Christology and Doctrines of Progression
No two followers of Christ embrace the truth of His Word in quite the same way. Similarly, no two Christians, after acknowledging the sacrifices of Jesus, have identical walks with the Lord. He told us about the nature of his burden and yolk (Matthew 11:28–30) so that we might learn how best to cultivate the spiritual strength He displayed as a minister prior to and even after His crucifixion.
The scriptures provide us with examples of spiritual exercises that help us to strengthen our relationship with God who, of course, was (and is) the source of Christ’s power. It was His closeness with Our Father that enabled Jesus to perform miracles and spread the gospel at a time of social unrest. As we learn through examining the life of Christ, appropriate preparation for times of prayer, fasting, and worship is essential to our spiritual health. These acts of devotion enable us to connect to God in deep, meaningful ways, completely divorced from the expectations of any one person or community. We know that we need help putting on the mind and manner of Christ in our daily lives, and we can find that help by consulting the written Word of God. There, through the accounts of His covenants with the faithful, we can access a repository of spiritual exercises that we can replicate with a high degree of reliability, much in the way a researcher can reproduce certain testing procedures in a laboratory. However, the principal difference between experimentalism and the religious truths we can access through adherence to the Word of God is that we can always expect God to keep His promises. In life, the results of our experiments may confirm our hypotheses, but such things are not guaranteed. God, by contrast, always guarantees and delivers. What is required, though, is commitment to the manner of living God prescribes, like a doctor of our souls, through His express will as detailed in the holy scriptures. Careful study reveals that God did, in fact, work through men like Joseph Smith, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, and many others to ensure that His desires (which include our happiness) are realized in our lives.
From the early chapters of the Pentateuch, we have examples of patriarchs whose spiritual labors helped them to bring their petitions to God with care and humility. Abraham, Moses, and Elijah demonstrated that direct communication with the Lord is not only possible, it is desirable for a righteous, God-seeking individual. As we grow in knowledge of God and His will for our lives, we are offered opportunities to gradually, in a trusting walk with the Lord, perfect ourselves. This is the very science that theologians such as Mary Baker Eddy have, in various ways, elucidated through the ages. Mrs. Eddy used the term “Christian Science” to describe a broad array of scriptural and physical phenomena, but what suffices for our purposes is that God granted us, through His word, a body of knowledge uniquely designed to draw us to Him. As we are taught in John 1, God, from the very beginning, wanted us know Him personally, that is, individually. One of the ways in which He sought to make Himself known is by dwelling with us on Earth, using His lifestyle as an example of how best to increase our capacity for godliness. For our benefit alone, He instructed the righteous and sinners alike through parables and sermons, and through them, He provided us with insights worthy of continual study. For example, the Parable of the Rich Man illustrates some of the mechanics of the spiritual exercises that Jesus Christ taught and performed Himself.
Why would a wealthy man elect a life of poverty and encourage another to do the same? On the face of it, that is what Jesus did — He appears to have chosen to travel throughout His native land as an evangelist so that other people might find the courage to do the same. As an adult, Jesus was consumed with His ministerial labors. We can deduce that, in the course of His lifetime, whatever material wealth he earned or was granted to him by His parents in His youth (whether through the gifts of the Three Magi or their own efforts, given that Joseph was a carpenter), He likely liquidated. Why else would He encourage people to “sell what you have and give it to the poor?” What we glean from the Parable of the Rich Man is critical to understanding some essential pillars of the teachings of Jesus.
We can look to two separate Gospels, that of Luke and Matthew, for information about this spiritual practice of selling all that we have for the sake of righteousness. Matthew 19:16–30 tells the story of a rich young man who, when given the answer to the question of how to receive eternal life in the Kingdom of God, departs from the presence of Jesus in tears. Many people are not prepared to receive the Gospel when they hear it; sometimes the fear of actually having all that we want can be overwhelming. But it was that very fear that drove a wealthy man away from the promises of God — they were far too great for him to accept humbly. Paul wrote, “the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (I Timothy 6:10). Of course, though that young man erred, as we all do, God is willing to bring us back to a place where we are willing to acknowledge His love for us, a special place where He grants us what we ask of Him — provided that we are compliant with His will. Could that rich man have chosen, at that exact moment, to sell all of his possessions, to liquidate whatever position he held in the markets, and follow after Jesus? Yes, he could have. But he did not. The scriptures do not tell us what became of him, but we can only hope that he put the divine information he heard that day to use. Because, if he did at a later point, he would remember the day he chose not to, only to take the course he feared at a later point. The conclusion would have been the same: he would have experienced poverty, certainly, but he also would have had an opportunity to apprehend the means by which he could live a more rewarding way of life, one filled with splendor greater than that of his past. The discontented rich man should have abandoned the root of his evil, and for those of us who know where our own roots of evil lie, we ought to walk away from them and not from the invitations we are offered to follow after God — wherever and however we encounter them. Because, it is true: what we enjoy in this life is given to us freely and directly, out of love, by God. We do not have the ability to carry our worldly possessions into the hereafter.
