayal entails. He will not save himself, for in so doing he would have no power to save others. But we see that such betrayal issues in remorse for the betrayer and the pieces of silver have no attraction when Christ dies in the soul, as the fate of Iscariot declares.

His Passion and Death

The wicked men under the law were not the ones who sought his destruction. They were crucified with him. It was those who were justified by the code who killed him-the "respectables." The Roman system of jurisprudence was supposed to be the highest ever produced by man. But it was shown to be utterly inadequate when confronted by the kingdom of truth in the person of our Lord. The structures of justice which men produce from their own historical experience are unable to save the best of men from the hideous thrust of pride and self-will. Pilate tried unsuccessfully to escape responsibility by a public display of handwashing and thought the Jews would be satisfied with a scourging. But his sin was that of every politician who sacrifices truth to the considerations of office. The judgment hall of Pilate became the judgment hall of Jesus when Pilate faced him. It was Pilate who was on trial at this confrontation. So it is in every court of law in every age. Anxiety beset Pilate, and anxiety is a mark of sin. The priestly class who were implicated in the crucifixion sought to preserve a tradition they thought perfect against a usurper. But the tradition they sought to preserve became the focal point of a false thrust of pride against the truth. It was not the tradition, but their own standing with the people that they were anxious about. What a terrible judgment has befallen them! "His blood be on us, and our children!" they cried. So it has been with the Christian tradition itself. And just as the Jerusalem of old was destroyed by those who held the Jews in bondage, so is every city ripe for destruction whose way of life crucifies the truth.

Jesus was crucified between two thieves. History produces two classes of people-sinners and repentant sinners. People who steal, and people who steal but recognize the Lordship of Jesus and are repentant. People steal constantly-even those most virtuous and right according to common consent. They steal the gifts of God and use them for their own purposes-purposes which seem right to them. They steal in the fact that they fail to give God his tithe. "Will a man rob God?" asks the people of the prophet. "Yes," comes the answer. Every nation which makes its own historical existence the center of history robs God. It robs him of his rightful Lordship in the universe, and when it comes to its end-as did the unrepentant thief-it goes into oblivion.

Those who repent, however, find from the fact of Calvary a promise of peace beyond history. History is completed from beyond history. Every attempt of man to find fulfillment in this life alone is doomed to failure, for "if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." There is no enduring future in time apart from the revelation of God. Repentance comes to men as they realize in the cross the depth of divine love and pity which puts an end to man's rebellion. "Lord-remember me!" That is the cry of repentance and that cry conditions the promise of future peace.

But on Calvary the Son of God also was crucified. He was judged worthy to die who was the source of the life that issued in such judgment. The world which was made by him was blind to the Lord of glory. They did not know him. He died because others were already dead-insensible to the principles of life and light which he epitomized. The Son of God died, and so dies every "son of God" when he is confronted by the ultimate choice in the struggle between life and death-between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God. He dies to this world and its glory, so demonstrating he is in reality eternally living. The cross enshrines the destiny of the church, which exists to make in its own life the sacrifice for others which Christ made for her. Such an institution has the power to pronounce pardon and minister peace to a dying world. No other institution has that power.

Good men are naturally anxious about the fate they may meet at the hands of wicked men, or the blind forces of nature. But whether they survive such things as evil men and erratic and untoward natural phenomena in this life is not ultimately important according to Jesus. It is not in time that such things are sorted out. Many good men may lose their lives by accidental means, and their loss seems without sense or significance. The rewards of goodness are not essentially on the temporal plane at all, and are surely not confined to time. The thing men have to be anxious to avoid is not an end to their temporal experience, but sin in the form of evil. And such sin can only be avoided and overcome by faith in Christ. To overcome man's recalcitrance and rebellion against God, to give man peace within himself, required the sacrifice of the cross. And the cross itself stands between time and eternity; and the manner in which one endures it determines his eternal destiny. So the cross is a prophecy for each disciple. Calvary itself is the prophecy of the end of the world.

The story of Jesus, which means so much to our understanding of history, was enshrined first in the faith of the Christian church. This story, presented in the Four Gospels, gives no feeling that Jesus was a mere intangible appearance of God-a theophany. Neither does it appear as the saga of some supernatural being who bridged the gap between temporal and spiritual, or between time and eternity. The story is part of the warp and woof of history itself. In Jesus the Eternal sustained a truly human history, with all its ambiguities and contradictions. The faith of the disciples constituted the invisible bond of fellowship which formed the Ecclesia. This faith was a gift from above, it is true, but that gift found its locus in the ministry of Jesus on the truly historical plane. Jesus was no ghost or phantom. Neither was he a superhuman being who was chosen to play a part. The church throve on the testimony of the eyewitnesses, as again and again events in the life of Jesus were told and retold, and as the Holy Ghost supplied the continuing presence of the Master.

To the Greeks it was foolishness to suppose that any human history could contain a final or complete revelation of God in any mode. They felt that history belonged to nature and nature was corrupt and rendered such revelation impossible. Man, they felt, contained a spark of the divine (reason or logos) imprisoned in nature, the human body, and this made such revelation unnecessary since death released the imprisoned logos. Today where men believe in the sure progression of history toward refinement and perfection, any thought of an absolute and ultimate perfection in the past which gives meaning to the future is intolerable. The Greeks thought the gospel foolishness. It is a scandal today. Those who speak the truth about the human situation are considered impolite by those who believe in the modern doctrine of historical progressivism. They resist the teaching of the cross that all their "respectability" is a sham, and their pride the source of all their folly. So far is the world a victim of its own pride, and so have men made false gods out of their own history, that revelation of the truth about Jesus Christ requires the operation of the Holy Spirit. Human reason motivated by human pride is essentially self-regarding. It will never yield its ground to recognize that once, in the past, the purpose of history was shown forth, and in Jesus something was done for men that men could never know needed doing apart from the testimony of the Spirit.

