God in Love

Posted on January 17, 2026January 18, 2026 by Roberta Grimes

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.

Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, holy, holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

In the Beginning…

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ²Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

³And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light “day,” and the darkness He called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

⁶And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” ⁷So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ⁸God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

⁹And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. ¹⁰God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters He called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

¹¹Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. ¹²The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. ¹³And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

¹⁴And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, ¹⁵and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. ¹⁶God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. ¹⁷God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, ¹⁸to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

²⁰And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” ²¹So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ²²God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” ²³And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

²⁴And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. ²⁵God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

²⁶Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷So God created mankind in His own image,
in the image of God He created them;
male and female He created them.

²⁸God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

²⁹Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. ³⁰And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

³¹God saw all that He had made, and it was very good! And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Thus, the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

²By the seventh day, God had finished the work He had been doing; so, on the seventh day He rested from all His work. ³Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done (Gen 1:1-31;2:1-3).

So, God created this material reality in six epochs that we might measure as days, although they might just as well be seen to be six long eons of time, in a reality in which time is both flexible and highly subjective. We have very much later come to understand that Consciousness is itself the living God, and Consciousness actually is all there is. So, God created this beautiful material reality for humankind to inhabit as a spiritual school within the Consciousness that is God… And God saw then that this starter material reality that God had just created was very good, indeed! There is a second, somewhat different phrasing of the creation story that comes in the Book of Genesis right after this one. But my Thomas tells me now that this first Biblical Creation Story is the one that is true.

That second creation story is just human-made. But God did in fact create life on earth going forward from a dot of the first people and vegetation and the first beasts on a bit of land in what became Africa. And then God gradually created more earthly reality around us, and more backstory, as those first people’s descendants have needed to find both. All of which explains a lot of things, including why evolution happens in long episodes of punctuated equilibrium. We can forgive God for fudging a few things that way! Thomas tells me now that this start of the Biblical Book of Genesis is a simple and literal telling of what actually began this material reality, within consciousness, which is the literal Mind of God, and all there is. Then, building out from that spot in what became Africa, God has simply created forward and backward and outward from there. I said to my Thomas when he told me this, “So does this mean there never were any actual dinosaurs? God created just the bones for us to find?” Thomas told me that, no, there were dinosaurs and there were trilobites created as a history, although those periods were far shorter than what we now imagine them to have been. “But, yes,” Thomas told me, “God gives Godself a great deal of amusement in creating a lot of whole backstory and habitat for God’s children to enjoy discovering!”

So, how then does materialist science assume that creation happened? Well, in a “Big Bang” some 13.8 billion earth-years ago. And that materialist Big Bang theory, which is seen by fewer and fewer scientists to be, let’s be frank, at all a satisfactory explanation for very much, is based upon what are seen to have been the likely conditions of the very early pre-universe reality. But in fact, it solves nothing much at all, wouldn’t you say? Because no matter where you choose to begin that materialist theory’s creation of the universe, someone can always quite reasonably ask you, “Okay then, but what came before that happened? And then what came before that?” And of course, the perfectly ordered universe that then developed after the Big Bang, nicely set up within its tiny tolerances of space and time, and always making perfect sense, really should make no sense at all, without a Creator in place to design and order every micro-step of its later perfect development along the way. And yet, of course, this universe has continued to develop ideally, and to always work out perfectly, without any Creator’s guiding hand at all… or so they imagine. And so they try to tell us.

The material reality that developed under God’s control during the eons that followed that first Genesis story, that clear beginning, and continuing right up until the twentieth century, and developing backward in time as well, always of course has made perfect sense, with God patiently there to design and to control its clear ongoing development in both directions. It began as that bit of flat plain surrounded by that bit of ocean under that bit of necessary sky, because at first that was all that humankind needed to see; and then, over time, over centuries and then over millennia, we needed more and more African plains to explore, and then more oceans, and then eventually this entire round planet to which we could eventually stake our various human claims. We needed those farther and ever more distant stars to see, and eventually an ever more complete universe of stars, and so on and on. And as we have needed more reality, so God has given us more reality, generally with the help of human collaborators… right up until the early part of the twentieth century.

I recall devouring old science magazines in my college’s library, and there coming upon a strange old article by a research astronomer. How I wish I had copied that article! Now, this was in the Sixties, mind you, but this article could have been a decade or more older. The astronomer who wrote it told his readers back then that there still were many patches of sky that were entirely devoid of stars, but he had discovered that if you focused a telescope on one specific point in the universe where there were no stars at all, where it was possible to photograph an absolutely dead-black void, and then you came back a year later and looked at precisely that same point again through your telescope, you would find that now that spot in the universe which had been empty just a year ago would now be literally teeming with stars. And from now on, that spot would always stay full of stars! He said that he had tried this experiment a number of times with empty black spaces, and it always happened just this way. He thought that if you wanted to spend your career doing this, you could likely find all the remaining blank spots in the universe, and personally fill them all with stars.

Well, wow. I think now of that long-ago astronomer, as I better understand how God has probably always worked with human minds to steadily complete God’s creation, and the thought fills me with such delight! Now I think of that fellow who wrote that article as one of God’s final collaborators, still working as late as the twentieth century to finish the job of creating this universe as our spiritual learning-place that God began to lovingly make for us so long ago, with the process described for us at the start of the Biblical Book of Genesis.

All those who continue to insist that they don’t believe in a loving Creator God are foolishly kidding themselves. Because, to be frank, the odds are unfathomably long against this material universe simply holding itself together and remaining stable for even one more day; but that doesn’t matter to us at all, because God believes in you and me, and God loves us perfectly, and God’s love is far more than enough to keep this material universe forevermore rock-solid. As even today’s materialist scientists are at last beginning to understand. So, be of good cheer, my very dear ones! It may turn out that nothing in materialist science is as the scientists long have imagined it to be, but that doesn’t matter to us at all. Because we are ever better learning now that God has in fact forever been tenderly, lovingly right here with us, and has always been deeply loving us as God’s treasured and very much adored children, forever held close in God’s eternal heart.

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Dying

Posted on January 10, 2026January 11, 2026 by Roberta Grimes

The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.

“Now, don’t you go till I come,” he said,
“And don’t you make any noise!”
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamed of the pretty toys;
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue.
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!
– Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)

My dear ones, let us now consider together, in frank and very positive terms, what our next-stage journey is going to be. After all, for many of us, that journey is not very far away now. I am something of an expert on what that lovely transition is going to be, because I studied it exhaustively when I was right out of college. The year was 1970. I was living in Boston, and working for a big insurance company, programming an IBM 360 computer that was the size of a house, although it had much less power than does your cell phone. On weekends, I took to browsing used-book stores to collect what were some amazing books. The end of the nineteenth century, and the first twenty years of the twentieth century had been the heyday in southern Great Britain and in the northeastern United States of the great deep-trance mediums, like Gladys Osborne Leonard (who was my favorite, along with her chatty spirit guide, Feda). So, in the Fifties and Sixties, all the people who had first collected the wonderful books that had been written by the folks who had studied those phenomenal mediums were themselves dying, and a lot of their wonderful books had ended up in Boston’s great old used-book stores. Where I then gladly found many of them!

My purpose back then was to convince myself that our lives truly are eternal, because at the time, I was worried about that. And wow, those books were so spectacular that I was able to convince myself then, in spades! I bought perhaps a dozen of those wonderful books, and I read them eagerly; and it was easy for the skeptic that I was at the time to firm up a strong case for human survival. Deep-trance mediums were not like any sort of medium that is working today, but rather they could go into trance so deeply that they could withdraw from their bodies altogether and let their guides, with the newly-dead person sitting right beside them, take over the medium’s body and speak directly to those sitting in the room. It was amazing! I read so many cases of newly-dead people who could give their living survivors detailed accounts of what dying had been like for them, and also where they were living now; and even though they had died in London, perhaps, or in the Boston area, or in the environs of New York, they all had had personal variants of very much the same experiences. It was always basically the same process, the same sceneries, the same clothing, the same pastimes, the same personal judgment process, the same often tiny details. The same everything! Through almost a hundred different death and afterlife accounts, no two were alike, and yet no two were very different.

This is how, when reviving hospitalized people who were close to death became more common in the Seventies, so then Raymond Moody wrote his Life After Life about near-death experiences, I could study NDEs, and could realize pretty quickly that in fact, reviving people who have actually died is impossible. We will talk about the death process in a moment, and you will see then that our material bodies during life have an internal energy body which is connected to our material body by what is referred to in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes as a silver cord. So, then when your energy body leaves your material body – as it often does, while your material body sleeps – that silver cord can be seen, and it looks like a faintly shimmery, bluish streak. Here is that Biblical reference:

Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
– (Ecclesiastes 12:6-7)

The Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes was written about 935 BCE. That was almost three thousand years ago. Three thousand years! So, it was written even a thousand years before Jesus had to enlist the tremendous powers of the Godhead to produce more energy in one burst than all of humankind together even today can produce in one burst, just to reanimate His crucified and stone-dead body enough to resurrect it for one more day on that first Easter Morning. NDEs have nothing whatsoever to do with death, as you will shortly see; so the name that Dr. Moody gave to them is really unfortunate. Even today, some foolish NDE experiencers will talk about “having died and come back to life”. And in so doing, they demean both life, which is precious and extraordinary, and also the wonderful gift that NDEs actually are. Genuine NDEs are in the nature of very vivid, dream-like sequences that are given to experiencers by their spirit guides. Each dream-like sequence is unique to the experiencer, and it is meant for that experiencer’s own edification.

