PAPER 54
PROBLEMS OF THE LUCIFER REBELLION
54:0.1 EVOLUTIONARY man finds it difficult fully to
comprehend the significance and to grasp the meanings of evil, error, sin, and
iniquity. Man is slow to perceive that contrastive perfection and imperfection
produce potential evil; that conflicting truth and falsehood create confusing
error; that the divine endowment of freewill choice eventuates in the
divergent realms of sin and righteousness; that the persistent pursuit of
divinity leads to the kingdom of God as contrasted with its continuous
rejection, which leads to the domains of iniquity.
54:0.2 The Gods neither create evil nor permit sin
and rebellion. Potential evil is time-existent in a universe embracing
differential levels of perfection meanings and values. Sin is potential in all
realms where imperfect beings are endowed with the ability to choose between
good and evil. The very conflicting presence of truth and untruth, fact and
falsehood, constitutes the potentiality of error. The deliberate choice of
evil constitutes sin; the willful rejection of truth is error; the persistent
pursuit of sin and error is iniquity.
1. TRUE AND FALSE LIBERTY
54:1.1 Of all the perplexing problems growing out of
the Lucifer rebellion, none has occasioned more difficulty than the failure of
immature evolutionary mortals to distinguish between true and false
liberty.
54:1.2 True liberty is the quest of the ages and the
reward of evolutionary progress. False liberty is the subtle deception of the
error of time and the evil of space. Enduring liberty is predicated on the
reality of justice -- intelligence, maturity, fraternity, and
equity.
54:1.3 Liberty is a self-destroying technique of
cosmic existence when its motivation is unintelligent, unconditioned, and
uncontrolled. True liberty is progressively related to reality and is ever
regardful of social equity, cosmic fairness, universe fraternity, and divine
obligations.
54:1.4 Liberty is suicidal when divorced from
material justice, intellectual fairness, social forbearance, moral duty, and
spiritual values. Liberty is nonexistent apart from cosmic reality, and all
personality reality is proportional to its divinity relationships.
54:1.5 Unbridled self-will and unregulated
self-expression equal unmitigated selfishness, the acme of ungodliness.
Liberty without the associated and ever-increasing conquest of self is a
figment of egoistic mortal imagination. Self-motivated liberty is a conceptual
illusion, a cruel deception. License masquerading in the garments of liberty
is the forerunner of abject bondage.
54:1.6 True liberty is the associate of genuine
self-respect; false liberty is the consort of self-admiration. True liberty is
the fruit of self-control; false liberty, the assumption of self-assertion.
Self-control leads to altruistic service; self-admiration tends towards the
exploitation of others for the selfish aggrandizement of such a mistaken
individual as is willing to sacrifice righteous attainment for the sake of
possessing unjust power over his fellow beings.
54:1.7 Even wisdom is divine and safe only when it
is cosmic in scope and spiritual in motivation.
54:1.8 There is no error greater than that species
of self-deception which leads intelligent beings to crave the exercise of
power over other beings for the purpose of depriving these persons of their
natural liberties. The golden rule of human fairness cries out against all
such fraud, unfairness, selfishness, and unrighteousness. Only true and
genuine liberty is compatible with the reign of love and the ministry of
mercy.
54:1.9 How dare the self-willed creature encroach
upon the rights of his fellows in the name of personal liberty when the
Supreme Rulers of the universe stand back in merciful respect for these
prerogatives of will and potentials of personality! No being, in the exercise
of his supposed personal liberty, has a right to deprive any other being of
those privileges of existence conferred by the Creators and duly respected by
all their loyal associates, subordinates, and subjects.
54:1.10 Evolutionary man may have to contend for his
material liberties with tyrants and oppressors on a world of sin and iniquity
or during the early times of a primitive evolving sphere, but not so on the
morontia worlds or on the spirit spheres. War is the heritage of early
evolutionary man, but on worlds of normal advancing civilization physical
combat as a technique of adjusting racial misunderstandings has long since
fallen into disrepute.
2. THE THEFT OF LIBERTY
54:2.1 With the Son and in the Spirit did God
project eternal Havona, and ever since has there obtained the eternal pattern
of co-ordinate participation in creation -- sharing. This pattern of sharing
is the master design for every one of the Sons and Daughters of God who go out
into space to engage in the attempt to duplicate in time the central universe
of eternal perfection.
