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Sin?

Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 02, 2025 • 1 Comment
Afterlife Research, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

On occasion, someone will reach out to me by email, and will ask what I know is an unbearable question for a parent even to contemplate. They will remind me that I keep insisting that there is no hell. But, if someone has done some really bad thing, something awful, what will happen to him? How will God judge him? And sometimes, what follows will be an awful story of someone whose young life has gone terribly wrong, someone’s child has committed a crime perhaps, has killed someone, has killed himself or herself, or has died by a fentanyl overdose; and so on and on. Or it might not even be a child who has been lost. It might be some other loved one who has grieved my correspondent in some terrible way.

To be frank, this is the most hideous aspect of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s  Christianity. Under the highly judgmental version of the Christianity that we have been faithfully practicing since the year 325 C.E., every mistake that you and I make on earth, however petty that mistake might seem to us to be, is immediately labeled a terrible “sin” by the religion. And that mistake, that sin, is reportedly about to subject us to God’s terrible wrath. Isn’t that right? Well, or so the Christian religion insists to us. But I am able to reassure my correspondents that Jesus tells us that nothing of the kind is true!

What does Jesus say to us about God’s judgment? Let’s open our Bibles together now, and ask Jesus that very question. What we find there about sin in actual fact is that Jesus pushes back pretty hard on the notion of any sort of divine judgment. Jesus even goes so far as to tell us that, “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). So then, is Jesus telling us that God does not ever actually judge us? So now, is Jesus actually our judge? Is that why Jesus went to the cross for us? Well, no, because Jesus now tells us in the Gospel of John that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Jesus came to save the world? You came to save the world from what, Jesus? Well, it is clear from everything that Jesus said during His earthly ministry, which was more than three years long, that what Jesus came to save us from was spiritual ignorance. And Jesus seems even to have gone so far as to tell us that there is no universal judgment. He says, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).

This idea that, so long as we forgive, then we also will be forgiven is Jesus’s great and very consistent theme, throughout all four canonical Gospels. When Peter, His disciple, asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I must forgive him, up to even seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you.They will pour into your lap a good measure – pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return (LK 6:37-38). Huh? While Roman Christianity uses the word “sin” as a powerful noun, as a fixed crime that, once you have committed it, now it rigidly exists, so it requires either punishment or some form of atonement; for the Jesus of the Gospels, “sin” is just a trivial and always-flexible verb, so it is easily modified, and even easily forgiven altogether. He says to the woman who was caught in adultery, at whom no one in the crowd has felt sinless enough in front of Jesus to cast the first stone, “I do not condemn you either. Go. From now on, sin no more” (JN 8:11). Wow, look at that! Jesus sees her sin not as a serious and rigid noun, a crime punishable by death. But rather, it is a trifling and flexible verb, a mere piffle that He can entirely dismiss with a word.

My gradually becoming so completely dismissive of the rigid, sin-based teachings of the Catholic Church has been made easy by the simple fact that the afterlife evidence all has sided so completely with the gentle Gospel words of Jesus. There is, in point of fact, no afterlife evidence whatsoever that God ever judges us. None at all! No afterlife evidence for a fiery hell, and nor is there evidence for any place of punishment at all after death beyond “the Outer Darkness, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12) The afterlife evidence tells us that this outer darkness is the very lowest-vibration afterlife level, and it is cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting. Only we, ourselves can ever put ourselves there, and that can happen only if we are unable to forgive ourselves for something that we have done in our earth-lives.

On the much more positive side, the Canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus can be seen now to be perfectly true! God never judges us, and also neither does Jesus. No, our post-death judge is always ourselves. And we don’t call this process judgment, but rather we call it just a life-review, and it happens very soon after our deaths. Each of us, with the assistance and comfort of our spirit guides, and sometimes also with the assistance of others who have been important in our lifetimes, will meet together, and will view all the significant events of our lifetime that just has been completed. We might be seeing all the important events from beginning to end, or else from the end backward to the beginning. But either way, this time we will feel the emotions of that whole lifetime from the points of view of all the people that we have in any way affected, for good or for ill. 

Many of those who have been through these life reviews will tell you that they can be pretty awful experiences! They say they never had remembered some of these life-events; and some of the very worst times, when they had most upset or pained people, were things that they had thought nothing of at the time. On the other hand, some of their most obvious screw-ups, they had apologized for and largely repaired during life, so those events weren’t very big deals in their life-reviews. But, the little girl you shamed in third grade? The boy whose great love you stole when he was twenty-two? The dry cleaner you denied a bank loan, so they went out of business and they couldn’t pay for their daughter’s cancer treatments? Learning complete forgiveness, and especially self-forgiveness while we are alive, really is essential! And not even so much so we can forgive others, but because eventually the day will come when we are going to face the deepest truths about ourselves. As Jesus so abundantly tells us! And on that day, even His “seventy times seven times” may not be enough times for us to need to forgive ourselves.

I have told you before in this space that eventually the impossible contrast between the way the Jesus of the Gospels sees sin, and the way the Roman Catholic Church sees sin, made my eyes cross! For Jesus, sins are only trivial mistakes made in the process of spiritual learning and growth, and always easily forgiven.  While for the religion, each sin is a permanent burden that only the  pure blood of Jesus on the cross can wash away. So eventually, and it was a number of years ago now, I asked Thomas point-blank who God really is. Is God the stern and fear-based God of the Catholic Church, or is God more the loving Father that Jesus taught us to know and to love in return? And does God see sin as a burden that only Jesus’s blood-sacrifice on the cross can remove?

So then, one morning as I was waking up, my Thomas showed me as a clear vision the living room of our first family home, way back when our three children were toddlers. In the early eighties, the carpet was pale blue, and the sofa was striped pale blue and white. The God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with His long, white beard was sitting on the sofa in that long-ago living room, looking like a Grampa and grinning at a toddler who looked like my blond and curly-haired son at about the age of one. The baby was giggling as he carried a cup of orange juice around the living room. Then, Whoopsie! The cup tipped, and all that orange juice spilled on the pale-blue carpet. The baby started to cry, but God laughed, and He leaned and picked up the baby, just as it toppled; and God cuddled the baby in His arms. That precious child will learn how to carry juice without spilling it, just as you and I will learn how to grow spiritually past our little sins and mistakes. Cod’s love is perfect! And each of us is God’s best-beloved child. All of our sins are nothing worse than spilling orange juice on the carpet.  We can call God our own heavenly Father, and we always can trust our God to keep us from falling. Every time.

 

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Roberta Grimes
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One thought on “Sin?

  1. Again today you have brought me peace in believing that I have never known before in my 72 years of living.
    Love you for sharing with us.

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