Life, on the other hand, is precious and extraordinary, in and of itself! Scientists still cannot tell us where life first came from, and nor can they say even now how it is produced; they cannot yet even tell us for certain how we can be sure when we are actually dead. But they can tell us, to their own amazement, that they lately have discovered that life actually gives off light. And that light fades and disappears when the life that produces it fades and dies.

So, I learned in my twenties from the great deep-trance mediums who had been developed toward the end of the nineteenth century what the overall process associated with a natural death would be. And most deaths are natural. Moreover, my further studies indicate that the process of a natural death really has not changed at all since I was first out of college. If a death is accidental, on the other hand, or if it is caused by human agency, it may seem to us to be worrisomely painful; but please know that we are routinely told afterward by the person who experienced that death that he or she was out of the body before the car crash or the murder or whatever it was happened.When death is going to be the result of some event, our guides protect us from experiencing most of the pain of it.

But now, let’s consider a usual death, the sort of death that most people experience. What happens in that case? Will we be much aware of what is going on? Will we have much choice as things progress? Let’s talk about it:

Life-Planning. As part of our pre-birth life-planning process, we generally plan into our lives three exit points from this upcoming lifetime that our higher consciousness can choose to take when it decides that it has wrung about as much value as it can from this upcoming lifetime. One possible exit is likely to be in youth, one in middle age, and one in old age; and yes, we and our guides might choose to move these dates as our lives go along. The decision to take an exit point will be made about a year beforehand, and then most people will begin, although unconsciously, to wrap up their lives. We might take a major, long-postponed trip; perhaps contact very old friends; and so on. People might decide at last to make their wills, and husbands might share with wives their secret passwords.
Changes in Body and Mind. Unless a death is going to be via a heart attack, a stroke, or some fast-moving cancer, a natural death requires either a serious illness or very old age to weaken our bodies and soften our attitudes toward the coming transition. And as we progress in that direction, our resistance to the whole idea of dying gradually lessens. A lot of this happens gently, subliminally, with the loving help of our spiritual guidance, but eventually our loved ones will likely notice our mental shift. We might want to talk about death, or want to read about how it happens, or perhaps we might want to go church. Remember that very often we may have been traveling out of body and into the astral plane with our spirit guide while our body slept, without conscious memory of that event, but with some gentle awareness of having done it.In general, and often surprisingly, our fears will lessen, and we will come to relax ever more about death during that final year.
The Final Month. This very last phase before transition has always been a magical, extraordinary time! In the first few decades of the twentieth century, before antibiotics, when many children and young adults died, there are reports of walls of bedrooms disappearing for some of the young dying, and those who were close to death could see right into the beautiful Level Three astral plane, where they would soon be heading. These children and young adults would joyously describe to those around their beds the giant flowers, the fountains, the distant mountain ranges, the people on their whimsical, mind-propelled toy vehicles, and so on, and sometimes for days. More recently, the dying will sometimes experience what is called Terminal Lucidity, when someone who might have been comatose or in end-stage Alzheimer’s, and sometimes for years, with a brain that is entirely fried, will unexpectedly wake up and begin to interact with those around the bedside. These folks might even sit up in bed, start talking in normal sentences, and seem to be just fine again! This phenomenon is easily explained. At this point, the inner energy body, which is leaving, is more easily separating from the material body; and as that happens, the damaged material brain no longer acts as an anchor on the healthy energy mind, so the healthy mind can briefly express itself freely.

The Active Death Process. Now things are set for the dying person to leave his or her material body. Dying people who are awake when this happens tell us that the process begins in the fingers and toes and travels up the arms and legs, and it feels like a kind of un-velcroing; they say it doesn’t hurt, although it does feel funny. Soon, then, the whole energy body has gathered in the chest; and then the energy body leaves the material body, either through the chest wall or through the top of the head, and it often lies above the material body, full-length and face-down. Or else it might sit above the material body in lotus-position. The dying person may then notice that the spiritual body is naked, and hurriedly produce clothes. And of course, immediately the dead loved ones, those spirit visitors who have come to take the dying person home are rushing to hug their loved one, just as those physical loved ones around the bed are rushing to feel for a pulse.
We Accompany Our Loved Ones on Our Brief Journey Home. This is a time of extreme danger! Most dying people newly out of their bodies will be distressed to see their bedside mourners’ distress, and they may attempt to capture the attention of living people and reassure them that they have survived their death. But if you are the dying person, and you do that, you can lower your personal vibration to the point where you can no longer see your Mom and older sister and your childhood dog anymore, and they needed to keep your full attention because they are the ones set to lead you home! There is a real risk that if you lose contact with those deathbed visitors, you could become an earthbound spirit for a time. So, whatever you do, if you are the one who is dying now, focus closely on your deathbed visitors! And as you do that, your silver cord, which had been stretchy enough to let you travel across the universe if you have ever wanted to do that during life, is becoming frayed now, and it breaks, which is your material body’s actual moment of death. But if you are the one who has died, you don’t much notice that, because you and your loved ones have already raised your vibrations together, and begun to leave that room behind. As you glance back at it, you can see it becoming vague and vapory; and then it disappears in a light, grayish fog, as just ahead, in the very same place but just at a higher vibration, the glorious Third Level of the astral plane dawns before you and your loved ones. You are arriving home!
What About Those Who Don’t Make It Home Right Away? We should note here that both Mikey Morgan and my own dear spirit guide, Thomas, tell us that, surprisingly, as many as close to twenty-five percent of those who leave their material bodies on earth will by their own choice not transit to the next level right away. I know very little about this phenomenon, so there is little that I can tell you about it! I only know that there are many who do spirit rescue work, including dear wonderful Father Nathan Castle, who is my frequent Seek Reality podcast guest. So if you ever find yourself outside your body and needing to be rescued, just call for Father Nathan Castle’s help.

My dear one, you are truly an eternal being! And it is impossible for you to fully understand how deeply and completely you in particular are loved. We come to this very difficult earth-school to learn and to grow spiritually; so yes, some of this life may have felt hard for you. Rough and unloving. And unfortunately, Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity suggests to us the possibility of punishment in our next stage of life. But, oh my dear one, you can forget all that now! God is love, and only pure and glorious love. And after the very hard and bitter life that you have just spent in earth-school, the infinitely loving God of All is eagerly waiting to welcome you home with milk and cookies forevermore! The tender, love-filled process of going home after a life lived on this hardscrabble earth is so sweetly joyous; it is truly the best part of life. You have been loved and nurtured all your life, but often without fully realizing that was what was going on for you. However now, toward the end of your time on earth, God can begin to show you God’s love purely, and without reservation. And God does that now! Oh, my very dearly beloved friend, welcome now to the perfect and eternal love of the forever-living God!

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
Since he kissed them and put them there.
– Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

The Slavery Question

Posted on January 3, 2026January 4, 2026 by Roberta Grimes

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!
Come, all who hear; now to his temple draw near,
join me in glad adoration.

Praise to the Lord, above all things so wondrously reigning;
sheltering you under his wings, and so gently sustaining!
Have you not seen all that is needful has been
sent by his gracious ordaining?

Praise to the Lord, who will prosper your work and defend you;
surely his goodness and mercy shall daily attend you.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
if with his love he befriends you.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680) & Catherine Winkworth, English translator (1829-1878), from “Praise to the Lord” (1680)

As each of us strives to come to ever better know and love the genuine Jesus on an ever deeper level, there are things about the Lord’s earthly life that still seem to be somewhat odd to us. I have talked about some of these issues in the past, especially after my Thomas took me to actually meet Jesus in the astral plane in April of 2022, on Jesus’s riverbank on astral Level Three. The afterlife foyer is on Level Three as well. That’s where we prepare for, and we then enter another new earth-life, and it’s the place to which we then return home again from our earth-lives that have just been lived. What you and I from here refer to as the afterlife is actually a fairly small transit space – you might think of it as a foyer – where we prepare to transition between there and here, and then we enter it on our way back home again. So what we call the afterlife is a foyer, if you will, on the third astral level, between our brief lives on earth and the immense and gorgeous astral realities which are our true eternal home.

And then the whole of Level Three, beyond that small afterlife foyer space, is beautiful and gigantic! Like each of the other astral levels, It is probably the relative size of our entire material universe. Nearly everyone vibrates high enough by the time of our material deaths to comfortably attain that beautiful Third Level; so naturally, even though at this point, Jesus can vibrate even higher than the Godhead level of this whole astral reality, He chooses to be where most of the people are for most of the time. So, He spends His eternity mostly on His humble Level Three riverbank, where if you want to visit Him, you can come and mostly listen to Him and help Him feed His fish, perhaps, with grain that just appears in your hands. And there, amazingly, repeatedly, small groups of people who have just recently died on earth will respectfully come in little groups to visit Jesus. This is the reason why He remains for us on easily accessible Level Three. He has to tone down His personal energies by a lot to be so approachable by us, and so He does that. Now, to be near Jesus just feels like one long, high note; it is odd, where everyone else vibrates in mixed tones. But it is quite bearable for us.