54:2.2 Every creature of every evolving universe who
aspires to do the Father's will is destined to become the partner of the
time-space Creators in this magnificent adventure of experiential perfection
attainment. Were this not true, the Father would have hardly endowed such
creatures with creative free will, neither would he indwell them, actually go
into partnership with them by means of his own spirit.
54:2.3 Lucifer's folly was the attempt to do the
nondoable, to short-circuit time in an experiential universe. Lucifer's crime
was the attempted creative disenfranchisement of every personality in Satania,
the unrecognized abridgment of the creature's personal participation --
freewill participation -- in the long evolutionary struggle to attain the
status of light and life both individually and collectively. In so doing, this
onetime Sovereign of your system set the temporal purpose of his own will
directly athwart the eternal purpose of God's will as it is revealed in the
bestowal of free will upon all personal creatures. The Lucifer rebellion thus
threatened the maximum possible infringement of the freewill choice of the
ascenders and servers of the system of Satania -- a threat forevermore to
deprive every one of these beings of the thrilling experience of contributing
something personal and unique to the slowly erecting monument to experiential
wisdom which will sometime exist as the perfected system of Satania. Thus does
the Lucifer manifesto, masquerading in the habiliments of liberty, stand forth
in the clear light of reason as a monumental threat to consummate the theft of
personal liberty and to do it on a scale that has been approached only twice
in all the history of Nebadon.
54:2.4 In short, what God had given men and angels
Lucifer would have taken away from them, that is, the divine privilege of
participating in the creation of their own destinies and of the destiny of
this local system of inhabited worlds.
54:2.5 No being in all the universe has the rightful
liberty to deprive any other being of true liberty, the right to love and be
loved, the privilege of worshiping God and of serving his fellows.
3. THE TIME LAG OF JUSTICE
54:3.1 The moral will creatures of the evolutionary
worlds are always bothered with the unthinking question as to why the all-wise
Creators permit evil and sin. They fail to comprehend that both are inevitable
if the creature is to be truly free. The free will of evolving man or
exquisite angel is not a mere philosophic concept, a symbolic ideal. Man's
ability to choose good or evil is a universe reality. This liberty to choose
for oneself is an endowment of the Supreme Rulers, and they will not permit
any being or group of beings to deprive a single personality in the wide
universe of this divinely bestowed liberty -- not even to satisfy such
misguided and ignorant beings in the enjoyment of this misnamed personal
liberty.
54:3.2 Although conscious and wholehearted
identification with evil (sin) is the equivalent of nonexistence
(annihilation), there must always intervene between the time of such personal
identification with sin and the execution of the penalty -- the automatic
result of such a willful embrace of evil -- a period of time of sufficient
length to allow for such an adjudication of such an individual's universe
status as will prove entirely satisfactory to all related universe
personalities, and which will be so fair and just as to win the approval of
the sinner himself.
54:3.3 But if this universe rebel against the
reality of truth and goodness refuses to approve the verdict, and if the
guilty one knows in his heart the justice of his condemnation but refuses to
make such confession, then must the execution of sentence be delayed in
accordance with the discretion of the Ancients of Days. And the Ancients of
Days refuse to annihilate any being until all moral values and all spiritual
realities are extinct, both in the evildoer and in all related supporters and
possible sympathizers.
4. THE MERCY TIME LAG
54:4.1 Another problem somewhat difficult of
explanation in the constellation of Norlatiadek pertains to the reasons for
permitting Lucifer, Satan, and the fallen princes to work mischief so long
before being apprehended, interned, and adjudicated.
54:4.2 Parents, those who have borne and reared
children, are better able to understand why Michael, a Creator-father, might
be slow to condemn and destroy his own Sons. Jesus' story of the prodigal son
well illustrates how a loving father can long wait for the repentance of an
erring child.
54:4.3 The very fact that an evil-doing creature can
actually choose to do wrong -- commit sin -- establishes the fact of
free-willness and fully justifies any length delay in the execution of justice
provided the extended mercy might conduce to repentance and
rehabilitation.
