V. The Teachings of the Risen Christ

Now to these divine Teachers belongs the host of beings connected with Jahve, with the Bodhisattvas, with the early interpreters of the world to humanity. Just think how in the Old Testament, for example, the mystery of death as it confronts men, comes to be fraught with an increasing sense of tragedy, and how, in fact, none of the teaching conveyed by the Old Testament gives any adequate or revealing illumination on the subject of death. If, therefore, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there had happened nothing that differed from what had already happened in the realm of the earth, and in the higher worlds connected with the earth, men would have faced a terrible situation in their earthly evolution. On the earth they would have lived through the experiences of birth and death, which now confronted them, not as simple metamorphoses but as drastic transitions in their whole human existence, and they could have learnt nothing of the significance and purpose of death and of birth in the earthly life of the human being. In order that there might gradually be imparted to mankind teaching concerning birth and death, it was necessary for the Being we call the Christ to enter the realm of earthly life, the Christ Who indeed belongs to those worlds whence the ancient Teachers too had come, but Who in accordance with a decision taken in these divine worlds, accepted for Himself a destiny different from that of the other Beings of the divine Hierarchies connected with the earth. He lent Himself to the divine decree of higher worlds that He should incarnate in an earthly body and with His own divine soul pass through birth and death on earth.[^2]