Still, we wonder about Jesus’s life on earth. It still presents us with some questions! And here are a couple of the questions that we might have about the life that Jesus lived when he was born on earth two thousand years ago. As we reckon it, He seems to have taken at least four thousand years to carefully plan that lifetime as Jesus, once He was perfected after His final regular lifetime on earth as a usual human being. Then, Thomas and I figure, some four thousand years passed before He was born again on earth as a devout Jew with the humble name of Jesus. So He had thousands of years during which He could plan that lifetime very carefully. Why then does His Jesus life in some ways seem so unusual? For example, being born to be a well-educated and very devout Jew, Jesus should have been married in His teens. And yet, insofar as we know, Jesus never married in that entire lifetime. Why wasn’t Jesus ever married? Jesus was very well educated, and His chosen role was to be a Teacher; and yet, He didn’t start to teach until He reached what was at that time the fairly ancient age of thirty years old. That left almost a decade of Jesus’s young adulthood unaccounted-for. What was He doing during that almost a decade of what are now called His “lost years”?

Various notions have been advanced by scholars over the years to explain what are two pretty dramatic oddities in Jesus’s supposedly traditionally strict Jewish life. Perhaps, of course, Jesus did get married at fifteen or sixteen, like every other good Jewish boy of His time. He married Mary Magdalene, let’s say; they had children, of course; and then after His resurrection, the whole family was spirited off to live in the south of France. Hey, that works! Well, except for the fact that Jesus at that point was using a temporary astral body. But perhaps we won’t worry about such details. And those “lost years” in Jesus’s twenties, when He should have been teaching, seem to many to almost require a long trip to India, to Nepal, or to somewhere else both spiritual and exotic, from which Jesus would have returned at the age of thirty, having learned all the wisdom of the east. He might have had time to have done that; true enough. But the Gospels never even hint at such travels. More importantly, the Gospel teachings of Jesus are all His own, and there is no taint in them of any foreign flavor.

More importantly, we can see now that there is a much simpler explanation for these, and for all the other oddities in the reported life of Jesus. I first saw this alternative explanation proposed perhaps four years ago, and while my first thought was to squeamishly reject the whole idea, the more I have thought about it, the more likely it seems to me to be probably true. The simplest answer always is the likeliest one, is it not? And it does fit psychologically with the Jesus that we know and love, who after those four thousand years at the Godhead level had become so distant from the material world, and from communion with regular humankind, that He had wanted most of all to be close to the very least of us again, to study humble humankind first of all; to come to know better the very least of these before He could really feel best able to do what He had come back to earth again so very eager to do.Which was to teach humankind universally how to love and forgive and to very rapidly raise ourselves spiritually.

Please consider the possibility now that Jesus chose to be born on earth two thousand years ago as an actual slave. The institution of slavery was common at that time, but slavery was then very different than it was in our world in the recent American South. In Jesus’s day, it was more like a kind of indentured servitude, with occasional universal emancipations. And with strict Biblical rules about how “slaves” were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16). Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave when Gabriel announces to her the coming birth of Jsus. In doing so, she uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would ordinarily have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty.
If Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a slave, and so Jesus Himself was born as a slave, then His lack of a wife and His “Lost Years” are entirely explained. He could not have been married until after He was freed; and then, when He was freed at thirty, He was rapidly at last deep into His primary planned teaching role. Of course, too, until Jesus reached the age of thirty, He would have been unable to travel, because He was indentured to Joseph and working for Joseph as a carpenter.
Since from the age of four, Jesus was set to be freed at thirty, Joseph was required by law to give Jesus a good religious education. And, so he did! Jesus could read fluently, and He knew the Hebrew scriptures well. Joseph seems to have cared deeply for Jesus, who was the first male born into Joseph’s household. Joseph cared for Jesus to the extent of even carrying Him out of harm’s way and into Egypt for a time during Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents.
But Joseph seems never to have married Mary. She followed her Son throughout His life. And then Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own impending death death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry, when He is freed at His age thirty. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never really made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. And his home-folks promptly try to throw Him off a cliff. Here it is:

¹⁴And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. ¹⁵And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

¹⁶And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. ¹⁷And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
¹⁹To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

²⁰And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. ²¹Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²²And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” ²³And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” ²⁴But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. ²⁵But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; ²⁶and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. ²⁷And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; ²⁹and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. ³⁰But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30). A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just recently been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely nothing less!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that we have come to know so well surely would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor; and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His human life. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth, so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to very much better understand humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people than when God viewed us from the perspective of the least of these (see MT 25:44-46)? What better perspective could there be than that of an actual slave?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery, in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He was thirty. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been a coincidence.

So I have come to accept the probability that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life when He was Jesus on earth as a slave. And He did so by His own strategic choice, to better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand God’s people. But I think it was also done by personal choice. I slapped my forehead when I realized that! The Jesus that I have been coming to ever much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He was going to be a slave Himself. Jesus has just lived the past seventeen hundred earth-years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain himself!

I think I get it now. I do. Back in the spring of 2022, soon after I had first personally met Jesus, when I was still trying to get my mind around all the details of so closely knowing Him, I was asking my Thomas a lot of questions. Why did Jesus do this or that, or was this or that really true about Jesus? And the sense I got was that Thomas wasn’t always thrilled with these details about Jesus, either, but I just had to accept what Jesus did, and who He was. And I now realize that Jesus would have had to teach as a free Man, but until the public teaching phase of His life began, He would have actively wanted to have the same status as the very poorest people around Him. He would have wanted to be a slave, since He lived where so many people were slaves. And if I had asked my Thomas why that would have been so, since I would certainly never have wanted to be a slave, myself! Thomas’s answer would have been the same answer that I always got when I asked him these questions about Jesus. He would have said simply, “That is because He is Jesus, and you are not.”

Praise to the Lord! O let all that is in me adore him!
All that has life and breath, come now with praises before him.
Let the Amen sound from his people again;
gladly forever adore him.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680) & Catherine Winkworth, English translator (1829-1878), from “Praise to the Lord” (1680)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Consciousness Dawns

Posted on December 27, 2025December 28, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the works Thy hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy pow’r throughout The universe displayed!
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When thru the woods And forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds Sing sweetly in the trees;
When I look down From lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook, And feel the gentle breeze,
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885; 1949)

Yet another year comes to its close, and it marks for us a full century and a quarter since the mainstream scientific gatekeepers imposed upon all scientific research its mandated dogma of materialism. Those gatekeepers thereby turned mainstream science from what should have been an open-minded pursuit of the truth into what still amounts to the closed-minded religion of atheism. Only think of it! At the start of the twentieth century, those leaders then controlling the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals were so alarmed by the budding implications that they saw in the field of quantum mechanics that they informally, but still firmly, imposed a dogma of materialism upon all scientific research. And, what were they so afraid of, pray tell? Simple. They feared that quantum physicists were much too close to actually finding – or at least claiming to find – the genuine God. It is likely that this restrictive dogma was expected at first to be temporary, and held in place just until those gatekeepers could better understand all the implications of quantum mechanics. But early decades soon stretched into years upon years….

A full century and a quarter for mainstream scientists to have been laboring under such a restrictive dogma has become, at this point, a very long time. And for many years, as we have done our occasional check-ins, we have seen very little scientific progress made in some fields as a result. That materialist dogma has not been much of an inconvenience in certain areas of investigative science, so during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first there has indeed been considerable research progress made in the core scientific disciplines of traditional physics, biology, medicine, and of course in materialist areas like geology and chemistry. But where meaningful progress glaringly has not been much made has been in some few very significant fields! And three areas in particular have been deeply stunted:

Consciousness. What consciousness actually is, where and how it is generated, what it does, how it works, and so on endlessly: materialist science simply has no clue at all about consciousness, even to this day. For example, more than a billion dollars has been spent in seeking a source of consciousness inside the human brain, only to always come up empty. Mainly, it seems that mainstream scientific efforts in the fields of consciousness research have been focused on proving that consciousness is surely not-God! Some 125 years after the mainstream scientific gatekeepers first imposed materialism on mainstream scientific research as their fundamental scientific dogma, they still understand close to nothing about what consciousness is, nor what it does, nor even where it comes from.
How Life Began on Earth. The basic mainstream scientific story about how life began on earth that is almost universally presented in textbooks has lightning hitting just the right mix of chemicals in a pool of water, and Zap! Life happened. Life was just single living cells at first, but gradually those living cells became more complicated, and they combined into multi-cellular creatures, which then eventually became animals. But of course, this explanation makes no sense at all. For one thing, such suddenly-alive single bits – sure, call them cells – would have no way to remain alive beyond the briefest moment; and they would lack any way to add what they would need to add as the basic means for maintaining their lives beyond that first instant. Nor would they have any way to eventually combine with other also suddenly-living cells, and nor would they be able to ever replicate themselves. The theory as it is presented in textbooks never has a way to take us much beyond that first living instant. To this day, textbooks authoritatively say that this is the way that life began on earth, even though there still is no real evidence that anything like this ever happened.
How Evolution Actually Works. The story of evolution as it usually is told is that very simple, even single-celled organisms gradually evolved into ever more complex organisms over eons of time, with the fittest surviving, endlessly changing form and growing ever larger and more complex in endlessly creative and ever more positive ways; and smoothly developing new features and functions, but entirely without any overall plan, and without the need for prompts from any designer. This broad evolutionary tale that is generally told quite frankly boggles the mind. How is it, for example, that a functioning mega-dinosaur smoothly evolved over time from some single-celled creature, without any plan in place for that to happen? Or for that matter, how did gazelles evolve, again with no plan? How did totally random evolution ever bring us sentient humankind? Of course, the frank evolutionary record tells us that what really happened instead of this imagined, utterly random evolutionary track was even weirder: it was long periods of stasis in nearly all animal lines, where little or no change happened; then those periods of stasis were generally followed by sudden, brief periods of rapid change to a new, entirely different creature, which then in turn would go on for a long period of stasis living as that new creature, again with very little change. Scientists who study evolution call this phenomenon “punctuated equilibrium”. In fact, something like punctuated equilibrium indeed does happen in some lines; but all the explanations for it, and the reasons why it doesn’t seem to happen more often, still are poorly understood.

