It is Easter week and in deference to this unique period, I will be digressing from the series I have started with, to remind us about what Easter portends. This is considered of essence because Easter presents before us, a veritable opportunity to remember our Creator. It is also in perfect consonance with our desire for enduring happiness in the earthly field.

Easter is celebrated yearly by Christians all over the world with the usual pomp and pageantry. While Easter is an occasion for celebration to some, to those living truly, it is really a period for sober reflection.

To start with, it is considered of essence to do a brief reminder about Easter, particularly for the benefit of those who never had Christian background.

Easter is woven round a Master Soul who came unto the world about 2000 year ago. He was given the name Emmanuel at birth and bore the name of Joseph initially. He actually acquired the name Jesus after He was baptized and started His mission. The title of Christ was generally used for Him after He shed the mortal coil.

The Bible recorded His birth and early life, but blotted out eighteen whooping years of His short life span. We mustn’t have any issues with this, since we should be concerned about His teachings only.

All the teachings emphasized by Jesus still hold true today and shall ever be. The two stated infra stood out.

They are;

(1) The vital importance of LOVE, without which there wouldn’t be lasting peace nor any true religion.

(2) The immanence of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is to be found only within man himself as He insisted; the Kingdom of God is at hand.

These two great precepts are cardinal for true worship. The first is the worship of God in Truth and the latter, the worship of God in Spirit.

But alas! His message was poorly received and meagerly understood even by His own disciples, much less the multitudes. They were quite unprepared for His lofty idealism, such refined perception. Least of all could they understand the main point of His message which is;

“The Kingdom of God is a present reality to be known and entered upon while living”

Ironically, the same doubt persists till date. Among the most pretending to be enlightened in the world, very few could grasp that sublime idea of Jesus. They can imagine a Heaven to which people may go after death, but when told, they can pierce the dark veil and enter upon that Kingdom of God, while in the body, as epitomized by the account of the mount of transfiguration, they were repugnant to such idea. Yet, this idea was at the heart of the message of the Messiah.

In the time of Jesus, the Jews earnestly look for a temporal kingdom, and prayed for a Messiah, a great warrior, who could deliver them from the Roman yoke and make them rulers of the world. But instead of earthly kingdom, Jesus spoke to them of Kingdom of Heaven and He told them it was at hand. The Jews were not interested in Jesus’ fancies, impractical to them and subversive of all their fond expectations.

Jesus had very little time to share His teachings with the masses as He lived for only a very short period. The period He spread His gospel was equally evanescent as it lasted barely 3 years, and then, He could not stay in one place, as He was moving from one place to the other, preaching the message of Love and the Kingdom of God being at hand.

Expectedly, Jesus teachings brought Him in conflict with the authorities, especially the high prince and the Sanhedrin. His early death was a foregone conclusion.

After the merest mockery of a trial, Jesus was condemned to death on the cross, the most ignominious of execution. The death sentence was approved under a mild protest, by the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate. The bigots drove nails into His hands and feet.

Those were the feet that trekked across the lands of the Jews preaching the message of Love, of Compassion and Redemption. The hands were the healing hands which had graciously dispensed food and cured the multitudes. They crucified Him, and hung a thief on either side of Him.

At the last hour the great compassionate Teacher expired, crying out at being forsaken by the Father.

It was claimed that Jesus rose from the dead on the 3rd day hence; The purpose of Easter is essentially to celebrate the death and rise of Jesus from death, and mystically put, the triumph of soul over Satan.

As realists, our interest is not to dwell on the merit or otherwise, of the alleged physical rise of Jesus from death, although the adepts have maintained, the triumph of Jesus, was the merging back of His soul into the Oversoul. That is, His soul uniting back into the Supreme Soul of the Supreme Lord.

The ascension of the soul is the main goal of the Messiah and all true Teachers of Spirituality. They have come to teach us how to die while living, so that at the expiry of our lives, in this physical world, our souls will not encounter any barrier in ascending back to the Lord.

“I die daily” says Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 vs 31.

That is meditation for you. It is the act making the eye single and the body will be full of light. It is also the entering into our inner closet as taught by the Messiah, during which, the soul leaves the body and returns to it at will, while alive.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ seem the main plank upon which the entire Christianity rests. As far as the Christians are concerned, Jesus died to write off their sins, and as long as they believe in Jesus, their salvation is assured.

With such naivety, we are ignoring the inviolable injunction of the Messiah in Galatians 6 vs 7 on quote;

“Do not be deceived, God is not mocked, man shall reap whatever he sows

Is it not a great irony, that a God-Sent that was despised, humiliated, tortured, whipped, and made to die by crucifixion was later deified, and the world was cajoled that He died for their sins. In other words, He was sacrificed for the sins of the world.

It is not rocketscience for any rational being to know that every sacrifice depicts a triumvirate viz; The sacrificer,the object of sacrifice and the receiver. In this setting, we can only discern the object which was Jesus.

The unanswered questions remain;

Sacrificed to Who?

To God or to Satan?

Can God-Sent be sacrificed to God?

If we assume YES, who was or were the Sacrificer/s ?

