- “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets; I have not come to destroy them but to fulfill them; for I say to you in truth that heaven and earth shall not pass away before everything in the law is perfectly fulfilled up to one single iota and one single dot.” (Mt. 5:17, 18)
The Three Revelations
Moses
- There are two distinct parts to the Mosaic Law: the Law of God, promulgated on Mount Sinai, and the civil or disciplinary law, established by Moses. One is invariable; the other, appropriate for the customs and character of the people, changes with the times. The Law of God is formulated in the ten following commandments:
I. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other, foreign gods before me. You shall make neither a graven image nor any figure of anything that is above in the heavens or below on earth, nor of anything that is in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor shall you render them supreme worship.
II. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
III. You shall remember to sanctify the Sabbath Day.
IV. You shall honor your father and your mother so that you may live
long in the land that the Lord your God will give you.
V. You shall not kill.
VI. You shall not commit adultery.
VII. You shall not steal.
VIII. You shall not covet false testimony against your neighbor.
IX. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
X. You shall covet neither your neighbor’s house, nor his servant, nor his
ox, nor his ass, nor any of the things that belong to him.
I have not come to destroy the law
This law is for all times and all nations, and therefore has a divine character. All the others were laws established by Moses, who had to use fear in order to restrain a naturally troublesome and undisciplined people, among whom he had to combat the deep-rooted abuses and prejudices acquired during their slavery in Egypt. In order to give authority to his laws, he had to attribute to them a divine origin, as did other lawgivers of early peoples.
Human authority had to be based on God’s authority, but only the idea of a terrible God could impress ignorant men and women in whom moral sense and the sentiment of a refined justice were still little developed. It is quite obvious that the One who prescribed the commandments, “You shall not kill; you shall not cause harm to your neighbor,” could not be self-contradictory by making extermination a duty. The Mosaic Laws per se thus had an essentially transitory character.
Christ
- Jesus did not come to destroy the law, that is, God’s law. He came to fulfill it, that is, to develop it, to give it its true meaning and to adapt it to the degree of humankind’s advancement. That is why that in this law may be found the principle of duty to God and one’s neighbor, which comprises the basis of his doctrine. On the contrary, as for the laws of Moses per se, Jesus modified them profoundly either in form or in substance. He constantly combated the abuse of outward practices and erroneous interpretations, and he could not make them undergo a more radical reform than that of reducing them to these words: “Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself,” and in stating, “This is the whole of the law and the prophets.”
- By these words, “Heaven and earth shall not pass away before everything is fulfilled up to one single iota,” Jesus meant
that it would be necessary for God’s Law to receive its fulfillment, that is, to be practiced all over the earth, in all of its purity, with all of its development and all of its consequences, for what good would it have done to have established this law if it were to have remained the privilege of only a few people or even of one sole nation? As children of God, all humans are, without distinction, the object of the same solicitude. Jesus’ role, however, was not simply that of a moralistic lawgiver with no other authority than his own word. He came to fulfill the prophecies that had announced his coming; his authority derived from the exceptional nature of his spirit and his divine mission. He came to teach humans that true life is to be found not on the earth but in the kingdom of heaven; to teach them the way that leads there, the means of reconciling themselves to God and to forewarn them regarding the progress of future
things for the fulfillment of human destiny. Nonetheless, he did not say everything, and on many points he limited himself to sowing the seed of truths that he himself declared could not yet be comprehended. He spoke of all things, but in terms explicit in varying degrees. In order to understand the hidden meaning of certain words it would be necessary for new ideas and knowledge to come to provide humans the key, and such ideas could not come before the human mind had acquired a certain degree of maturity. Science would have to contribute strongly toward the emergence and development of these ideas; therefore, it would be necessary to give science time to progress.
Spiritism
5. Spiritism is the new science that has come to reveal to humans, by means of irrefutable proofs, the existence and nature of the spirit world and its relations with the corporeal world. It shows us that world no longer as something supernatural, but instead as one of the living and incessantly active forces of nature, as the I have not come to destroy the law source of a multitude of phenomena hitherto incomprehensible, and for that reason, relegated to the domain of the fantastic and extraordinary. It is to such relations that Christ alludes on several occasions, and that is why many things that he said have remained unintelligible or wrongly interpreted. Spiritism is the key that enables everything to be easily explained.
6. The law of the Old Testament is personified in Moses; that of the New Testament is personified in Christ. Spiritism is
the third revelation of God’s Law, but it is not personified in any particular individual; rather, it is the product of a teaching given not by one person but by the Spirits – who are the voices of heaven – at all points of the earth and through a countless multitude of intermediaries. It is a sort of collective being entailing a group of beings from the spirit world, each one coming to bring to humans the tribute of its knowledge in order to enable them to know about
that world and the fate that awaits them in it.
7. In the same way that Christ said, “I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it,” Spiritism says, “I have not come
to destroy the Christian law but to fulfill it.” It teaches nothing contrary to what Christ taught, but develops, completes and explains in clear terms for everybody what he stated only in allegorical form. Spiritism has come to fulfill at the foretold time what Christ announced and to prepare the fulfillment of future things. It is therefore the work of Christ, who himself is presiding – as he also announced – over the regeneration that is occurring, and who is preparing the reign of the kingdom of God on earth.