Roberta Grimes

God and You

Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 14, 2024 • 17 Comments
Jesus, The Source, The Teachings of Jesus

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
² My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
³ He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
⁴ Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.

⁵ The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
⁶ The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
⁷ The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
⁸ The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.
Psalm 121 (A Song of Ascents; A Psalm of David), ca 1000 BCE

For much of my life, I never could find a way to feel close to God. I think my problem was mostly that the God that we meet in Christian churches is so distant, so gigantic, and so frankly scary. That Christian God gave us strict rules that he had delivered to Moses on stone tablets on the top of a mountain. And omigod, we had better follow that Christian God’s rules, or else our eternal destiny will be to fry alive and screaming in a literal hell forevermore! Please pause and think about this for a moment. What Christianity actually seems to be telling us is that human reality before the sacrifice of Jesus was something like a kind of pre-electronics video game being played by some sadistic being with a long, white beard. Isn’t that the way it actually seems to you, too? The Christian God created all of us, and he also made the rules for us to live by. Very strict rules, those Ten Commandments! Then when anybody breaks a Commandment, he gets a black mark against his name in God’s book, called a “Sin.” So then as soon as our body dies, if we have committed a bad enough Sin during life, God picks us up in two gigantic fingers, and God drops us, alive again and screaming, into a gigantic lake of fire. Isn’t that how the Christian deal with God’s rules and hell before Jesus eventually became involved appears to have worked?

My experience of light at the age of eight probably made all of this feel especially real to me. I knew that none of it was just a story, but like that light, that scary God was real! But to put a better face on this, I also knew that the Christian God had sent Jesus. The Jesus in the stained-glass window below was actually quite large and vivid, and I clung to Him every Sunday of my childhood. And I know now that it was my spirit guide, Thomas, that I was always feeling in my life when I was a child, and I was very fortunate in that way; because without Thomas always there and loving me and talking to me in my mind, I think my fear of God in childhood would have been crippling. But as it was, I always had Thomas’s comforting hand to hold.

So in any event, as Christianity tells the story, God was merciful to God’s creation and sent us Jesus. God’s only begotten Son took upon Himself every one of our Sins, past and future, and then died horribly on the cross as our ultimate sacrifice to God for all our Sins, once and for all. So now, thank God, we hopelessly unworthy souls are cleansed and made worthy, and we feel miserably guilty and indebted forevermore. But at least, provided that we choose the right one of the forty-thousand-odd versions of Christianity which are now extant, and also assuming that we obey the rules of that right version of Christianity, we will not be going to hell after all. Of course, with Catholicism at least you can always buy your way out of hell. Rumor has it that Frank Sinatra paid the Vatican ten million dollars to ensure that his elevator would be going up and not down. Fortunately he was not a Calvinist! For Calvin, since God knows everything, God must always know even before we are born who is going to be saved and who is going to be damned, and your elevator’s direction is predetermined before you are born so you can’t even buy your way out. What does that Christian doctrine alone tell you about the way the made-up Christian God is imagined to pervertedly think?

And yes, of course the Christian God was human-created and designed to be terrifying, but that is true of every god that has been imposed upon humankind by every religion. From very ancient times, religions have been human-created and then used to control the masses, so all the gods always have had at their base the power that an angry god needs so it can properly punish us. Horrific punishment and eternal reward are every god’s imaginary tools. Of course, over time Christianity has enhanced the hell that it invented, first making that hell eternal, then adding features such as condemning unbaptized infants to it, and then later even allowing those unbaptized infants to ascend from hell for a moment in order to see the happy eternal lives in heaven that are enjoyed by baptized infants, and all so grieving parents would bestir themselves and hurry to pay their priests to baptize their newborns that were about to die. Fear has been at the center of every religion since humankind first invented the notion of having any kind of god at all.

So it is no wonder that Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago. Jesus came to free us from religions altogether, and to free us from even the very concept of religions so He could at last introduce to us the Genuine God. Funny, isn’t it, that the Christian religion that was invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine three hundred years after Jesus rose from the dead made nothing of the two real reasons why Jesus actually tells us that He came to earth? Far from starting yet one more religion and creating yet one more false god, Jesus insists that He came to earth to end all religions, and to introduce to us the one true God. But the genuine God would not have been of any use to the Roman Emperor Constantine, since except for naked power, the genuine God has none of the attributes that we always have ascribed to any of our human-created gods. The genuine God is never angry, never judges, never punishes, and never plays games with our minds and our lives at all. The genuine God treats each one of us with infinite love and with a kind of awe, with a reverence and respect that it is difficult for anyone who ever has set foot inside any Christian church even to imagine. And I only know this because I have spent so much time in studying the afterlife, which actually is what amounts to our true eternal home, and is so dense with the love of God that God is both the air and the light.