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Luke 12 contains what might be called an alternative telling of The Parable of the Rich Man. In this chapter, Jesus describes a wealthy man who, when given the choice to invest the proceeds from his harvest, declines to in favor of building a larger storehouse in expectation of larger future yields. As would be customary at the time, he could have (and should have) taken a portion of his income and offered it to God as a tzedek, as it was known in Israel, because such a gift to the Lord was possible. We all benefit from tithing. But, like the man who walked away, he chose the wrong path to future profitability.
Jesus, as it happens, never leaves money on the table. He detests the waste of spiritual gain so much so that he even flipped tables in the temple to demonstrate His displeasure. And because of how important it is to maintain a clean temple, God saw fit for this moment in the ministry of Jesus to be retold four times in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As we are told repeatedly in the scriptures, our bodies — our lives — are to be dedicated to God as pure temples of righteousness , as living sacrifices unto Him.
God does not offer quid pro quo arrangements to His children; the gifts he bestows upon us are given because He delights in our joy. He does, however, expect us to mirror His consistency as a sign of our gratitude for His interventions in our lives. Indeed, Jesus had unique spiritual gifts, but so do we as children of God, which was one of the essential points of the ministry of Christ (see I Corinthians 12 and Romans 12). God is no respecter of persons, and even Jesus, a Jewish heir after the line of David, endured financial hardship. He went for broke in an effort to spread the love of God. Our understandings of that love, through the ages, can be refined through continually revisiting the scriptures for, as it is written, “profitable to teach, to convince, to correct, and to instruct in righteousness” (II Timothy 3:16). And if God loved us so much that He gave His only begotten son (John 3:16), are we not to show gratitude for that sacrifice, one that even Abraham was spared (Genesis 22), by simply reading the scriptures with some regularity?
Through His Word, God leaves us breadcrumbs, kernels of wisdom and knowledge, to nourish us as we learn to walk with Him with ever greater patience. In a certain sense, this principal of care through generosity and trust in the omnipotence of God — in His capacity to provide rather than our capacity to produce — is one we must appreciate in order to more comfortably navigate life alongside God as we move through the challenges we face as He matures us spiritually. In order to grow within our physical bodies and as spiritual beings, we must be nourished.
We receive manna from Heaven every time we prepare to read His Word, which is a simple way of engaging with God with our whole hearts. Study and prayer avail much, and the Parable of the Rich Man is one of many lessons taught through the scriptures. In order to climb new spiritual heights through holy ways of ascent (and enjoy increasingly better manna along the way), we must first apprehend certain patterns and rites detailed in the written Word of God. The Parable of the Rich Man, like the other parables taught by Jesus, perfectly encapsulates a key theme in the story of man’s relationship with God: in order to receive from the Lord of Hosts, we must be willing to give to Him, as well. There is a certain ratio known only to God and made intelligible to us through divinely designed experiences, one that requires us to search our hearts so that they may become light and properly weighted. As we read in Proverbs 11:1, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”
What is critical here is that we have the power (indeed, the responsibility) to review the scriptures through an entirely personal lens, one that honors our integrity and individual notions of self. If we, as Christians, are commanded to walk with God after the model of Jesus, then we benefit from carefully reviewing the details of His life and ministry. The life of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, as chronicled in the New Testament and prophesied in the Old Testament, illustrates how God honors His covenants in order to maintain an intimate relationship with all of His children.
If we want the treasure that is stored for us in Heaven, we ought to spend some time investigating where, in all of God’s infinite creation, the desires of our heart are specifically located. We are God’s creation; there is no one like Him, nor are our thoughts are high as His (Isaiah 40, Isaiah 55). But, by taking on His mind, by changing the way we think about wealth and poverty, we may become more like Him. In this way we may, as it is described in Sura 70 of the Qur’an, scale the ways of ascent and climb Jacob’s Ladder (Genesis 28).