54:4.4 Most of the liberties which Lucifer sought he
already had; others he was to receive in the future. All these precious
endowments were lost by giving way to impatience and yielding to a desire to
possess what one craves now and to possess it in defiance of all obligation to
respect the rights and liberties of all other beings composing the universe of
universes. Ethical obligations are innate, divine, and universal.
54:4.5 There are many reasons known to us why the
Supreme Rulers did not immediately destroy or intern the leaders of the
Lucifer rebellion. There are no doubt still other and possibly better reasons
unknown to us. The mercy features of this delay in the execution of justice
were extended personally by Michael of Nebadon. Except for the affection of
this Creator-father for his erring Sons, the supreme justice of the
superuniverse would have acted. If such an episode as the Lucifer rebellion
had occurred in Nebadon while Michael was incarnated on Urantia, the
instigators of such evil might have been instantly and absolutely
annihilated.
54:4.6 Supreme justice can act instantly when not
restrained by divine mercy. But the ministry of mercy to the children of time
and space always provides for this time lag, this saving interval between
seedtime and harvest. If the seed sowing is good, this interval provides for
the testing and upbuilding of character; if the seed sowing is evil, this
merciful delay provides time for repentance and rectification. This time delay
in the adjudication and execution of evildoers is inherent in the mercy
ministry of the seven superuniverses. This restraint of justice by mercy
proves that God is love, and that such a God of love dominates the universes
and in mercy controls the fate and judgment of all his creatures.
54:4.7 The mercy delays of time are by the mandate
of the free will of the Creators. There is good to be derived in the universe
from this technique of patience in dealing with sinful rebels. While it is all
too true that good cannot come of evil to the one who contemplates and
performs evil, it is equally true that all things (including evil, potential
and manifest) work together for good to all beings who know God, love to do
his will, and are ascending Paradiseward according to his eternal plan and
divine purpose.
54:4.8 But these mercy delays are not interminable.
Notwithstanding the long delay (as time is reckoned on Urantia) in
adjudicating the Lucifer rebellion, we may record that, during the time of
effecting this revelation, the first hearing in the pending case of Gabriel
vs. Lucifer was held on Uversa, and soon thereafter there issued the mandate
of the Ancients of Days directing that Satan be henceforth confined to the
prison world with Lucifer. This ends the ability of Satan to pay further
visits to any of the fallen worlds of Satania. Justice in a mercy-dominated
universe may be slow, but it is certain.
5. THE WISDOM OF DELAY
54:5.1 Of the many reasons known to me as to why
Lucifer and his confederates were not sooner interned or adjudicated, I am
permitted to recite the following:
54:5.2 1. Mercy requires that every wrongdoer have
sufficient time in which to formulate a deliberate and fully chosen attitude
regarding his evil thoughts and sinful acts.
54:5.3 2. Supreme justice is dominated by a Father's
love; therefore will justice never destroy that which mercy can save. Time to
accept salvation is vouchsafed every evildoer.
54:5.4 3. No affectionate father is ever precipitate
in visiting punishment upon an erring member of his family. Patience cannot
function independently of time.
54:5.5 4. While wrongdoing is always deleterious to
a family, wisdom and love admonish the upright children to bear with an erring
brother during the time granted by the affectionate father in which the sinner
may see the error of his way and embrace salvation.
54:5.6 5. Regardless of Michael's attitude toward
Lucifer, notwithstanding his being Lucifer's Creator-father, it was not in the
province of the Creator Son to exercise summary jurisdiction over the apostate
System Sovereign because he had not then completed his bestowal career,
thereby attaining unqualified sovereignty of Nebadon.
54:5.7 6. The Ancients of Days could have
immediately annihilated these rebels, but they seldom execute wrongdoers
without a full hearing. In this instance they refused to overrule the Michael
decisions.
54:5.8 7. It is evident that Immanuel counseled
Michael to remain aloof from the rebels and allow rebellion to pursue a
natural course of self-obliteration. And the wisdom of the Union of Days is
the time reflection of the united wisdom of the Paradise Trinity.
54:5.9 8. The Faithful of Days on Edentia advised
the Constellation Fathers to allow the rebels free course to the end that all
sympathy for these evildoers should be the sooner uprooted in the hearts of
every present and future citizen of Norlatiadek -- every mortal, morontia, or
spirit creature.
