Roberta Grimes

Ours To Do

Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 03, 2024 • 19 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.

 Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Jesus came to earth determined to do what even He must have known was going to be impossible to do without our help. And human beings are deeply tribal by nature, able to trust only a maximum number of one hundred and fifty people at a time as our true familiars. That is called “Dunbar’s Number,” believe it or not. And it may well be that this maximum possible number of familiars that any of us can maintain has always been true of us, since even back as far as our Cro-Magnon days. It has been true since literally time out of mind! Jesus, on the other hand, came to transform us all into one great and perfectly loving kingdom of God on earth. So we might actually call eight billion people “Jesus’s Number”. Jesus wants us to be able to see every other person on earth as our personal soul-brother. He wants us to love and trust all eight billion strangers at once as members of our own great and much-beloved and entirely trusted tribe.

How did Jesus Himself put it? He said when He was asked what was the greatest commandment, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Such simple, and such truly beautiful words!

Jesus called it “bringing the kingdom of God on earth.” In the afterlife we actually do feel as if we are immersed in God’s love, so we might also say of it, “As above, so below”. I used to fret a good deal about what Jesus even meant by the term “the kingdom of God,” and whether perhaps the terms “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven” perhaps meant different things. Eventually I concluded, for reasons too convoluted to pause and delineate here, that both terms referred to the highest afterlife levels, the levels just below the Godhead level. I decided that the fact that the Gospel of Matthew generally refers to this level of spiritual perfection as the kingdom of heaven, while the other three Biblical Gospels use the term “the kingdom of God,” only as two different means of expression, or of translation. But both terms mean the same thing.

Yet if Jesus came to bring that sort of universal love to all the earth, we seem even after two thousand years to have made no progress in that direction.  I am sorry to blight your beautiful morning, but here is one of the most disheartening things that I have ever seen.  An American Jew recently passed himself off as Italian and went to the West Bank to interview some of its inhabitants. And the plain ignorance and hatred of Jews on the part of these Muslims living right next to Israel is beyond your worst imaginings.

So, what happens now? Is there anything that you and I can do at this stage to even help at all? It seems to be time for us to say plainly that every religion has been altogether useless in our efforts to bring peace to the world. All that our religions have managed to do has been to make all our problems even worse! And if you didn’t believe this was true before, then be sure to have a listen to those Muslims living in the West Bank in the recording that is linked above.

I didn’t know until the summer of 2022 that Thomas, my beloved spirit guide, is Jesus’s close eternal friend, and that Thomas takes me along when he visits with Jesus in the third level of the astral plane on nearly every night of my life while my body sleeps. Thomas is my spirit guide, so he is not supposed to leave me alone during my lifetime on earth. He also is a source of friendship and support for Jesus, so his solution is simply to give me amnesia about all these nightly jaunts that we share. However, I was supposed to be working on building a website for Jesus in 2022, so very briefly there was a reason for me to be remembering these evenings when I was hanging out with Thomas and Jesus in the middle of the night. Which was why my summer of 2022 was so extraordinary. On many nights, I would go to sleep at eight o’clock or so, which is usual for me, since I normally wake up at midnight and I do my best writing between midnight and three or four in the morning. But often during that summer, I would come to awareness soon after my physical eyes closed; and amazingly, Thomas and I would be there with Jesus on His astral riverbank! It was then that I got to ask Jesus so many questions. And one question that I asked Him that summer was whether He really had come to earth intending to abolish all religions. I did not yet fully comprehend, even so recently as two years ago, how abhorrent to Jesus religions really are. Let me set this amazing scene for you:

I came to awareness sitting beside Jesus where we often sat to talk together during that summer. We were sitting on His riverbank on the third level of the astral plane, with our astral feet in the living water that feels like silk, and feeding His neon-colored fish with grain that simply would appear in our hands. He has a flock of pet deer, too, and they were grazing in a field behind us. Jesus always would tamp down His personal energy by a lot for me so I could sit beside Him that way, but still, there was a little warm buzz from Him that I could feel. And on the third astral level, there is a diffuse light with no sun, and a many-colored sky that makes the atmosphere feel something like a perpetual sunset. There is a lovely scent that isn’t quite like flowers, and a feeling of love that is always around you.

As Jesus and I sat there, tossing bits of grain to the fish, I said respectfully and rather shyly, “My Lord, is it really true that when You came to earth, one of Your reasons for coming was to abolish religions? To help people relate to God more directly?”

As He often did, Jesus read my mind, and He took His answer from my own mind. After a moment He said, “Little One, you know it to be true.”

He said that gently. He was smiling a little. He knows how much his presence overwhelms me.

A year ago, I wrote a blog post that summarized what Jesus is quoted in the Biblical Gospels as saying about religions. I cannot now improve upon what I said there, so please consider that post to be incorporated here.

We tend to think of Jesus as having taught only or mostly Jews, but that was really not the case. As He began His earthly ministry, He moved out of Nazareth and away from the more narrowly Jewish culture into which He had been born, into “Galilee of the Gentiles,” to fulfill Isaiah’s prophesy (see MT 4:15). And it was there that He first began to call His disciples. The excerpt from the Book of Matthew quoted below describes those early days in Galilee:

¹⁷ From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Reform your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” ¹⁸Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon who was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. ¹⁹ And He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” ²⁰ Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. ²¹ Going on from there He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and He called them. ²² Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him. ²³ Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. ²⁴ The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them. ²⁵ Large crowds followed Him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan (MT 4:17-25).

And as Jesus collected His first disciples, He continued to teach about the kingdom of heaven wherever He went, to the crowds of hundreds, and then of thousands of people who followed Him everywhere. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (MT 13:31–32).

This sounds almost like a throwaway story, but it is an important teaching! Pliny the Elder, a botanist and a contemporary of Jesus, wrote two things about the mustard plant: It is medicinal, but Pliny warned against growing it because it tends to take over the entire garden. So those would have been the images on which Jesus was building. He taught that the kingdom of God is good for us – it is grows from a tiny seed, and it is healing, transformative, and life-giving – and once we espouse and cultivate it, the kingdom of God will grow rapidly in the world. Jesus talks about loving everyone and turning the other cheek, doing to others as we would have them do unto us, and living a simple and gentle life. He said that once we are perfectly living these lives filled with love that He prescribes, we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. He intended the old world to soon be over. 

So then, why is the old world not over by now? What happened? I think the answer to that question is a simple one. The kingdom of God on earth is internal. It is something that each of us must individually allow and accept to grow within us. And until each of us, individually, is ready to do that, it cannot arrive. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Every time that each of us prays as Jesus taught us to pray, and each time that we mean those words as we say them, we begin to make the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth even possible! As you will recall, Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed (or holy) be Your name.¹⁰ ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:9-10). As you have said those words, have you ever said them consciously, thoughtfully, with meaning, with yielding, and actually thinking with full awareness about what you were saying, and what it deeply means? I myself never had, until Thomas first made me realize the amazing importance of each of those words!

The people to whom Jesus first taught The Lord’s Prayer did not know that this earthly reality is created by and composed of what we each experience as Consciousness. In fact, nothing else but what you and I experience as Consciousness actually exists. And there is in fact just one Consciousness, which all eight billion of us who are now on earth share. So as each of us raises our own Consciousness vibratory rate away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love, we also will minutely raise the vibratory rate of everyone else on earth. Which means that as more and more of us raise the vibration of the Consciousness within us to the level of God’s pure and perfect love, oh yes indeed, we will easily help every other person on earth to raise his or her own spiritual vibratory rate as well. So then we can at last all together easily bring the kingdom of God on earth!  

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony. 

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)