Author: Roberta Grimes

The Kingdom of God On Earth (Part III)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The destruction of the Lord’s first effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth was complete. The early Roman Church stamped out every form of Christian thought that did not conform to its fear-based dogmas, and it almost destroyed even the memory of those first three hundred precious years when Jesus had been a vibrant force for love whose teachings were devoutly followed.

Even the Lord’s words were directly edited by the First Council of Nicaea. The Council removed every reference they could find to reincarnation, reportedly because our believing we have just one lifetime was likely to make us try harder. They also added references to church-building, sheep-and-goats judgment, and end-times nonsense that are so different from the Lord’s genuine teachings that we can pluck them out easily.

What may be worse is that the dogmas laid down at Nicaea gave rise to errors that are now embedded in the Gospel words themselves. The earliest translations of the Gospels from Greek into Latin happened later in the fourth century, and they followed upon Nicaea’s ideas. For example, Jesus is frequently quoted as saying versions of “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (MK 1:15). But that is not what Jesus said! The Greek word for what He actually said was metanoeite, which means “transform your mind.” But the prelates who first translated that word from Greek into Latin were so steeped in Nicaea’s fear-based dogmas that they chose instead to use the word paenitentia, which means “repent” or “do penance.”

It is difficult to sufficiently grasp all the damage that  was done by this one change. Jesus had come to help us transform our minds, and had abolished the very notion of sin, but over the past seventeen hundred years the belief that He had told us to “repent” became such a fundamental tenet of Christian thought that even modern translations that are done from the original Greek use the flatly erroneous word “repent.” And this is true, even though it contradicts everything that Jesus actually said! Let’s look at three of the Lord’s core teachings that are starkly incompatible with the notion that Jesus sees us as guilty of anything for which we would need to “repent.”

Jesus Tells Us We Must Always Forgive, and We Must Never Judge

When Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And if we  are broadly forgiven, then repentance is unnecessary. He said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned (LK 6:37). He told us straight-out that even God does not judge us. He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And neither does Jesus judge us. He said, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him” (JN 12:47). He spoke so strongly against every kind of judgment that it is horrifying to see how completely the early Roman Church made the false belief that God judges us its entire fear-based focus.

Jesus Tells Us We Must Love Even those Who Seem Unworthy of Love

He said, “But 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. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). If we are made to feel so guilty that we need to “repent,” we cannot possibly love these unrepentant others as Jesus tells us we must love them.

The Lord’s Focus is On Teaching Us How to Transform Our Minds

Our need to bring the kingdom of God on earth requires that we now forget about sin and focus on transformation! So He came to share with us simple methods for adopting at our very core a kind of dynamic peacefulness that is possible only with the elevation of our personal consciousness vibrations. He said, “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41). “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so 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.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48). Nothing short of transforming our minds can even begin to make us perfect!

The Christian Church created by Constantine the Great is anathema to everything Jesus came to do. But I don’t mean by that to say that Jesus failed. Since objective time does not exist and our incarnations are not linear, I have come to think that the intervening seventeen hundred years or so are meant by the Collective that is the only God to be a period when we can choose to incarnate in order to experience the severe negativity of domination by a fear-based Christianity. Now, however, the very free will that is essential to our being able to grow spiritually has allowed too many of us to choose fear and anger over love, so the consciousness vibration of this planet has sunk to what we are told by those not in bodies is a level from which it cannot recover without divine intervention. And therefore, late in the nineteenth century the Lord began His modern push to bring the kingdom of God on earth. We spoke last week about the start of that effort. Here, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story.

No one who is in a body knows all of what is going on. There are a great many people now who are claiming that Jesus is in contact with them, and a number who have channeled books that they believe came from Jesus. I am not allowed by my guides to communicate with these people or to read their books, but I hear from many Seek Reality listeners who tell me about this or that writer or YouTuber whose work in this field is just like mine. I love hearing that! As Jesus said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out more workers into His harvest field” (MT 9:37-38).