For mainstream scientists to come to fully understand these three important aspects of reality, whether we take each of the three individually or we choose to see all three together, will be tremendously important! For us to fully understand everything about consciousness; about how life began, and about how life developed and became stable from those earliest sparks; for us to come to finally see how evolution truly works in detail, all of this is basic stuff. And yet, the horrifying fact that we confront yet again at the end of the year 2025 is that traditional materialist scientists still understand almost nothing about consciousness. They still don’t know how life got started on earth, and nor how it developed from there. And their understanding of how evolution works is still very primitive, at best, when their materialist dogma will never allow them to admit to any kind of a designed process, nor to seek the source of any sort of evolutionary plan. The plain fact is that, even though these questions lie at the core of our ever understanding how our reality works, materialist scientists don’t yet understand any of these three phenomena, pretty much at all, even more than a hundred years after they first imposed their dogma of materialism upon all of mainstream science. And this appalling level of ignorance is a much bigger problem for the whole scientific community than that community ever has let on.

So, now we look again quickly as the old year ends at our favorite popular science magazines’ latest issues, to see whether there might at this point be even a hint of progress toward greater knowledge to be spotted anywhere. And, yes indeed, there is! The Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington, has been around for about thirty years now, and it does phenomenal work in the field of non-dogma-based, truly open-minded scientific research. From them, we learn that the argument over intelligent design is by no means seen as settled. Evolution is being studied and debated, and a synthesis among competing theories is at length being sought. What is wonderful is how much more open-minded all of science really seems to be becoming now, thanks to the work of these intellectual leaders!

And, wonder of wonders, now at last we are seeing a first, dawning awareness among trained scientists of something that Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, already fully understood more than a century ago. Dr. Planck saw way back then that consciousness is basic, and he could see that there is no way to get behind consciousness. In 1931 he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And indeed, even we lay researchers have long since come to the same, basic and inescapable conclusion. Consciousness is all there is, and the grounding of all reality. Consciousness is where each of us lives and moves and has our being. Consciousness is the sculptor as well as the clay. Consciousness is nothing bt God’s perfect love, and my dear ones, there truly is nothing else!

Even back a century ago, Max Planck felt strongly that consciousness had to be basic, and it must underlie everything. And, sure enough, scientific research has been inching in that direction ever since; until now, when what is precisely Max Planck’s concept of consciousness underlying it all is actually, finally, being proposed scientifically. So, my beloveds, is that newly-discovered consciousness layer actually God for real, lovingly underlying for us all of reality? When my dear Thomas tells us that is just what scientists at last have found, and he chuckles at the follies of humankind, then we all have to smile with him! My dear ones, the truth can indeed be kept from people, even sometimes for a century or more; but, the truth cannot be hidden forever. Always sooner or later, the truth will win.

When Christ shall come,
With shout of acclamation, And take me home,
What joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow, In humble adoration,
And there proclaim, My God, how great Thou art!
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885; 1949

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

What Does He Mean?

Posted on December 20, 2025December 21, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

Oh… Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.
— Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

For my whole life, I have struggled to ever better comprehend what Jesus actually meant by all the things that He said during the three and a half years when He taught on earth two thousand years ago. Almost as soon as I was able to read such sophisticated language as is in the Bible, I was attempting to read the four Biblical Gospels in a little copy of just the Gospels that some Mormon visitor had given to each of the children in my Congregational Church’s Sunday School. And even as a young child, almost every time that I attempted to read those Gospel words, I seemed to be finding new shades of meanings in what Jesus was saying there to us. So to deepen my perspective, by the age of eleven I had graduated to reading the whole Bible through, from Genesis right through Revelation, just a couple of pages every night. I wanted to see what added perspective all the rest of the Bible might add to what Jesus was saying there in just His four Books. And then of course I went on to major in early Christian history in college.

One of the things that I learned in college was that if I hoped to understand my treasured Jesus’s deepest thoughts, I would have to deal with some additional complications. For one example, Jesus spoke Aramaic while He was on earth, but His teachings were first written down in ancient Greek some sixty or so years after His resurrection. So there would be His first translation. And later on, of course, would come a second translation from Greek into Latin in the early Middle Ages. Then after additional centuries had passed would come yet more translations, into English and into other modern languages. And with each translation, additional fallible human translators had to make decisions which sometimes did at least some level of violence to what Jesus originally had said in the lyrical and emotional language that was His original Aramaic. The classic example often used to illustrate this problem is the ancient Greek word “Metanoia”. What Jesus almost certainly first said in Aramaic, which then was translated into Greek as “Metanoia”, was “transform your mind.” But the early Medieval Christian monk who first saw that word “Metanoia” in Greek is known to have translated it into the Latin command that we must “repent”. And that is how the insistence that we must “repent!” ended up as a command from Jesus throughout the first Latin translations of His spoken words. Even though it surely was nothing that Jesus ever said, or indeed that He ever would have said!

But remember that by the Middle Ages, that monk who was Jesus’s first translator from the Greek into Latin was a member of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian religion, which is the Christianity that still prevails in the world today. That monk never knew the genuine Jesus, nor did he have any idea of what the genuine Jesus actually had taught. And the Christian religion of that Medieval monk who was privileged to translate the words of Jesus was built not around love, of course, but instead his Christianity was centered on the ancient Hebrew religious idea that Jesus had come to die as a pure sin-sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Jesus had been a sin-sacrifice without blemish. That whole pure sin-sacrifice idea had been a concept central to the religion of the ancient Hebrews, and well known to the Apostle Paul. It was familiar as well to the Councilors at the Council of Nicaea who had created Constantine’s Christian religion. The monk who created that translation therefore readily believed that the Jesus he was sure must have founded the Christianity that he so devoutly followed very much later on would of course have ordered us all to “repent”!

But Jesus was not the founder of what eventually became modern Christianity. What Jesus Himself created was “The Way,” which was the beautiful and simple love-based spiritual way of life that He taught to His disciples. The Way then grew rapidly for the first two hundred years after Jesus’s death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea until it had amassed millions of followers as far away as Rome. And our great tragedy as we try to more deeply understand the true Jesus now is the inexorable fact that human history is written by its winners. The Romans decided that they could use The Way, but not in its original form. So they ruthlessly persecuted it, and they crushed it and nearly wiped it out. By the early 300s, there was almost nothing left of Jesus’s original Way but its scriptures, which still had the name of Jesus attached to them when Constantine resurrected The Way in 312, and it then was formalized as Roman Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. By then, The Way had allowed all sorts of spiritual side-theories and dogmas to develop; and in order for it to be useful to Rome, Constantine’s version of Christianity needed to be transformed from a spiritual movement and way of life into a fear-based religion that would make it an efficient means of mass human control. Nicaea’s formal version of Christianity was therefore built around a lesser dogma that had developed within The Way, which was that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin- offering required by God to cleanse us of our sins.

Still, the core of Jesus’s teachings when He was on earth had not been focused on sin. And the Councilors who were creating this new religion of Christianity under Constantine’s direction, and were assembling their new religion’s sacred Book, held a sufficient reverence for the teachings of Jesus that fortunately they left nearly all of His teachings just as they had received them, and they put what they added in the course of building their new religion just at the back of each of their chosen four of the many accounts of Jesus’s words that were then in circulation. Thomas tells me now that He and some of Jesus’s other followers not then in bodies were influencing the minds of many of the Councilors at First Nicaea, and at the six other first millennium councils. So they were able to shape to a considerable extent what happened at all of those councils, especially with regard to the selection and preservation of those four Biblical Gospels.

