The Psychic Life of Jesus Episode 2

Taken from The Psychic Life of Jesus by the Rev G Maurice Elliott

Jesus possessed, among other psychic gifts, the gifts of clairvoyance and pre-vision. These gave him immediate insight into the characters of men. He evidently saw their auras and the effect that their thoughts had upon the ether around them.

The first time Jesus met Peter he gazed at him. The usual translation “He looked upon him”, is much too weak. The Greek word means “a long, steadfast and contemplative look”. It means that Jesus brought his psychic faculties into play that he might really know Peter.

And he said to him, “Your name is Simon : you shall be capped Cephas”. Cephas was the Aramaic equivalent of the Greek ‘Petrol’, which means ‘a piece of rock’. The rugged strength of Simon’s character had been psychically revealed to Jesus and he conferred upon him the symbolic name “Peter” (Rock).

Later, Jesus gazed at another man and his psychic vision revealed so much good in the man that he at once said to him, “Follow me”, and Philip did so. And surely Philip was himself psychic and had, in some measure, gazed at Jesus and seen what manner of man he was. Otherwise, how are we to explain his immediate response to so sudden an invitation?

It is more than probable that each of the twelve apostles was chosen chiefly on account of the psychic faculties he possessed.

Philip told his friend Nathanael about Jesus. Nathanael doubted his friend’s judgement. He could not believe that a prophet, let along the Messiah, could come out of so god-forsaken a place as the obscure village of Nazareth.

So Philip suggested that Nathanael should have a personal interview with Jesus. Seeing him coming towards him, Jesus exclaimed, “Behold an Israelite in whom is no guile!” How could Jesus have known that, apart from the exercise of his psychic faculty?

Nathanael was amazed and said, “You know nothing about me : when have you ever seen me?” Jesus told him that he had seen him when he was in quiet meditation under the fig tree and had read his heart. This convinced Nathanael that Jesus was at least a prophet.

Jesus then said, “All who follow me will one day see heaven open wide and God’s messengers ascending and descending upon the son of man.’

What could Jesus have meant by those words? They come from Jacob’s vision. Surely he meant that all who truly followed him would see constantly what Jacob saw once.

This is what the “New Commentary” says : “The promise (of the open heaven and the vision of angels) recalls the opening of heaven at his Baptism and the ministry of angels during the Temptation, so the thought is partly “You shall see what it has been given me to see”.

Exactly! And if we couple with these words the saying of Jesus, “He that believeth on me the works that I do shall he do also and greater works’, we shall begin to understand his message.

Jesus came to reveal to man the god-powers that are inherent in him. That is one of the reasons why he chose to call himself the “Son of Man”.

Not many days after the calling or choosing of Peter, Philip and Nathanael, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to the Passover. On arriving at the temple he saw, to his horror and disgust, cattle trampling over the temple-court, and cattle-dealers and money-changers seated inside the temple.

Making a whip of cords he drove them all out, scattered the coins of the brokers and upset their tables, crying, “Away with these! Make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise and a den of thieves”.

How he reminds us of the Old Testament prophets! The temple authorities were too frightened and dumbfounded to resist him. The might of his indignation raised his psychic power to irresistible dominance and subdued them all.

But they hated his interference and hated him. He had dared publicly to expose the priests. They never forgave him. By his courageous action he had signed his death-warrant.

The Jews then accosted him with the words, “What SIGN of authority can you show for your abominable action?”

Jesus replied, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”. He was referring to the temple of his own body. But the reply was meaningless to Jewish priests who knew, but had forgotten, the psychic powers of the Old Testament seers and the pre-vision of the prophets.

The took his words in their literal sense and ridiculed his statement. One can quite understand their doing so. And some of our modern critics have misunderstood Jesus. They have said that Jesus must have had in view the destruction of the temple and the rise of the Christian Church.

This is because they do not believe in the resurrection. But they are plainly told that Jesus “spake of the temple of his own body’; in any case, the rise of the Christian Church did not follow the destruction of the temple; it preceded it.

Jesus meant what he said. He had pre-vision of ‘dying’ at the hands of the Jews and the rising on the third day.

During the seven days’ celebration of the Passover, Jesus performed a number of ‘signs’ (the Authorised Version says ‘miracles’, but the Greek word does not mean miracles, it means signs and nothing else) and many believed that he was the Messiah ‘beholding the signs which he did.’

We observe that signs accompanied the birth of Jesus, his baptism, his temptation. And as soon as he began his public ministry signs accompanied it.

Yet some of our modern commentators insist that Jesus disliked working signs. They are wrong. It is true that he refused to work useless and spectacular signs, but he gloried in the signs he performed.

And when his disciples told him that ‘even the devils were subject to them’, he rejoiced and said “Yes, I have been watching Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning’.

Now in order to understand why Jesus gloried in performing signs and in seeing his disciples causing the downfall of the Satanic kingdom by expelling Satanic entities, we must bear in mind certain facts.

In the Old Testament the Messianic kingdom is conceived of not only as a reign of goodness and righteousness, but as time when demon-possession, disease, premature ‘death’ and every kind of evil will be overcome and abolished.

Jesus knew that at his baptism he had been endowed with the Spirit and psychic powers and it was only natural that he should rejoice in his signs as evidence that God was working through him.

He knew that every time a demon was cast out it was a sign that Satan was falling from heaven ie was being cast out of the heaven of health, happiness and life. So he gloried in healing all who came to him and he commissioned his disciples to heal all who were sick.

And when the disciples failed to heal in any particular case, Jesus assumed that either they or the sick, or their friends lacked faith.

So far from Jesus disliking to work signs, as the critics say he did, it was his mission to do so. His signs were the sign of the coming of, or presence of, the Messianic (The Christ-ian) kingdom.

Without the possession of psychic gifts and the exercise of them Jesus could not have done what he was called to do. Indeed, we should not have heard much about him and there would have been no Christian Church and no New Testament.

When John the Baptist was in prison, news reached him of the signs and wonders being performed by Jesus and he sent messengers to inquire of him, “Art thou the Messiah, or look we for another?’

Jesus answered, “Tell John what you yourselves have seen and heard : the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good tidings preached to them.”

Jesus knew that John would understand that these demonstrations of his psychic powers were the hall-marks of his Messiahship. They were an essential part of the gospel.

The early Church regarded them as works and manifestations of the Spirit. They were not, as Traditionalists would have us believe, proofs that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity.

They had nothing to do with any metaphysical status of Jesus. He was no heavenly bellman ringing his miracle-bell to call attention to his Godhead.

He was rather the great lover of God and of men; and his love increased and directed the use of, his amazing psychic gifts. His signs were an essential part of his messages. They were not seals attached to the document.

The Church is obsessed with the idea that the work of Jesus was to bear the sin of mankind and offer to God an atonement for sin. But Jesus never mentioned the abstract noun sin. But he mentioned evil and spent his time in destroying ‘the works of the devil’ – sickness and disease, demon-possession, blindness etc.

And he bad his followers, “Heal the sick and cast out demons’.

He did not of course, treat lightly wrong-doing. Neither did he go about telling people they were sinners. He preferred to give them the parable of the prodigal son.