Or was Satan so powerful that he needed the God-Sent to be percified?

All these posers shall be answered in future series, for NOTHING is hidden.

Guilefully, it was Paul who as Saul never acknowledged Jesus and was a Jadaic scholar that repackaged the lofty teachings of Jesus into what is known today as Christianity, having written a good portion of the new Testament.

It is on record that Peter whom the Messiah had appointed in form of a successor saying to him in Matthew 18 vs 18 that; “Whatever you bind on earth, shall be bound in Heaven and that which you loose on earth, shall be loosed in Heaven” initially disagreed with Paul about Paul’s aggression.

Peter was emphatic that all through, their Master-Jesus preached message of Love and even on the Cross under excruciating pain, Jesus was still pleading with the Father to forgive His persecutors for they knew not what they were doing.

All told, it is the Sacrifice and belief Theory that the Priestly Class is still cashing on, to sustain Christianity and exploit their gullible followers.

It thus stands to reason that if by mere affirmation we can make Heavens, even Satan will also make Paradise. The method of accessing the bosom of the Lord was severally made unambiguous by the Messiah Himself, with several parables in the Bible and emphatically, in John 14 vs 23, He admonished;

“All who love me will do what I say, my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them”

With another analogy, Jesus explained in very explicit terms the condition for meriting the bosom of the Lord, using the metaphor of the wedding garment.

This parable in Matthew 22 vs 1-14 which am quoting verbatim for effects reads as follows;

“Jesus spoke to them in parable saying; The Kingdom of Heaven is like a King who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent servants to those that have been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.

Then he sent more servants and said; Tell them that have been invited that I have prepared my dinner; My oxen are fattened cattle and have been butchered, everything is ready, come to the dinner.

They paid no attention and went off-one to his field, another to his business.  The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The King was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

Then the King said to his servants, the wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the streets corners and invite anyone you find. So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all people they could find, the good as well as the bad and the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But when the King came in to see the guests, he noticed a man not wearing a wedding garment. He then asked; How did you get here without wearing a wedding clothes friend? The man was speechless.

Then the King told the attendants, tie him hand and foot and throw him outside, into the darkness,where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are invited but few are chosen.

The King in the narrative was the Lord Himself. The Wedding was the Grand Re-Union of our individual souls with that of the Lord, while the invitation was the daily prodding for us to; Let go the world and let in the Lord. The servants were the truly Anointed of the Lord. Not the Challatants.

Those who turned down the invitation were those who were still involved with the world’s shadow show and not ready for the Lord, while those that attended were the average postulants, but some of them, their devotion was not untainted. Their souls haven’t the wedding garments as yet.

If we can digest the drift of this parable, it will dawn on us meriting the Kingdom of God is not a walk in the park. It is far beyond affirmation. This perception is as groundless as feeling, merely enrolling in a University would make earning a degree automatic, without studying to pass the qualifying exams.

Quite rightly, belief in Jesus is a sine qua non. But added to the belief is the readiness for the disciplines and hard work required, to detach ourselves from the world and live strictly within the teachings of Jesus.

To the “unenlightened” who may be prone to reading the parable literally, the King could be adjudged as wicked. He asked the servants to invite all comers to the banquet, when the High and Mighty he initially invited did not turn up.

Where did he expect all manners of people to have wedding garments to wear to his banquet? And if those without wedding garments wouldn’t be allowed to partake in the banquet, why punishing them by binding them hands and feet?

But with expanded consciousness, we will come to the understanding that the wedding garment is a metaphor for being Born Again. It is harsh to say, but the truth is; We are all here because we were dead in the Spirit world to take birth in the earthly field. As we sojourn in the earthly field we are so to say, spiritually asleep or enervated in spirit.

To return to the Unsullied Region-The Abode of the Supreme Lord we have to be born again. The true and real born again is the wedding garment. Baptism per se is our acceptance to live within the tenets of the Messiah’s teachings.

The Wedding Garment or Born Again for the soul is the soul’s pristine state when it is shorn of all fetters, of sins, of earthly cravings and attachments.

These are all the pre-conditions that will make the soul to radiate and shine once again in it’s primeval refulgence.

That is the state where the soul will exclaim “That I am” on realizing its undefiled identity with the Oversoul, known as God, Heavenly Father, Allah, Olorun, Chineke and other names we have ascribed to the First Cause.

Only on this attainment that the soul merits the bosom of the Supreme Lord, where there is no speck of filth. NO OTHER WAY!!!

It is in view of the stringent requirements that hardly can any human reach the Court of the Lord without the Lord’s grace. Even then, we have to earn the grace because of the cosmic rule in Matthew 7 vs 6 on quote;

” Pearls are not cast before the swines”

Against the foregoing, the choice is open to us,either to allow the blind to continue to lead the blind, or go for the true teachings of the Messiah.His teachings require neither additions, nor embellishment just as He charged us in John 8vs 32.

“To seek the Truth and only the Truth shall set you free”

Best tidings of Easter & May its lessons and reason enable us to live righteously.

We will revert to the earlier series next week DV.

Aare Kola Oyefeso, a businessman, writes from Lagos