The way that the Christian Bible was assembled at First Nicaea with what we now know was spiritual guidance, and then carefully preserved thereafter, allowed the precious words of Jesus to be largely preserved. Yes, there are some contradictions within the Gospels themselves as to what we are told that Jesus said, but those contradictions come largely from translation concerns, from Christian dogma-based contradictions, from some First Nicaea Councilors’ additions, and from the frank fact that as they invented their religion, the Councilors never thought to check to see whether they were going directly against any of the spoken teachings of Jesus, the Prophet that they were claiming as their nominal founder. Here are examples of each of these problems

Translation Concerns. Some older Biblical translations still show Jesus calling on us to “Repent,” when what He really said was that we should “Reform or renew our minds.” Modern English translations are generally freer of this kind of distortion.
Jesus had to speak circumspectly because He was often speaking directly against the prevailing religion. And in fact, Jesus came to free us from all religious restrictions! It is important to keep these facts in mind. For example, since the prevailing Hebrew religion when and where Jesus taught on earth was largely focused on sin, and perhaps we might even say that it was in some ways obsessed with sin, Jesus often has to responds to the issue of sin, although in His own teachings, Jesus never focuses on sin. Instead, His teachings focus on love and forgiveness. That is a crucial distinction! Jesus is often quite casual about disregarding sins. For example, consider this passage: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat.But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (MT 12:1-8)
The Councilors Added a Number of Things That They Likely Wished That Jesus Had said. And what they added often directly contradicts what Jesus did say, and what is objectively true! For example, when Jesus asked His disciple, Simon, who Simon thought that Jesus was, the disciple is reported to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then reportedly said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:16-19). This is obviously one of the Councilors’ later additions! Note: “Petros” means “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic; Jesus did not build a “church”; hades does not exist, and anyway it would not have gates; the kingdom of heaven has no keys; and Jesus could give no human being the power to bind or to loose anything in heaven.
Some of what the First Nicaea Councilors Left in the Gospels That Was Said by Jesus Directly Contradicts the Core Dogma of Their New Christian Religion. This really confused me when I was a child! The most notable of these problems is that the Christian religion as the Romans designed it has Jesus dying as a pure sin-sacrifice. But Jesus tells us right there in the Biblical Gospel of John that neither God nor Jesus ever judges us. 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), and “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). Therefore, no sin-sacrifice is needed! And if no sin-sacrifice is necessary, then Jesus didn’t need to die as a sin-offering, did He? His death and resurrection were, after all, just what He said at the time that they were: His own triumphant demonstration of our eternal life.

Then too, of course, there is the fact that Jesus never was speaking in a vacuum. His words always were at least in part dependent on what was going on around Him, who He was addressing, and what the stage of His ministry was at the time. This point is especially important! Jesus was always sensitive to His listeners, and He spoke very differently, for example, to clergymen, for whom He had very little use, than He spoke to poor widows perhaps, or to earnest young seekers, or to his closest disciples and intimates. Modern Christians will often pluck a few of Jesus’s words from the Gospels and cite them just in sentence-fragments, as if they had been great proclamations. And if you do that, you might misunderstand Jesus’s Mind pretty severely!

As the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created seventeen hundred years ago is falling apart around us now, it is fragmenting pretty severely. I recall that when The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010, I was astonished to learn that there were then some ten thousand denominations of Christianity in existence. And now, just fourteen years later, amazingly, there are more than forty-five thousand forms of Christianity extant worldwide. Unbelievable. Yet still, there is just one patient and infinitely loving Jesus! Amazingly, there is enough of Him for all of us to share. And Jesus has one clear message preserved for us in one set of four Gospels by Him, by my Thomas, and by the rest of Jesus’s faithful minions. All the struggles of the past two thousand years are now nearly altogether past! And Constantine’s Christianity is looking pretty hopeless at this point. So Jesus does ask that we try to all begin to come together and resume The Way again now, dear ones, if we possibly can?

Day by day, Day by day,Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day by day by day…
Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

Any Minute…

Posted on December 13, 2025December 14, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

Beyond the blue horizon
Waits a beautiful day.
Goodbye to things that bore me.
Joy is waiting for me!

I see a new horizon.
My life has only begun!
Beyond the blue horizon
Lies a rising sun!
– Leo Robin (1900-1984), from “Beyond the Blue Horizon” (1930)

You and I continue to be flat-out amazed by the fact that the mainstream scientific gatekeepers still cannot accept the truth that reality will not submit to their materialist dogma-based ideas. So fraud in the field of peer-reviewed scientific publications now grows rampantly; while at the same time, the most successful form of physics, which is of course quantum mechanics, harbors a fatal problem at its core that no one wants to talk about, although nevertheless that problem has existed in quantum physics for more than a century, from even the date of its founding. Simply put, quantum mechanics requires an observer in order to collapse the wave function in a particle, to establish a certain reality. So, is the past before that observation happened not real? Was there no reality before the human observer existed who could collapse that wave? Or might a new understanding of causality somehow fix this whole causality problem?

As you and I know, in an earlier day, an ancient, very highly revered scientist faced a similar problem of being persecuted by a set of Luddite scientific gatekeepers. Do you recall the name Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)? He was a fundamental father of astronomy, physics, and the modern scientific theory who was tried and condemned for heresy by the holy Roman Inquisition for insisting that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. His puzzled insistence, “And yet, it moves,” referring to the earth, still resonates today. We might as well say now of that vexatious wave to those modern scientific gatekeepers, “And yet, it requires an observer”! Because eventually, Galileo was proven to be right about the earth’s in fact orbiting the sun. And so will the observer’s role be proven to be primary in quantum physics as well, but in ways that we do not as yet understand or respect where quantum mechanics is concerned.

Of course, Dr. Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum physics, solved this whole problem easily in his own mind. He readily accepted the fact that consciousness is primary, and mind does in fact pre-exist matter, so we had better all just accept and work with that fact! The modern scientific attempt to bend reality with their fake materialist/atheist dogma is just as stupid an idea as the Catholic Inquisition’s bullying of Galileo ever was. In 1931, Dr. Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

For Newtonian physicist Albert Einstein, though, finding his way toward this amazing new reality was a tougher slog. Einstein never was a complete convert to quantum physics, although toward the end of his life he did see the inevitability of it all. He was by then saying things like, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have seen as matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

The plain fact is that quantum physics is at this point a failed theory of physics, while at the same time it is one of the most successful theories in science, and it makes much of our modern life possible. And yes, both of these facts can be true at the same time. Indeed, the fact that mainstream science is dead-wrong is pretty clear to those of us who are not scientists, and therefore are not held to their nonsensical pledge to assume that MATTER must be the base of all reality. Indeed, “matter” is not the base of anything. Like Galileo, and like Max Planck before us, we who continue to hold steadfastly that the earth revolves around the sun, and that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists matter, are correct in our assumptions. And the materialist/atheist scientific gatekeepers are flat-out, dead wrong about consciousness, and they have stubbornly been dead-wrong now for more than a hundred years, as they continue to search for the source of consciousness inside the human brain. Which is, for heaven’s sake, like looking for the source of AIR inside the human lung!

My goodness, are you aware that even insects are to some degree conscious? And plants are certainly conscious, and they cooperate with one another? It is harder to accept that simple fact about plants because they don’t move on their own. They simply sit there, patiently thinking. But I learned that plants are conscious as a core truth way back in 1973. And learning that fact flat-out and forever transformed my own mind, altogether!

We’ll explain the amazing truths about plants in a moment, but first let’s finish considering the appalling fact that mainstream materialist/atheist scientists have been forced to ignore all these crucial truths. Just as their scientific gatekeepers have forced them to ignore the truths about so many things! In reality, the Catholic Inquisition that oppressed Galileo never ended; it only changed its name and for whom it was working, since now, rather than working in support of religion, it works to suppress religion. But mainstream science is determined to fight the overwhelming evidence that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists both matter and all of humanity, so currently more than a billion dollars in the U.S., and the same amount in euros in Great Britain, is being spent to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, but all without success. When asked to define “consciousness”, these materialist/atheist scientists always define it in terms of human awareness in some way. For example, “Consciousness is defined as subjective awareness of oneself and the world, encompassing thoughts, feelings, sensations, and the ‘what it’s like’ quality of experience (qualia), involving both arousal (wakefulness) and awareness (content of experience)” was perhaps their best consciousness definition that I could find today. But it’s always defined just in personal terms.

The most transformational book that I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Nothing else comes close! I first read that amazing book in 1973, its year of first publication, and I didn’t realize until years later the way that book had formed a basis for my fifty years of afterlife research. It opened my eyes to a deeper awareness that nothing ever is as it seems! It primed me to accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness is universal. And never again, for the rest of my life, have I cut a head of lettuce or grated a carrot without wincing. The fact that such a seminal masterwork, which is so fundamental to our understanding of all of life, has been steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their predetermined narrative was my first clue that the mainstream science emperor is sadly altogether buck-naked. And that scientific emperor appears now to be determined to remain buck-naked and altogether blind to vast areas of important knowledge, not only for the rest of my life, but perhaps naked even for my children’s and my grandchildren’s entire lives as well.

The Tompkins and Bird book’s fundamental insight is that plants are, OMG, fully conscious, and they mentally communicate with one another. They also mentally communicate with us. And what an amazing revelation that is! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who in the nineteen-sixties was one of America’s leading experts on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, Mr. Backster decided on a whim to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached a galvanometer to one of its leaves. And, what do you know? He found that the plant in his office was reacting very much as a person would react as it sat there in its pot having its transient, amazingly human-like thoughts. He soon found that the most extreme reactions in his plant’s leaf were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. Its reaction was less if Backster only imagined burning the leaf, without actually intending to do the plant harm. His plant would react, too, if other living things in the room were mentally threatened with harm. And Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants can read the minds of their own keepers even from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing revelations are now almost sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to pick up and read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history.

This discovery that plants are actually conscious still fills me with wonder, to this day. It formed a basis for my research-based awareness that what we experience as consciousness must be primary. There is no other explanation that fits all the evidence! So when I read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and I found that the greatest of all quantum physicists had decades earlier reached the same conclusions, I had a profound and joyous eureka moment. As the genius quantum physicist Max Planck famously said, ”I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Here is an astonishing video that gives you some sense of just how sensitive and mutually cooperative, and how oddly aware and almost human-like plants actually are as they intensively work and live together in their wild communities, right there in our own backyards. Please do take the time to watch this video, since I cannot conceivably do it justice. I only can tell you that after you have watched it, you will forever after see each patch of forest as a thriving community of sentient individuals in constant communication with one another, sharing their resources and caring for their young, and even fighting off anything that means to do their little community harm. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again. So, yes, what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force, and it is governed by what we experience as emotion, just as you and I are.

