The Inner Life

had come to close the Old Testament, and give to the world a NEW TESTAMENT. This was necessary because men would be unable to harmonize his teachings with those of the men who wrote the scriptures. His teachings could not be put into the old bottles of thought, neither could his new ideas be successfully used to patch up the deficiencies of the wornout idealisms. The world needed to discard the old, and listen to the new teaching. Because, the words which he taught would be eternally true. They would remain true even though heaven and earth were obliterated. The new teachings were aromatic, changeless, and eternal.

Jesus challenged the world to take his teachings seriously. He began immediately to teach the fundamental truth regarding God and his universe. The basic truth was that of eternal at-one-ment. Men were to discard the old ideas and accept the new, because what they had been taught was not true. God was not separate from his universe. Man was not a wandering soul endeavoring to contact God, because the reverse was true. Jesus explained the atonement in very simple terms, yet they proved that the ideas contained in the Old Testament were paradoxical to the truth.

When we keep in mind that Jesus was a philosopher, and not a religionist, we have little difficulty with his teachings. But if we seek to harmonize his teachings with the religious viewpoints of the Old Testament Scriptures, we find it is impossible. His teachings were NEW, and for that reason they were paradoxical to what had gone before.

The simple statement regarding the atonement that Jesus gave on one occasion was “without me ye can do nothing.” In other words, man could not exist at all unless he was in direct contact with God.

This simple truth may seem harmless, and even uninteresting, yet it wrecked all the teachings of the priests of the temple ritual. God was not separate from his universe. God was not unapproachable, neither was He afar off. He was working WITHIN man—without Him we could do nothing. In reality, the kingdom of God was WITHIN, and not in some distant heaven or special location.