Machiventa Melchizedek

93:3.1With the pass­ing of a decade, Mel­chiz­e­dek or­ga­nized his schools at Salem, pat­tern­ing them on the olden sys­tem which had been de­vel­oped by the early Sethite priests of the sec­ond Eden. Even the idea of a tithing sys­tem, which was in­tro­duced by his later con­vert Abra­ham, was also de­rived from the lin­ger­ing tra­di­tions of the meth­ods of the an­cient Sethites.

93:3.2Mel­chiz­e­dek taught the con­cept of one God, a uni­ver­sal De­ity, but he al­lowed the peo­ple to as­so­ciate this teach­ing with the Con­stel­la­tion Fa­ther of Nor­la­ti­adek, whom he termed El Elyon—the Most High. Mel­chiz­e­dek re­mained all but silent as to the sta­tus of Lu­cifer and the state of af­fairs on Je­ru­sem. Lanaforge, the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign, had lit­tle to do with Uran­tia un­til af­ter the com­ple­tion of Mi­chael’s be­stowal. To a ma­jor­ity of the Salem stu­dents Eden­tia was heaven and the Most High was God.

93:3.3The sym­bol of the three con­cen­tric cir­cles, which Mel­chiz­e­dek adopted as the in­signia of his be­stowal, a ma­jor­ity of the peo­ple in­ter­preted as stand­ing for the three king­doms of men, an­gels, and God. And they were al­lowed to con­tinue in that be­lief; very few of his fol­low­ers ever knew that these three cir­cles were em­blem­atic of the in­fin­ity, eter­nity, and uni­ver­sal­ity of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity of di­vine main­te­nance and di­rec­tion; even Abra­ham rather re­garded this sym­bol as stand­ing for the three Most Highs of Eden­tia, as he had been in­structed that the three Most Highs func­tioned as one. To the ex­tent that Mel­chiz­e­dek taught the Trin­ity con­cept sym­bol­ized in his in­signia, he usu­ally as­so­ci­ated it with the three Vo­ron­da­dek rulers of the con­stel­la­tion of Nor­la­ti­adek.

93:3.4To the rank and file of his fol­low­ers he made no ef­fort to pre­sent teach­ing be­yond the fact of the ruler­ship of the Most Highs of Eden­tia—Gods of Uran­tia. But to some, Mel­chiz­e­dek taught ad­vanced truth, em­brac­ing the con­duct and or­ga­ni­za­tion of the lo­cal uni­verse, while to his bril­liant dis­ci­ple Nor­dan the Ken­ite and his band of earnest stu­dents he taught the truths of the super­uni­verse and even of Ha­vona.

93:3.5The mem­bers of the fam­ily of Ka­tro, with whom Mel­chiz­e­dek lived for more than thirty years, knew many of these higher truths and long per­pet­u­ated them in their fam­ily, even to the days of their il­lus­tri­ous de­scen­dant Moses, who thus had a com­pelling tra­di­tion of the days of Mel­chiz­e­dek handed down to him on this, his fa­ther’s side, as well as through other sources on his mother’s side.

93:3.6Mel­chiz­e­dek taught his fol­low­ers all they had ca­pac­ity to re­ceive and as­sim­i­late. Even many mod­ern re­li­gious ideas about heaven and earth, of man, God, and an­gels, are not far re­moved from these teach­ings of Mel­chiz­e­dek. But this great teacher sub­or­di­nated ev­ery­thing to the doc­trine of one God, a uni­verse De­ity, a heav­enly Cre­ator, a di­vine Fa­ther. Em­pha­sis was placed upon this teach­ing for the pur­pose of ap­peal­ing to man’s ado­ra­tion and of prepar­ing the way for the sub­se­quent ap­pear­ance of Mi­chael as the Son of this same Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

93:3.7Mel­chiz­e­dek taught that at some fu­ture time an­other Son of God would come in the flesh as he had come, but that he would be born of a woman; and that is why nu­mer­ous later teach­ers held that Je­sus was a priest, or min­is­ter, “for­ever af­ter the or­der of Mel­chiz­e­dek.”

93:3.8And thus did Mel­chiz­e­dek pre­pare the way and set the mono­the­is­tic stage of world ten­dency for the be­stowal of an ac­tual Par­a­dise Son of the one God, whom he so vividly por­trayed as the Fa­ther of all, and whom he rep­re­sented to Abra­ham as a God who would ac­cept man on the sim­ple terms of per­sonal faith. And Mi­chael, when he ap­peared on earth, con­firmed all that Mel­chiz­e­dek had taught con­cern­ing the Par­a­dise Fa­ther.