Yet still, the mainstream scientific community remains stubbornly stupid and amazingly clueless. Although, you know, with so much objective scientific truth now wafting around each individual scientist, we can have more and more hope that, just inevitably, the next-generation scientific community cannot remain so obediently clueless for much longer. After all, Galileo was right, and eventually the truth that he knew has prevailed. Every scientist who realizes and claims that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists matter is certainly right, and until basic scientific research is done with that fact as its grounding, there can be no further basic scientific discoveries made in any scientist’s name. You would think that knowing that fact alone would make young scientists become rapidly ever more disgusted with the fact that there still even are mainstream scientific gatekeepers who continue to enforce materialism on their work! Can’t they see how stupid this all is, when it forces them still to deny even proven truths? When these young scientists know that insects and even microbes, and OMG also trees, grass, and mushrooms are in their perfect ways conscious, and they are communicating with one another and with us, and for scientists still to be stupidly forced to deny these facts now, in the Twenty-First Century, gets us nowhere! Any day now, the truth is bound to dawn on sufficient young scientists that it is long past time for them to decide to be rid of all counterproductive dogmas, and to at last allow the plain truth to be known, and to be happily used by everyone!

I see a new horizon.
My life has only begun!
Beyond the blue horizon
Lies a rising sun!
– Leo Robin (1900-1984), from “Beyond the Blue Horizon” (1930

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Sermon on the Plain

Posted on December 6, 2025December 7, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.

Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, holy, holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

We ought to complete our study of what are the core of Jesus’s most important teachings, so today we augment our four-week review of His Sermon on the Mount by now considering His Sermon on the Plain. But first, briefly, to orient our reading, the Christian Bible’s New Testament begins with four Gospels which tell the story of Jesus’s life and work, with an emphasis on His teachings. Three of them are called the Synoptic Gospels (which means “seen together” in Greek). They clearly have similar sources. And two of these, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, are near-mimics of one another. So, here in Luke, we find Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount in near-parallel, and called the Sermon on the Plain. We are perhaps not very surprised to find many of Jesus’s words from The Sermon on the Mount being reported again in the Gospel of Luke, given how many people were there to hear Him that day! There were many there who would have been eager to pass these teachings down in their families. But it is given to us here as a different sermon, this time delivered in abbreviated form and on a flat plain. This modified re-use of such an important sermon, and the details of the way that it was re-used, should fascinate us. Note the reference here again to the vast size of the crowd, and the distances that they had walked, just to come on that day and hear Jesus speak.

(As you read these words from the Gospel of Luke, a few things will become evident to you. First, it’s clear that the writer of this Gospel had The Sermon on the Mount in hand in something near its final form. He entitled this speech the Sermon on the Plain, and he pointedly had Jesus come down and deliver it on a flat place for contrast; and in addition, he added some of his own moody flavor here. Note that in Luke’s Beatitudes, we have only four “Blesseds” and not eight; and they are harshly balanced at once by four “Woes”. When you read these Beatitudes beside those in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, you find that their tone is altogether different, as if they are said by two different people: while Matthew, like Jesus Himself, is entirely positive; here Luke, like the later religion of Christianity, carries the sense that the good times now must inevitably be balanced by pain later on.)

¹⁷Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place; and there was a large crowd of His disciples, and a great throng of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, ¹⁸who had come to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were being cured. ¹⁹And all the people were trying to touch Him, for power was coming from Him and healing them all.

(As an aside, in reference to all these healings, Jesus routinely used the faith of the person being cured to perform what were often quite miraculous healings. He would say something like, “Do you believe that I can heal you?” And when the sick or lame person said, “Yes,” Jesus would touch him and say, “Be healed!” and that worked!)

The Beatitudes

²⁰And turning His gaze toward His disciples, He began to say, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. ²¹Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. ²²Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. ²³Be glad in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. ²⁴But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. ²⁵Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. ²⁶Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.

(The three paragraphs that follow Luke’s “balanced” version of the Beatitudes are a marvelous summary of many of Jesus’s teachings, all gathered here and thrown together in a quick summary. So many, many lessons given to us all at once! You could write an explanatory paragraph or two about each separate sentence in each of these paragraphs, which makes the Sermon on the Plain a brief study bible all by itself.)

²⁷“But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt from him either. ³⁰Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back. ³¹Treat others the same way you want them to treat you. ³²If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. ³³If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. ³⁴If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners in order to receive back the same amount. ³⁵But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. ³⁶Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

³⁷“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. ³⁸Give, 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.”

³⁹And He also spoke a parable to them: “A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit? ⁴⁰A pupil is not above his teacher; but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher. ⁴¹Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴²Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye. ⁴³For there is no good tree which produces bad fruit, nor, on the other hand, a bad tree which produces good fruit. ⁴⁴For each tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they pick grapes from a briar bush. ⁴⁵The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart.

Builders and Foundations

(With this summary below, Jesus borrows one more thing from His Sermon on the Mount, He takes the comparison of the man who built his house on the rock and the man who built his house on the sand, and we here see that comparison reinterpreted as building with or without any foundation, after he has first begun this final paragraph with a question clearly brought in from elsewhere. So, again, we know that this Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel Book of Luke was all brought in from elsewhere, and assembled here from incorporated parts once the Gospel of Matthew, at least, already had been written.)

⁴⁶“Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? ⁴⁷Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them, I will show you whom he is like: ⁴⁸he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. ⁴⁹But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great” (LK 6:17-49).

We read all this astonishing spiritual wisdom of Jesus presented freshly here, very similar to The Sermon on the Mount and yet not the same because our angle is different since this Gospel’s author is different. And we read it with hearts full of delight! When Jesus’s teachings are given to us so compressed, it is possible to make this entire Sermon tonight’s quick bedtime reading. Or, we might do that with just those three summary paragraphs in the middle, each of them so densely laden with the richness of Jesus’s wisdom brought to us straight from God. Or, what about just that more balanced version of the beatitudes? Let’s only read and ponder that, and then commune with God awhile?

Jesus’s profound teachings on gratitude, forgiveness, and love, whether you find them scattered throughout all four Gospels, or given to you here in very condensed form, are much more than just words. As we know, if you can ever more perfectly live your life in the dynamically peaceful and loving way that Jesus taught, then you can choose to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, even if you are now in the later part of your life. Jesus’s teachings really do work amazingly well!

I know that from personal experience. In 2011, my beloved Thomas, my spirit guide, put it into my mind to try to live the Teachings of Jesus, literally. I was then an ego-obsessed hard case, as I have written for you elsewhere. But with Thomas’s help and coaching, and above all with his insistence that I abandon my old ways of thinking and instead that I only live and breathe the Lord’s teachings on constant gratitude, radical and complete forgiveness, and the love that naturally flows from always thinking as Jesus taught us to think, then omigod, my transformation was radical! And over just a couple of years, it was complete. I could talk to you for days about the absolute and permanent, the peaceful and joyous difference that living Jesus’s teachings has made in my life! It was as if, forevermore, there was a soft barrier of peace and joy imposed between me and every possible issue, every conceivable care. The proof for me of the power of those teachings was when, unexpectedly, in 2020 I believe it was, my Thomas told me that I had raised my spiritual vibration sufficiently that I am now living my last necessary earth-lifetime. And I believed him. I can feel it to be true.

So then, I had to attempt to teach what I had learned with such amazing ease! Two years ago, I experimented with teaching two Zoom courses on “making this your last necessary earth-lifetime”. And for some who took those courses, the effort was such a success that I got to watch many similar wonderful transformations! Even to this day, a core of us continues to meet each week in a community of love that is worldwide. Of late, I have been receiving emails from others who are hoping that we will again offer those courses. My time is pretty well taken up now, but perhaps in 2027? We will have to see where God guides us on this.

But my dear ones, every Christian Bible contains The Sermon on the Mount (MT 5-7) and The Sermon on the Plain (LK 6:17-49). If you will very closely follow the teachings in either Sermon, then you yourself have the power on any day that you choose to begin your own two-year course of study that can lead you to making this earth-lifetime your own last necessary earth-lifetime, so then you, too, can achieve sufficient spiritual growth to leave this earthly spiritual grade-school behind, and from after this earth-lifetime you can then grow rapidly toward ever greater eternal perfection. Thomas wants me to assure you that you can do it! And it won’t even be very hard!!

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Hearing Jesus #4

Posted on November 29, 2025November 30, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be;
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
– Adrianus Valerius (1575-1625), from “We Gather Together” (1597)

With Chapter 7 of the Gospel Book of Matthew, which constitutes the core of our post today, Jesus closes His Sermon on the Mount. Of course, we know that Jesus didn’t speak in discreet Gospel chapters, and nor does it seem very likely to me that these words were first spoken all together by Jesus in such a tidily organized way. Yet, the Bible is considered to be a holy book. So for all of its history, there has been no other truth than that God spoke, and this sacred Book was received from God and from God’s Son, Jesus, just as we have it now. But in truth, we know as a historical fact that the parts of what became the Christian Bible, which were in main part the Hebrew Torah; the scrolls of the Prophets; the various versions of the words of Jesus plus the story of His life; and also the letters of Paul to the first communities of Jesus’s followers: all the pieces arrived at the Roman Emperor Constantine’s First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. There the Councilors set about assembling from these materials their first Christian Bible for what would become the very first followers of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s new Christian religion. What seems likely is that those Councilors received as a part of this trove a whole pile of sayings of Jesus that had been carefully passed down within families and groups for decades, then written down after sixty to eighty years, and thereafter preserved by Apostles and Teachers, with probably no precise circumstances any longer attached to many of these bits of sayings. So, I assume that the Councilors did the sensible thing. They organized some of Jesus’s sayings by topic and by type, and then they cut them into three chapters of the Book of Matthew, since one chapter would have been overlong, et voila! They had The Sermon on the Mount.

