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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
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.
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