54:5.10 9. On Jerusem the personal representative of
the Supreme Executive of Orvonton counseled Gabriel to foster full opportunity
for every living creature to mature a deliberate choice in those matters
involved in the Lucifer Declaration of Liberty. The issues of rebellion having
been raised, the Paradise emergency adviser of Gabriel portrayed that, if such
full and free opportunity were not given all Norlatiadek creatures, then would
the Paradise quarantine against all such possible halfhearted or
doubt-stricken creatures be extended in self-protection against the entire
constellation. To keep open the Paradise doors of ascension to the beings of
Norlatiadek, it was necessary to provide for the full development of rebellion
and to insure the complete determination of attitude on the part of all beings
in any way concerned therewith.
54:5.11 10. The Divine Minister of Salvington issued
as her third independent proclamation a mandate directing that nothing be done
to half cure, cowardly suppress, or otherwise hide the hideous visage of
rebels and rebellion. The angelic hosts were directed to work for full
disclosure and unlimited opportunity for sin-expression as the quickest
technique of achieving the perfect and final cure of the plague of evil and
sin.
54:5.12 11. An emergency council of ex-mortals
consisting of Mighty Messengers, glorified mortals who had had personal
experience with like situations, together with their colleagues, was organized
on Jerusem. They advised Gabriel that at least three times the number of
beings would be led astray if arbitrary or summary methods of suppression were
attempted. The entire Uversa corps of counselors concurred in advising Gabriel
to permit the rebellion to take its full and natural course, even if it should
require a million years to wind up the consequences.
54:5.13 12. Time, even in a universe of time, is
relative: If a Urantia mortal of average length of life should commit a crime
which precipitated world-wide pandemonium, and if he were apprehended, tried,
and executed within two or three days of the commission of the crime, would it
seem a long time to you? And yet that would be nearer a comparison with the
length of Lucifer's life even if his adjudication, now begun, should not be
completed for a hundred thousand Urantia years. The relative lapse of time
from the viewpoint of Uversa, where the litigation is pending, could be
indicated by saying that the crime of Lucifer was being brought to trial
within two and a half seconds of its commission. From the Paradise viewpoint
the adjudication is simultaneous with the enactment.
54:5.14 There are an equal number of reasons for not
arbitrarily stopping the Lucifer rebellion which would be partially
comprehensible to you, but which I am not permitted to narrate. I may inform
you that on Uversa we teach forty-eight reasons for permitting evil to run the
full course of its own moral bankruptcy and spiritual extinction. I doubt not
that there are just as many additional reasons not known to me.
6. THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE
54:6.1 Whatever the difficulties evolutionary
mortals may encounter in their efforts to understand the Lucifer rebellion, it
should be clear to all reflective thinkers that the technique of dealing with
the rebels is a vindication of divine love. The loving mercy extended to the
rebels does seem to have involved many innocent beings in trials and
tribulations, but all these distraught personalities may securely depend upon
the all-wise Judges to adjudicate their destinies in mercy as well as
justice.
54:6.2 In all their dealings with intelligent
beings, both the Creator Son and his Paradise Father are love dominated. It is
impossible to comprehend many phases of the attitude of the universe rulers
toward rebels and rebellion -- sin and sinners -- unless it be remembered that
God as a Father takes precedence over all other phases of Deity manifestation
in all the dealings of divinity with humanity. It should also be recalled that
the Paradise Creator Sons are all mercy motivated.
54:6.3 If an affectionate father of a large family
chooses to show mercy to one of his children guilty of grievous wrongdoing, it
may well be that the extension of mercy to this misbehaving child will work a
temporary hardship upon all the other and well-behaved children. Such
eventualities are inevitable; such a risk is inseparable from the reality
situation of having a loving parent and of being a member of a family group.
Each member of a family profits by the righteous conduct of every other
member; likewise must each member suffer the immediate time-consequences of
the misconduct of every other member. Families, groups, nations, races,
worlds, systems, constellations, and universes are relationships of
association which possess individuality; and therefore does every member of
any such group, large or small, reap the benefits and suffer the consequences
of the rightdoing and the wrongdoing of all other members of the group
concerned.