My Thomas tells me that he and Jesus were present as disembodied Beings at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE; and critically, in significant ways, they influenced the minds of the Councilors who were putting together the first Christian Bible. He tells me that, yes, at Constantine’s instruction, those Counselors did add some nonsense about hell and Armageddon to the Gospels, but he and Jesus were able to mind-influence them to put such religion-inspired errors mostly at the backs of each Gospel book, where they could influence other minds in much later generations to find and pluck such errors out again. So, then I also have asked my dear Thomas, well, and of course The Sermon on the Mount is a compilation of Jesus’s sayings, right? Jesus didn’t just give The Sermon on the Mount all at the same time, on an actual hill, as perfect as that Sermon is? But Thomas won’t answer my question! All he will tell me is that Jesus did actually say all that is said in The Sermon on the Mount. These are all His teachings, so it doesn’t matter when or where He gave us these teachings.

Chapter 7 is especially full of wonderful sermon-fodder for far-future preachers! It nicely pulls together themes from the earlier parts of The Sermon on the Mount, and it gives us these teachings straight from the Lord in such a beautiful, colloquial way that if you have read the previous three posts in this series, there is little more that Thomas and I can add here. These words sing from Jesus’s heart to our own hearts.

And for me, whenever I read the beautiful Sermon on the Mount, the soft tone of Chapter 7 somehow shifts me from sitting on that hill and listening directly to Jesus, and lets me feel that I also am seeing into the room where they likely put it all together. You almost can see those First Nicaean Councilors, quill-pens in hand and busily bent to their work, and of course working efficiently, because their Emperor himself is stalking around their big planked table impatiently, already wearing his armor and requiring them to produce his finished religion right away so he can be out there and be about his conquering! A great many sayings of Jesus here! What to do? What to do? When you envision The Sermon on the Mount having been put together this way at the First Council of Nicaea, from many sayings of Jesus collected and then organized roughly by topic and by type, then it all makes a lot of sense. It is hard to envision, though, even the Son of God simply sitting down on a rock on the side of a hill one day and randomly giving such a lengthy, well-organized, and beautiful speech, entirely without any notes.

(Again, these headings are not from the speech, but they appear in the Bible for our ease of reading. And in this first section, note that to the Hebrews of Jesus’s day, dogs were not pets, but they were herding and guard animals; and swine were unclean and never eaten.)

Judging Others

7 “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. ²For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. ³Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? ⁵You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

⁶“Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

(My dear ones, the first two sentences below have guided my entire life! They were the touchstone of my fifty years of afterlife research, and they have been what I have put before Jesus in supplication whenever I have needed information as I have been doing this work.)

(And notice how Jesus tells us below that “treat people the same way you want them to treat you” literally replaces all the religious rules of the entire Old Testament, including all Ten Commandments!)

Prayer and the Golden Rule

⁷“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ⁹Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? ¹⁰Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? ¹¹If 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!

¹²“In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

(Jesus gives us below the reason why so many people make so little spiritual progress in each earth-lifetime! That “narrow gate” is devoid of earthly distractions and composed of love alone; the “wide gate”, on the other hand, is composed of all this world’s often pretty distractions.)

The Narrow and Wide Gates

¹³“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. ¹⁴For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

(When I was young, the second paragraph below distressed me very much. How could someone cast out demons and perform miracles in Jesus’s name, and yet be rejected and called lawless by Jesus? For the answer to that question, we are told that we must look to the first paragraph below. Jesus is telling us that it is not enough to simply appear to be a true prophet, to look like one, but we must be able to produce the fruit of a prophet, which is perfect lovingkindness. He is comparing a flashy TV preacher who is out for money to a true servant of God seeking just to do God’s work.)

(Do you see how Chapter 7 pulls so much of the rest of the earlier parts of The Sermon on the Mount together?)

A Tree and Its Fruit

¹⁵“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? ¹⁷So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. ¹⁹Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰So then, you will know them by their fruits.

²¹“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²²Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ ²³And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

(So here just below Jesus summarizes the whole reason why His listeners really must take all of what He has been saying in His Sermon on the Mount to heart! Enter through that narrow gate of pure lovingkindness; build using just solid stones of truth and forgiveness and rightness, and the strong cedar logs of spiritual certitude, and your house will be on a foundation that can withstand any possible storm that life might throw at it. His way is the only right way to Life.

The Two Foundations

²⁴“Therefore everyone who hears these un of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

²⁸When Jesus had finished these words, the crowds were amazed at His teaching; ²⁹for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes (MT 7:1-29).

The sun is setting beyond the fringe of trees growing along the top of that long-ago Galilean hill. Jesus has completed His Sermon on the Mount. Water jugs have been passed around all day long among the thousands of people who have been listening, sitting in groups below us on the hill and strung all down the valley; but everyone is hungry now. Jesus is growing hoarse. And we who had traveled here briefly from the far future are relieved to remember that we can simply turn around twice, close our eyes and open them again, and we are home! My beloved friends, this post concludes our walk together through The Sermon on the Mount, which is arguably the centerpiece of Jesus’s teachings. I urge you to read it often. Doing that takes little time, simply reading the Gospel Book of Matthew, Chapters 5-7. And I have found that often reading it brings you much closer to the living Jesus.

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Hearing Jesus #3

Posted on November 22, 2025November 23, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see,
Comin’ for to carry me home?
A band of angels comin’ after me,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

If you get there before I do,
Comin’ for to carry me home,
Just tell my friends that I’m a comin’ too!
Comin’ for to carry me home.
– Wallace Willis, former slave (ca 1820-1880), from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1863)

Just listening passively to the words of Jesus is a far different matter from truly and deeply, actually hearing what Jesus is saying as He speaks directly from His heart to our hearts! After all, many of the sayings of Jesus are famous. And when you hear His words used, and even misused often enough, they begin to lose their deep significance in your mind. Especially since the religion that carries Jesus’s name has in some cases distorted what seem to have been the Lord’s intended meanings for some of the things that He said, this can be a very big problem! This is why Thomas and I have asked you to imagine for our series of blog posts about The Sermon on The Mount that you are quite literally sitting with us now on that Galilean hill. We urge you to stretch your mind to believe that you are listening to the itinerant preacher who is Jesus Himself, and hearing His words literally the very first time that they were spoken. Think of these words as not tied to any religion at all just yet, but as instead coming directly from God to you by way of God’s living Son and True Messenger.

The Gospel Book of Matthew, Chapter 6, comes next in The Sermon on the Mount, and it deals with our personal relationship with God, and also with some of the more mundane-seeming aspects of our internal lives. Jesus is gently trying to wake us up to the notions that what we are thinking about, and the way that we think, both are really all-important! For us to talk to God every day is important as well. Jesus teaches us in this Gospel Chapter how best to handle these most private aspects of our lives, and even our most intimate daily thoughts. It may surprise you to learn that some scholars now believe that in Jesus’s day, a lot of these ideas in Chapter 6 which seem only normal to us may actually have been heard by their first listeners as brand-new, and even as radical! Back then, all these people were farmers and laborers, and most of them were illiterate; so for nearly all of them, and throughout nearly all of human history, there was pretty much nothing going on upstairs. And this was a more complete nothing going on than anything that we can imagine today: we are told that before electronics, before even literacy, it is suspected now that these people literally did not think much at all, when compared to the way that we think today. I can recall seminar discussions about this problem in college. Our modern minds are encyclopedias chock-full of interesting stuff to think about in every moment of our lives, when compared to the empty minds of those ten thousand people around us, sitting and listening to the words of Jesus on that Galilean hill.

So listening to Jesus is, for the very simple people of His day, even that much richer and more amazing as a life-experience than anything that you and I can imagine. No wonder so many of them would follow Him for days, eager to hear even much more of what He was saying! It would have been for them almost as if an alien from space had landed in your city and started spouting some truly amazing things. So after that wake-up jolt of the second part of Chapter 5, now we move into the comforting and love-filled spiritual guidance that makes up Jesus’s Chapter 6 of The Sermon on the Mount:

(Quick aside as you begin your reading of Chapter 6: there is a wonderful story in the early-twentieth-century afterlife literature about a woman who had obviously read The Sermon on the Mount, and she had taken to heart Jesus’s command that we be secretive in our charity and not let our left hand know what our right hand is doing [see MT 6:3 below]. This woman made a practice of secretly doing something good for someone else every day of her adult life; and if a kindness of hers was discovered, then she made herself do some other secret kindness to replace it, that same day. When this woman died, she was given a gigantic celebration and parade in the afterlife which was said to be like nothing else ever seen there! We know about it only because a man who had died around the same time described it to his family through deep trance medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, and it was preserved in a contemporary book written about that medium.)

6 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.

²“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. ³But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

⁵“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. ⁶But 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.