It has for a while been clear to me why Jesus came to earth when He did, and also what He came to earth to accomplish. But I have not until lately been really sure until I studied a bit of Jewish history that the God who seemed to be calling to and working with humankind so long ago, who spoke to David and Elijah and some of the other greats back then, actually was indeed the Genuine God.  But it does seem quite clear to me now that, yes, that period of Hebrew history a thousand years or so before the birth of Jesus was in fact the true God’s earliest appearance to humankind. Which was why Judea and the area around Jerusalem was where Jesus later chose to be born. Then at last Jesus could introduce to us the one true God!

To recap for emphasis, here is some of what we know is NOT true about God, and also about Jesus’s mission on earth:

• The true God is never angry, petty, jealous, or judgmental. Jesus Himself tells us that God never judges us when Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
• The true God never appears in human form. The fact that God never appears as a human being is true even in the astral plane, and in the afterlife, which is one reason why Jesus refers to God as “the Holy Spirit.”
• Jesus did not die for our sins. No, Jesus’s death on the cross had an entirely different purpose! Think about it. If Jesus had come to us to die for our sins, then He would not have needed to bother to rise again from the dead, now, would He? No, of course not! Merely His death would have been enough to complete the sacrifice. No, but Jesus died on the cross and then rose from the dead in order to prove to His contemporaries, and to us, that human life really is eternal, and that our own deaths will not end our lives. No one would have believed Him otherwise.

If you understand what Jesus actually was doing during His life on earth, the evidence for Jesus’s genuine mission is everywhere in the Biblical Gospels! To cite a few examples:

Jesus despised clergy and religious leaders. Among many other things, He said:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

“Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52).

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13).

Jesus hated religious traditions. To give you just two examples, He said: 

“Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9).

“Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

Jesus was disgusted by displays of religiosity. He said:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So, when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).

In all things, Jesus was speaking for the Genuine God! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of those old Ten Commandments. Right? Instead, He said, “‘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). Since “The Law and the Prophets” was how the Hebrews of Jesus’s day referred to what we now call the entire Old Testament, in one splendid stroke Jesus hereby replaced the entire Hebrew holy book of His day, and arguably also that whole ancient god’s grotesque video game notion of Sin as well, with one singular, glorious command: Love God, and love your fellow man with everything that is in you!

We know that when Jesus spoke of “the Holy Spirit,” He was not speaking of some separate Being. No, the Holy Spirit is just the spirit of God indwelling in each of us. This was made clear when Jesus repeatedly said things like, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (LK 11:13) And, “Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him” (LK 12:10), which proves that the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of us is indeed the genuine God, while Jesus, the Son of Man, tells us that He is not God. Not quite. But, can it really be so simple?

Oh yes, indeed it can! Earthly Christian leaders speak of a “Trinity”, but God is nothing so complicated as a Trinity. God is Everything and All There Is. Because the Genuine God is Consciousness, there is in fact literally nothing that God is not. But since God understands that you and I have such a strong sense of our own littleness while we are encased in these material bodies, God has conceived for us the concept of the Holy Spirit, which is in fact all of God but just human-sized and able to dwell within us for our earthly lives. Of course, God is within you now and God has been within you for your entire life, since there is nowhere that God is not. But perhaps the Emperor Constantine’s Christianity has convinced you that you are a Sinner. Perhaps you worry that you might have driven God away from you by something you ever might have done?

Well then, it is time right now to invite God back into your life, to stay! Simply close your eyes, take a hopeful breath, and with Jesus right there with you, where Jesus always is for you whenever you simply speak His name, just say, “Dear God, I love You with all my heart, and I receive from You now the Holy Spirit.”  

⁶ With what shall I come to the Lord,
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
⁷ Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
⁸ He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
Micah of Moresheth (Micah 6:6-8), ca 700 BCE