54:6.4 But one thing should be made clear: If you
are made to suffer the evil consequences of the sin of some member of your
family, some fellow citizen or fellow mortal, even rebellion in the system or
elsewhere -- no matter what you may have to endure because of the wrongdoing
of your associates, fellows, or superiors -- you may rest secure in the
eternal assurance that such tribulations are transient afflictions. None of
these fraternal consequences of misbehavior in the group can ever jeopardize
your eternal prospects or in the least degree deprive you of your divine right
of Paradise ascension and God attainment.
54:6.5 And there is compensation for these trials,
delays, and disappointments which invariably accompany the sin of rebellion.
Of the many valuable repercussions of the Lucifer rebellion which might be
named, I will only call attention to the enhanced careers of those mortal
ascenders, the Jerusem citizens, who, by withstanding the sophistries of sin,
placed themselves in line for becoming future Mighty Messengers, fellows of my
own order. Every being who stood the test of that evil episode thereby
immediately advanced his administrative status and enhanced his spiritual
worth.
54:6.6 At first the Lucifer upheaval appeared to be
an unmitigated calamity to the system and to the universe. Gradually benefits
began to accrue. With the passing of twenty-five thousand years of system time
(twenty thousand years of Urantia time), the Melchizedeks began to teach that
the good resulting from Lucifer's folly had come to equal the evil incurred.
The sum of evil had by that time become almost stationary, continuing to
increase only on certain isolated worlds, while the beneficial repercussions
continued to multiply and extend out through the universe and superuniverse,
even to Havona. The Melchizedeks now teach that the good resulting from the
Satania rebellion is more than a thousand times the sum of all the
evil.
54:6.7 But such an extraordinary and beneficent
harvest of wrongdoing could only be brought about by the wise, divine, and
merciful attitude of all of Lucifer's superiors, extending from the
Constellation Fathers on Edentia to the Universal Father on Paradise. The
passing of time has enhanced the consequential good to be derived from the
Lucifer folly; and since the evil to be penalized was quite fully developed
within a comparatively short time, it is apparent that the all-wise and
farseeing universe rulers would be certain to extend the time in which to reap
increasingly beneficial results. Regardless of the many additional reasons for
delaying the apprehension and adjudication of the Satania rebels, this one
gain would have been enough to explain why these sinners were not sooner
interned, and why they have not been adjudicated and destroyed.
54:6.8 Shortsighted and time-bound mortal minds
should be slow to criticize the time delays of the farseeing and all-wise
administrators of universe affairs.
54:6.9 One error of human thinking respecting these
problems consists in the idea that all evolutionary mortals on an evolving
planet would choose to enter upon the Paradise career if sin had not cursed
their world. The ability to decline survival does not date from the times of
the Lucifer rebellion. Mortal man has always possessed the endowment of
freewill choice regarding the Paradise career.
54:6.10 As you ascend in the survival experience,
you will broaden your universe concepts and extend your horizon of meanings
and values; and thus will you be able the better to understand why such beings
as Lucifer and Satan are permitted to continue in rebellion. You will also
better comprehend how ultimate (if not immediate) good can be derived from
time-limited evil. After you attain Paradise, you will really be enlightened
and comforted when you listen to the superaphic philosophers discuss and
explain these profound problems of universe adjustment. But even then, I doubt
that you will be fully satisfied in your own minds. At least I was not even
when I had thus attained the acme of universe philosophy. I did not achieve a
full comprehension of these complexities until after I had been assigned to
administrative duties in the superuniverse, where by actual experience I have
acquired conceptual capacity adequate for the comprehension of such many-sided
problems in cosmic equity and spiritual philosophy. As you ascend
Paradiseward, you will increasingly learn that many problematic features of
universe administration can only be comprehended subsequent to the acquirement
of increased experiential capacity and to the achievement of enhanced
spiritual insight. Cosmic wisdom is essential to the understanding of cosmic
situations.
54:6.11 Presented
by a Mighty Messenger of experiential survival in the first system rebellion
in the universes of time now attached to the superuniverse government of
Orvonton and acting in this matter by request of Gabriel of
Salvington.