⁷“And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. ⁸So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

(As we can see, a lot of this is about transforming what was the simple and outward-focused very public religious life that prevailed prior to Jesus’s day and was managed by the smug and dominant clergy into a more personal and individual spiritual life that is inward-focused and private, since our relationship with God is meant to be internal. It is no wonder that the clergy soon came to hate Jesus, and were always testing Him!)

“Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
¹⁰‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
¹¹‘Give us this day our daily bread.
¹²‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
¹³‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’

¹⁴For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

¹⁵But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.

Fasting; The True Treasure; Wealth (These titles appear in the Bible only and were, of course, not spoken.)

¹⁶“Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. ¹⁷But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face ¹⁸so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

¹⁹“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; ²¹for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

²²“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. ²³But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

²⁴“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

(This beautiful summary of what human goodness is, and what it means to put the pure love of God first in your inner life, could be read again and again, as each word sings in your heart!)

The Cure for Anxiety

²⁵“For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? ²⁷And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? ²⁸And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, ²⁹yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! ³¹Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ ³²For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. ³⁴“So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

(This is the most glorious exhortation and call to faith and trust in God that I have ever read! Some who have taken courses that I have given in how to rapidly raise your personal spiritual vibrations enough to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, which essentially teach how to love and trust God enough that you can live by the beautiful paragraph just above, have told me that paragraph is perfectly true! If you completely trust God and live your whole life spiritually in the shelter of God’s perfect love, truly God does indeed provide, and miracles do happen. And my own life-experience has been amazingly the same as theirs has been.)

The treasured wisdom of Matthew’s Chapter 6 is all so beautifully said, dear much-beloved Jesus! Thank you, Dear Heart! We look now toward Chapter 7 of the Gospel Book of Matthew, where Jesus sums up for the quiet crowd of many thousands spread sitting all along this narrow valley below us the rest of what He has been teaching all along the way as He walked through Galilee with His disciples, while the sun begins to sink toward the farthest hills. We will complete our four-part study of The Sermon on the Mount next week.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

I’m sometimes up and sometimes down,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
But still my soul feels heavenly bound!
Comin’ for to carry me home.
– Wallace Willis, former slave (ca 1820-1880), from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1863)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Hearing Jesus #2

Posted on November 15, 2025November 16, 2025 by Roberta Grimes

For the beauty of the earth,
For the splendor of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the wonder of each hour,
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliot Sandford Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

My beloved friends, sitting here as we still are on this tall Galilean hill, with the Master sitting just above us on the hill surrounded by His disciples, with the sun higher just beyond the trees and the day growing warm around us now, we can hear that Jesus is getting deeper into sharing with us His saintly wisdom. Those of us here in our little group of only just a few thousand people have walked for days from the far future, just to have this chance to hear Him. To hear humankind’s greatest Teacher! But, we realize now that the valley below us is filling with many more thousands of people, to even beyond what the eye can see. So, how will we find food and water today, and even by nightfall, we are asking one another now. How will we feed and care for our children?

Jesus has a very big voice. It carries, even far down across that broad valley below us. There is no word in the literature that I can recall seeing about people having trouble ever hearing Him speaking, even though so many thousands, and sometimes even tens of thousands, would assemble to listen to Him raptly. And they would follow Him, even for days sometimes, so He often had trouble finding ways to feed them. And from our far-future modern vantage point now, we have to wonder, as we listen to Him speaking so beautifully, how He gave such a long and such an organized speech as The Sermon on the Mount, without any notes at all. Still, after all, Jesus came to us as God on earth, did He not? And although He sometimes denies that He was God on earth, He was born to us from the Godhead, so God on earth is what He truly was. And so, perhaps even more to the point, we are wondering now how such a long speech can have been remembered in such a well-organized way, even three centuries after it was given, so it could have been remembered precisely for inclusion in the First Council of Nicaea’s original Christian Bible in 325 CE. The record strongly suggests that Jesus’s words were memorized by His listeners, and were passed down orally for sixty to eighty years before they even were first written down.

The passage that follows is the second half of Chapter 5 of the Gospel Book of Matthew. It directly follows the Beatitudes that we studied last week, which begin The Sermon on the Mount; and as we did last week, we suggest that you might first read the rest of this blog post, including Thomas’s and my brief parenthetical commentary. Then after that, so you can better experience hearing Jesus directly, you might go back and read just the Gospel Beatitudes in dark print from last week, and then read Jesus’s words in dark print from this week, right after them.

To best envision that Galilean morning two thousand years ago, please understand that Jesus with His disciples had likely just been walking for days. This was what Jesus very often did, as a charismatic itinerant Teacher. He would walk for days sometimes, stopping often along the way to eat, sleep, teach, and heal people. He could see now that He had gathered a tremendous crowd of listeners along the way: think of ten thousand people, or even more, who were following him just to hear a lot more from Him! He noticed a likely hill that He could teach them from, so he went up the hill maybe thirty or forty feet and sat down, and He called his disciples to come and sit around Him, which was a signal for that gigantic crowd to stop walking and back up and settle down in groups onto the ground all around them and back down that long valley. It is thought that while the crowd was in the process of settling, Jesus gave to mainly his own disciples the more sophisticated teaching that is the Beatitudes, which was what we studied last week. But then, once the crowd had mostly settled, came the literal fire and brimstone that we are about to receive this week!

(What is most surprising about this week’s teaching is that in it, Jesus uses such a thoroughly modern technique. He uses the technique of argument from extremes to altogether reset His listeners’ attitudes toward our relationships with others AWAY from just the minimal standards that the old Judaic Law that they had known for their whole lives required, and TOWARD the utmost perfection that is demanded by God’s new internal Law of Love. There is nothing subtle or even literal about His words here at all, and it would probably be another fifteen hundred years, and well into what we would much later refer to as the Middle Ages, before very much more educated people could be trusted actually to hear some of what Jesus is saying to us today with the same level of sophistication with which Jesus is saying and meaning it! I mean, good grief, did they think he was telling them to cut off hands and pluck out eyes LITERALLY? We can have no way to know how Jesus’s very first listeners heard some of this, but to be frank, until I was maybe fifty years old and I had absolutely convinced myself with a lifetime of afterlife research that there really is no fiery hell, I was pretty alarmed by some of this!)

Personal Relationships (Again, these headings are just in the Bible, and they were of course not spoken by Jesus.)

²¹“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ ²²But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the hell of fire. ²³Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, ²⁴leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering. ²⁵Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. ²⁶Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent.

(Gehenna was a valley just outside Jerusalem where they burned trash, so fires were always burning there. Depending upon which Biblical translation you read, that word might be translated throughout the Sermon on the mount as “hell of fire”, but I have been kind and done that only the first time it appears here! Just think “hell” each time you see “Gehenna” hereafter. You can imagine how, as a teenager who had not yet begun to do afterlife research and eventually discovered that no hell exists, I had found reading this part of The Sermon on the Mount and found Jesus here repeatedly referencing “hell” to be terrifying!)

²⁷“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; ²⁸but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹If your right eye makes you sin, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna. ³⁰If your right hand makes you sin, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into Gehenna.

(President Jimmy Carter is remembered for having told us that he was troubled by this passage, because he had, he very sadly said, often looked at women other than his wife with a bit of lust!)

³¹“It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce’; ³²but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

³“Again, you have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not make false vows, but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord.’ ³⁴But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. ³⁶Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. ³⁷But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.

(Some translations say here, “anything beyond these is from the evil one”, and thereby they imply the existence of an incarnate Devil. My afterlife research has never found any evidence for an incarnate Devil as such, so this is another thing that once bothered me about The Sermon on the Mount, but this more accurate translation feels more comfortable.).

³⁸“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ ³⁹But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. ⁴⁰If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. ⁴¹Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. ⁴²Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.

(I love this! The Code of Hammurabi, or as it is sometimes called, “The Law of Retaliation” dates to about 1790 BCE, and it is said to be the base of the Torah, and therefore of both Jewish and Christian law. Jesus here replaces it with a kind of opposite law of radical peace and perfect love.)

⁴³“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵so that you may ^]be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:21-48).

(Here we learn directly from Jesus that our goal is no longer to keep just the minimal standard of righteously obeying the ancient laws handed down from God thousands of years ago. Oh, no! Now, my dear ones, our goal must be, and it can only be nothing less than to achieve God’s Own level of pure and perfect love!)

In Chapter Five of the Gospel book of Matthew, Jesus powerfully teaches you and me a full master-class in spiritual growth toward our own personal spiritual perfection. As we go back over last week’s black letters, and then add to them this week’s powerful black letters, we are so grateful to our cherished Elder Brother and Best Friend for the fact that He never talks down to us. No, even though we are still spiritual children, so He is speaking to us in straightforward terms, He does not hold back. He really does tell it to us precisely the way that it is! He knows that when we very soon go home, we are not going to be able to fudge things at all, but we will be able to achieve only the level of the glorious astral plane which is our true home that we have achieved in terms of our growth in love while we were here on earth. We will achieve that, but no higher. So, hold tight now. They are passing the bread and the water-jugs below us in the valley. It is barely noon on this Galilean hill, and we have two more wonderful chapters of the Gospel of Matthew still to go….

For the church, that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For Thyself, best Gift Divine.
To us all so freely given,
For that great, great love of Thine,
Peace on earth and joy in Heaven.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliot Sandford Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

God in Love

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Hearing Jesus #4

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