Baptism and the Forty Days

136:7.1Hav­ing made his de­ci­sions re­gard­ing such mat­ters as food and phys­i­cal min­is­tra­tion to the needs of his ma­te­rial body, the care of the health of him­self and his as­so­ciates, there re­mained yet other prob­lems to solve. What would be his at­ti­tude when con­fronted by per­sonal dan­ger? He de­cided to ex­er­cise nor­mal watch­care over his hu­man safety and to take rea­son­able pre­cau­tion to pre­vent the un­timely ter­mi­na­tion of his ca­reer in the flesh but to re­frain from all super­hu­man in­ter­ven­tion when the cri­sis of his life in the flesh should come. As he was for­mu­lat­ing this de­ci­sion, Je­sus was seated un­der the shade of a tree on an over­hang­ing ledge of rock with a precipice right there be­fore him. He fully re­al­ized that he could cast him­self off the ledge and out into space, and that noth­ing could hap­pen to harm him pro­vided he would re­scind his first great de­ci­sion not to in­voke the in­ter­po­si­tion of his ce­les­tial in­tel­li­gences in the pros­e­cu­tion of his life­work on Uran­tia, and pro­vided he would ab­ro­gate his sec­ond de­ci­sion con­cern­ing his at­ti­tude to­ward self-preser­va­tion.

136:7.2Je­sus knew his fel­low coun­try­men were ex­pect­ing a Mes­siah who would be above nat­u­ral law. Well had he been taught that Scrip­ture: “There shall no evil be­fall you, nei­ther shall any plague come near your dwell­ing. For he shall give his an­gels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you up in their hands lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Would this sort of pre­sump­tion, this de­fi­ance of his Fa­ther’s laws of grav­ity, be jus­ti­fied in or­der to pro­tect him­self from pos­si­ble harm or, per­chance, to win the con­fi­dence of his mis­taught and dis­tracted peo­ple? But such a course, how­ever grat­i­fy­ing to the sign-seek­ing Jews, would be, not a rev­e­la­tion of his Fa­ther, but a ques­tion­able tri­fling with the es­tab­lished laws of the uni­verse of uni­verses.

136:7.3Un­der­stand­ing all of this and know­ing that the Mas­ter re­fused to work in de­fi­ance of his es­tab­lished laws of na­ture in so far as his per­sonal con­duct was con­cerned, you know of a cer­tainty that he never walked on the wa­ter nor did any­thing else which was an out­rage to his ma­te­rial or­der of ad­min­is­ter­ing the world; al­ways, of course, bear­ing in mind that there had, as yet, been found no way whereby he could be wholly de­liv­ered from the lack of con­trol over the el­e­ment of time in con­nec­tion with those mat­ters put un­der the ju­ris­dic­tion of the Per­son­al­ized Ad­juster.

136:7.4Through­out his en­tire earth life Je­sus was con­sis­tently loyal to this de­ci­sion. No mat­ter whether the Phar­isees taunted him for a sign, or the watch­ers at Cal­vary dared him to come down from the cross, he stead­fastly ad­hered to the de­ci­sion of this hour on the hill­side.