I serve a risen Saviour, He’s in the world today.
I know that He is living, whatever men may say.
I see His hand of mercy, I hear His voice of cheer,
And just the time I need Him He’s always near.
He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
– Alfred H. Ackley (1887-1960), from “He Lives” (1900)
When I was a child sitting with my parents in the pews of my family’s old New England church, our beloved Reverend Turrell often would tell us that Jesus is “fully God and fully Man”. I preferred to go to grown-up church every Sunday from the age of eight because after my experience of light, coloring and singing in the basement held no further charms for me. Instead, what I craved was meaty sermons! And “fully God and fully Man” the way our minister would say it had a fascinating ring to it. I was eager to better understand what that meant, and why, and our Reverend Turrell was a blessing for a childhood-level minister. His every sermon richly quoted long and deep gospel passages, so it felt as if Jesus was talking to me directly; and he never preached hellfire or anything else negative. It was because of Reverend Turrell that my first life-ambition was to become a minister, too, so I also could one day stand up there in a pulpit and say mesmerizing things to people. He even had me reading the Bible from cover to cover, over and over, by the time that I was eleven. I would read a couple of pages each night, and I kept that up until I was in my fifties.
You tend to go deeper, though, as you grow older. That is especially true if you grow up to become such a zealous Christian that you major in early Christian history in college. And as you must realize by now if you have been sharing very much of this life-journey with me, the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity won’t stand up to much scrutiny. There is nothing sacrilegious about going deeper, mind you! In fact, Jesus urges us to do just that. Our beloved Wayshower and Best Friend respects our intelligence, and He seems to enjoy our curiosity. Jesus says, 7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? 11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! (MT 7:7-11) The footnotes to this passage even tell us that the forms of the verbs used here are especially strong, so Jesus would have said it to sound more like, “keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking”. Jesus urges us to dig away and to keep on learning, my very dear ones! The more eagerly I ever have sought the truth, the very much more I have ever so happily learned. It has always been as if God has been amused by my unwillingness to ever let myself be fully satisfied with anything that I already knew. Until there came at last that unbelievable night in April of 2022 when I was sitting at the feet of Jesus Himself, and hearing from Him at last His own eternal-life story.
It was there that somehow my childhood pastor came together with Jesus in my mind. Reverend Turrell’s old insistence that Jesus must be “fully God and fully Man” made perfect sense to me finally, and Jesus’s own devout wish that my spirit guide please do something so crazy as chasing the Son of God’s astral body around that Heavenly field and catching Him and beating Him up also made its own confounding sort of actual sense. I almost could see a smile on the face of the Godhead Collective, which yes, true enough, is Spirit, just as Jesus long ago insisted to us is true, so it has no actual face. God never wears any kind of a body! All of this came together for me perfectly and combined with my whole lifetime of questioning and challenging Constantine’s bastard religion on the night when Jesus invited me to come and sit with Him on His riverbank so He could tell me how He came to be.
NO, Jesus did not die for our sins! Of course not! And I can see that now so clearly. When you believe that Jesus’s death was a human sin-sacrifice to God, then you throw God’s perfect love for you as God’s infinitely treasured and best-beloved child right back in God’s metaphorical face. When you believe Constantine’s old fear-based religious idea upon which he built his version of Christianity, that Jesus died for our sins (or needed to), then you are saying that you actually believe in just a petty little excuse for a God who insists that you and I must always forgive, even though God cannot quite manage to forgive us in return without first receiving Jesus’s bloody body as a sacrifice. Jesus Himself tells us that His death and resurrection together demonstrated to us that human life is eternal, which He tells us was the reason why He chose to go to the cross. So then His rising from the dead was the part that mattered! And of course, if Jesus had died as a sin-sacrifice, then His rising from the dead would have been meaningless. It also would have made Him an imperfect sin-sacrifice. After all, every lamb, calf, and pigeon that ever has been killed as a perfect sin-sacrifice to God in the Temple down through all the ages always has stayed dead! Have you never paused to considered that fact?
Jesus informed me on that night in April of 2022 when He told me His life’s story that the Godhead had at first actively rejected His idea that He might allow Himself to be arrested and crucified. God had considered that whole notion to be too humiliating for a perfected Being and a genuine Part of the Godhead! But Jesus told me on that night in 2022 that He had decided that, with or without the Godhead’s permission, He was going to do this. He really felt at the time that He had to do it, because He could not convince the people that He had come to earth to teach that their lives were eternal in any other way. Which makes more meaningful something that Jesus cried out from the cross on that Friday night, the night before the Sabbath, just as the sun would have begun to set:
“At about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'” (Mt 27:46) This same quotation also appears in the crucifixion story in the Gospel Book of Mark at 15:34. And it suggests that perhaps Jesus was still not quite sure when He dismissed His Archangels and surrendered Himself to be crucified that He had fully convinced God to cooperate with His plan:
- Jesus had been expecting God to free Him from His body on the cross before sunset, because
- At sunset on that Sabbath Eve, the soldiers would be coming around to break the legs of those still alive on crosses, so they could no longer push up to breathe and they would then quickly expire and be taken off their crosses before darkness fell and the Sabbath began.
