The Later Adult Life of Jesus

129:4.1To the on­look­ing ce­les­tial in­tel­li­gences of the lo­cal uni­verse, this Med­i­ter­ra­nean trip was the most en­thralling of all Je­sus’ earth ex­pe­ri­ences, at least of all his ca­reer right up to the event of his cru­ci­fix­ion and mor­tal death. This was the fas­ci­nat­ing pe­riod of his per­sonal min­istry in con­trast with the soon-fol­low­ing epoch of pub­lic min­istry. This unique episode was all the more en­gross­ing be­cause he was at this time still the car­pen­ter of Naz­a­reth, the boat­builder of Ca­per­naum, the scribe of Da­mas­cus; he was still the Son of Man. He had not yet achieved the com­plete mas­tery of his hu­man mind; the Ad­juster had not fully mas­tered and coun­ter­parted the mor­tal iden­tity. He was still a man among men.

129:4.2The purely hu­man re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence—the per­sonal spir­i­tual growth—of the Son of Man well-nigh reached the apex of at­tain­ment dur­ing this, the twenty-ninth year. This ex­pe­ri­ence of spir­i­tual de­vel­op­ment was a con­sis­tently grad­ual growth from the mo­ment of the ar­rival of his Thought Ad­juster un­til the day of the com­ple­tion and con­fir­ma­tion of that nat­u­ral and nor­mal hu­man re­la­tion­ship be­tween the ma­te­rial mind of man and the mind-en­dow­ment of the spirit—the phe­nom­e­non of the mak­ing of these two minds one, the ex­pe­ri­ence which the Son of Man at­tained in com­ple­tion and fi­nal­ity, as an in­car­nated mor­tal of the realm, on the day of his bap­tism in the Jor­dan.

129:4.3Through­out these years, while he did not ap­pear to en­gage in so many sea­sons of for­mal com­mu­nion with his Fa­ther in heaven, he per­fected in­creas­ingly ef­fec­tive meth­ods of per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the in­dwelling spirit pres­ence of the Par­a­dise Fa­ther. He lived a real life, a full life, and a truly nor­mal, nat­u­ral, and av­er­age life in the flesh. He knows from per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence the equiv­a­lent of the ac­tu­al­ity of the en­tire sum and sub­stance of the liv­ing of the life of hu­man be­ings on the ma­te­rial worlds of time and space.

129:4.4The Son of Man ex­pe­ri­enced those wide ranges of hu­man emo­tion which reach from su­perb joy to pro­found sor­row. He was a child of joy and a be­ing of rare good hu­mor; like­wise was he a “man of sor­rows and ac­quainted with grief.” In a spir­i­tual sense, he did live through the mor­tal life from the bot­tom to the top, from the be­gin­ning to the end. From a ma­te­rial point of view, he might ap­pear to have es­caped liv­ing through both so­cial ex­tremes of hu­man ex­is­tence, but in­tel­lec­tu­ally he be­came wholly fa­mil­iar with the en­tire and com­plete ex­pe­ri­ence of hu­mankind.

129:4.5Je­sus knows about the thoughts and feel­ings, the urges and im­pulses, of the evo­lu­tion­ary and as­cen­dant mor­tals of the realms, from birth to death. He has lived the hu­man life from the be­gin­nings of phys­i­cal, in­tel­lec­tual, and spir­i­tual self­hood up through in­fancy, child­hood, youth, and adult­hood—even to the hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence of death. He not only passed through these usual and fa­mil­iar hu­man pe­ri­ods of in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual ad­vance­ment, but he also fully ex­pe­ri­enced those higher and more ad­vanced phases of hu­man and Ad­juster rec­on­cil­i­a­tion which so few Uran­tia mor­tals ever at­tain. And thus he ex­pe­ri­enced the full life of mor­tal man, not only as it is lived on your world, but also as it is lived on all other evo­lu­tion­ary worlds of time and space, even on the high­est and most ad­vanced of all the worlds set­tled in light and life.

129:4.6Al­though this per­fect life which he lived in the like­ness of mor­tal flesh may not have re­ceived the un­qual­i­fied and uni­ver­sal ap­proval of his fel­low mor­tals, those who chanced to be his con­tem­po­raries on earth, still, the life which Je­sus of Naz­a­reth lived in the flesh and on Uran­tia did re­ceive full and un­qual­i­fied ac­cep­tance by the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther as con­sti­tut­ing at one and the same time, and in one and the same per­son­al­ity-life, the full­ness of the rev­e­la­tion of the eter­nal God to mor­tal man and the pre­sen­ta­tion of per­fected hu­man per­son­al­ity to the sat­is­fac­tion of the In­fi­nite Cre­ator.

129:4.7And this was his true and su­preme pur­pose. He did not come down to live on Uran­tia as the per­fect and de­tailed ex­am­ple for any child or adult, any man or woman, in that age or any other. True it is, in­deed, that in his full, rich, beau­ti­ful, and no­ble life we may all find much that is ex­qui­sitely ex­em­plary, di­vinely in­spir­ing, but this is be­cause he lived a true and gen­uinely hu­man life. Je­sus did not live his life on earth in or­der to set an ex­am­ple for all other hu­man be­ings to copy. He lived this life in the flesh by the same mercy min­istry that you all may live your lives on earth; and as he lived his mor­tal life in his day and as he was, so did he thereby set the ex­am­ple for all of us thus to live our lives in our day and as we are. You may not as­pire to live his life, but you can re­solve to live your lives even as, and by the same means that, he lived his. Je­sus may not be the tech­ni­cal and de­tailed ex­am­ple for all the mor­tals of all ages on all the realms of this lo­cal uni­verse, but he is ev­er­last­ingly the in­spi­ra­tion and guide of all Par­a­dise pil­grims from the worlds of ini­tial as­cen­sion up through a uni­verse of uni­verses and on through Ha­vona to Par­a­dise. Je­sus is the new and liv­ing way from man to God, from the par­tial to the per­fect, from the earthly to the heav­enly, from time to eter­nity.

129:4.8By the end of the twenty-ninth year Je­sus of Naz­a­reth had vir­tu­ally fin­ished the liv­ing of the life re­quired of mor­tals as so­journ­ers in the flesh. He came on earth the full­ness of God to be man­i­fest to man; he had now be­come well-nigh the per­fec­tion of man await­ing the oc­ca­sion to be­come man­i­fest to God. And he did all of this be­fore he was thirty years of age.