Peter's Confession and Denial

This is shown in the great confession of Peter:

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. -Matthew 16: 15-17

But it is one thing to receive such testimony as Peter received, and another to recognize that in the act of taking it, it is mistaken. To the revelation that he was indeed the Son of God, Peter added his own interpretation of the fact-namely, that Christ's suffering was to be no part of his mission. From that time forth began Jesus to tell the true nature of Messiahship.

Peter's knowledge was at that time incomplete. Unless knowledge of the divinity of Christ is matched by understanding of the nature of his Messiahship, conquest over the historical antichrists will not be complete. In fact, such knowledge in its complete sense may become the occasion of self-esteem and fashion a structure of pride and promote apostasy. This, in fact, is what happened in history. Men believed in Christ's divinity, but took the sword to enforce belief and dogma upon the "unconverted." And so an apostate body replaced the body of Christ.

This confession of Peter and his subsequent defection is a prophecy of the temptation to which all followers of Christ are subject. In so far as our church acknowledges that Jesus is Lord, it is his church. In so far as we refuse to see the essential glory of the cross and embody the principle of willing sacrifice in our social and individual life, we are sinful, and to that extent subject to the insecurities of human history.

But it is difficult to see how at the point in time at which Peter apprehended the Lordship of Jesus-namely, before the crucifixion-he could have reacted differently to the prophecy of the crucifixion. His weakness and recalcitrance were not fully overcome until after the atonement had actually been wrought out and he saw his folly for what it was. All the strength of the world, symbolized in Peter's sword, is weakness. Those who take the sword to defend the church perish with the sword in their hands. The impulse that motivates men to use force to defend the kingdom is alien to the kingdom. For the kingdom of God cannot be defended by violence. The "stone" cannot be "cut out" with hands. So the "weakness" of God revealed in the willing submission of Christ to his persecutors turns out to be, in reality, the strongest power in the universe. It is "mighty through God" to the subduing of "principalities and powers." After Calvary and the resurrection Peter was transformed, and even though his own crucifixion was foretold by Jesus, he never faltered.

The church is founded on the apostolic gift. "To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world." Paul asserts that no man calls Jesus Lord but by the Holy Ghost. When he made his appearance at Bountiful, Christ invited the multitude to experience the results of his suffering for themselves.

And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto them, saying, Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands, and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. -III Nephi 5: 14

On this foundation and on no other can men build a structure of meaning into their lives which will sustain them in every sacrificial endeavor necessary to the full realization of the kingdom of God. God "set" in the church "first" apostles-those who like Peter see in Jesus Christ the end of this world (this one) and the beginning of the new.

His Resurrection an Essential Symbol

This new world is prophesied in the resurrection of Christ and is in that resurrection achieved in principle. The fact of Christ's resurrection had to be established in the minds of his disciples even after he had risen. It seems that at least eight separate appearances to the disciples were necessary to establish firmly in their minds his supremacy over death. In the consciousness that "the Lord is risen indeed" the true nature of Christ was seen, and his victory over the ambiguities of history appreciated. This climaxed a series of self-disclosures by God, and constituted the turning point in Israel's history. Henceforth there was to be a new Israel, fashioned in a new covenant, and based not on lineal descent but on spiritual faith, Israel's history is renewed in Jesus and henceforth there is neither Jew nor Gentile (a distinction based on religion), bond or free (a distinction based on wealth), Greek or barbarian (a distinction based on race), male nor female (a distinction based on sex). All are one in Christ. "Except ye are one, ye are not mine." The resurrection sets the seal to the New Covenant, which is to be with no particular tribe or nation, but a "new Israel" gathered out of every nation under heaven. To that gathering all the powers of the spiritual world are committed. He shall send his angels before him to gather out the elect from every nation. And the elect are those who hear his voice and harden not their hearts.

Summary

If we may state briefly and in a somewhat logical form the propositions which seem to emerge from the total experience of Christ's earthly life, they would consist in part of the following:

Life is fragmentary. It ends in death. Human history devours its own children.

But man clings desperately to this life, feeling innately that life is very precious. Fearing death he seeks frantically to establish himself in time by extending his physical powers.

Life is really not what it seems to men. If men would really live they must die to self, and recognize that even here, in this principle, is absolutely no guarantee that their physical lives will be preserved.

All the insecurities and follies of history are traceable to the bondage which besets men because they fear death.

Death is the last enemy to be destroyed, and Christ teaches us the way in which it may be vanquished. His resurrection validates his teaching, finally, and is the prelude to the effusion of a new spirit in and through history.

The resurrection of Christ is a sure word of prophecy, indicating the resurrection of all men.The study of human behavior by psychiatry has in recent years yielded some startling facts which point to the significance of what Jesus did. Freud posited two basic instincts-Eros and Death. Rank asserts the whole history of mankind is intelligible only on the basis of a longing for immortality and the frustrations this longing meets in actual human experience. There is no doubt but what history may be fashioned in part by what men carry in the unconscious. From the deeps within each one of us arise those urges and constructs which affect our conduct. But Jesus "knew what was in man" and so did not trust himself to them. In him dwelt a divine consciousness or a consciousness of God which directed his path toward the supreme moment in history. The same consciousness may be ours by faith and repentance; and if it is, then the same type of creative action which Jesus displayed we may display also.

The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.