And of course, a resurrected body with broken legs would have been useless when Jesus tried to walk it out of that tomb so He could thereby prove His survival! Personally, I long have assumed that the sponge filled with sour wine that Jesus was offered immediately after He cried out to God contained a poison, and the man who administered it to Jesus was acting at the Godhead’s subliminal direction. Here is what comes immediately after Jesus cries out to God:
47 “And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began saying, ‘This man is calling for Elijah.’ 48 Immediately one of them ran, and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and gave Him a drink. 49 But the rest of them said, ‘Let us see whether Elijah will come to save Him.’ 50 And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. 51 And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. 52 The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many. 54 Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, Truly this was the Son of God!’” (MT 27:47-54)
And so it was that Jesus died on the cross. And Jesus indeed was, and He remains today as my childhood pastor always used to insist, fully God and fully Man. He was fully Man because up until about the year 6000 BCE, He was a human being like all others, and He was spiritually rising over repeated lifetimes toward love and away from all the ishy emotions, perfecting Himself on earth within God’s Consciousness just as we all are now perfecting ourselves. He then became a perfected Being.
When the boy that Jesus had been in 6000 BCE first achieved Godhead status, He was stunned and alarmed to realize that He had arrived alone at the Godhead level. Neither of His brothers of that lifetime who had died when He had died also had been perfected, so there had been some sort of contest going on here that none of them even had known about and He alone had won it. But it was unfair for there to be a contest going on unless everyone at least got to know the rules! That was the way that Jesus told me He had seen it at the time. So He had refused to join the Godhead Collective, and instead He had spent what my Thomas later reckoned was something like four thousand earth-years making a complete pain in the neck of Himself, petitioning to be allowed to be born again right now from out of the Godhead so He could teach on earth what He now referred to as “the rules” for achieving Godhead status. Let’s make this a fair contest, for Heaven’s sake!
So, very truly, Jesus remains to this day fully God and fully Man. Jesus never has joined the Godhead Collective, even though two thousand years ago His pleas at last were answered, and He was born again from the Godhead as God on earth. All His additional work done in love for humankind has so much further elevated Him spiritually that now He vibrates even above the Godhead level. In the astral plane we recognize one another by our spiritual vibrations, and Jesus’s vibration is at this point one singular, very high note so powerful that unless He remembers to tone it down by a lot, you cannot get near Him. As Jesus said when He was living on earth, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). And with the patient assistance of my Thomas, who is His devoted elder brother from His final earth-lifetime that they lived together so long ago, Jesus also has managed to maintain His human distinction. Thomas has told me that he and a few others who are very close to Jesus have pledged to Him that they will never advance further spiritually to join the Godhead, but they will always remain close to humankind and also in service to Jesus, in order to help Him to maintain forever His intimate human connection. So Jesus can indeed be forever fully God and fully Man, and therefore for each of us He is our own intimate connection to the Godhead. My childhood pastor was precisely right!
So, is Jesus actually our Savior? And what then is He saving us from? Not from hell, certainly, or from anything like it. Afterlife researchers never have found any evidence of a fiery hell, but instead there is evidence that such a place is not really possible. But Jesus is indeed our Savior! Jesus tells us that He came to the world two thousand years ago not to save us from the wrath of a perfectly holy God whose only emotion is the purest and most intense love for each one of us individually. But Jesus did indeed come to save us, and what He came to save us from was ignorance. Two thousand years ago, Jesus was born from the Godhead, fully determined to give us what He thought of as “the rules” for what would be the quickest and easiest way to raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime so we might all become spiritually perfected Beings as soon as possible. And that is precisely what the Gospel teachings of Jesus actually are! Perhaps the Roman Emperor Constantine got everything wrong, but Jesus gets it all precisely right. And next week we will talk about how, despite the careless and dismissive way that Constantine stole and used His name, Jesus made sure that into the far future you and I still might come to know and love Him on an intimate level, even today!
In all the world around me I see His loving care.
And though my heart grows weary, I never will despair.
I know that He is leading, thro’ all the stormy blast.
The day of His appearing will come at last.
He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
Rejoice, rejoice, O Christian! Lift up your voice and sing.
Eternal hallelujahs to Jesus Christ, the King!
The Hope of all who seek Him, the Help of all who find.
None other is so loving, so good and kind.
He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
– Alfred H. Ackley (1887-1960), from “He Lives” (1900)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)