Those who have not been in bodies for centuries lose their ability to communicate easily with the living, so it is understandable that the Lord’s first apparent attempt to reintroduce His Gospel teachings missed the mark. He led the team that channeled A Course in Miracles in the late Sixties, and while ACIM is indeed those same Gospel teachings, they come there in a form so advanced that it is hard to do much learning unless you commit to meeting with a study group!

So reportedly the team around Jesus decided in the 1980s to channel exactly the Gospel words but with Nicaea’s additions removed. I am told that they set out to find for this task what they called “a pure vessel,” someone who had never been a channel. And here is where, amazingly, your old friend Roberta enters the picture. I knew none of this at the time! I have told My Thomas by Roberta Grimesyou too often that I learned in February of 2015 that my primary spirit guide was once Thomas Jefferson, and I am apparently a friend of his over lifetimes who agreed to enter this body now so I could finish a few of the things that he didn’t manage to finish as Jefferson. One of those tasks was the writing of his thoughts on the teachings of Jesus, so Thomas had been preparing me to write his own take on the Gospel teachings. And of course I was not a known channel, so he offered me up to be used by the Lord. Apparently I filled the bill. But they needed to know that I could channel, so my friend who in his Jefferson lifetime had been so private that he never wrote a memoir, and he even burned all his wife’s letters and papers, then used me to channel his memoirs of his ten-year marriage that spanned the Revolutionary War period. My Thomas is the most beautiful thing that I will ever write. And the research and writing of it were so easy that I thought I was a genius! Sadly, though, I am not. Thomas is. My every subsequent effort to write anything that my precious friend has not supervised has been nothing but a rookie mess.

Apparently my having channeled My Thomas convinced the beings around Jesus to choose me, and according to Thomas they spent the next twenty-five years preparing me to channel the Lord. I was clueless! And of course when they felt the time had arrived for Jesus to channel His restatement of the Gospels, Thomas didn’t tell me more than that he wanted me to write a book about Jesus. And I flat-out refused. Who was I to be doing that? So then he nudged me to contact a medium, and four years ago this month he used her to break into my waking life. He told me who he was, and he convinced me that I had to write his Jefferson-era book about Jesus. He did not, however, tell me this book was going to be written by the Lord Himself!

Thomas began by channeling the first three chapters of Liberating Jesus. Then, late one afternoon the medium through whom he had first contacted me emailed to say that Thomas had just seized her briefly in a Walmart parking lot and said, “Please forgive the speed at which we are dictating, as your soul-ular self is working directly for the Master now, without benefit of the filters which would slow the transmission. And I hasten to add, you must please of course speak clearly should your physical suffer exhaustion.” I thought nothing of that until I woke up abruptly at two the next morning and rushed to my computer, and over two weeks an entirely different entity channeled the rest of that book. I tell the tale of how it was written in Appendix V of Liberating Jesus, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say that there has never been the remotest doubt in my mind that the Being who wrote that book is Jesus.

With the Collective’s many minions now deep in working to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet, we are assured by beings at the upper levels that the Lord’s work is unfolding according to plan. Jesus told us it will happen subtly, so don’t expect the kingdom of God to arrival on earth with trumpets blaring! Indeed, I suspect that it is going to be apparent to us just in retrospect. So, what would it be like for you and me to live in God’s kingdom here on earth? Let’s begin now to think about that….

Broken angel photo credit: JFB119 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/77461661@N04/46512163062″>D-MFA-52</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Bible and cross photo credit: verchmarco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/160866001@N07/44559979080″>Geöffnete, alte Bibel mit verfärbten Seiten und kunstvollem, silbernem Kreuz als Buchzeichen</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Kingdom of God on Earth (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We are told by those that we used to think were dead that for more than a century there has been a major effort underway, being orchestrated at the highest levels of reality, to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet away from fear and anger and toward ever more perfect love. This goal should seem familiar to you. Those at the highest levels of reality – the Collective that is the only God – have recently re-initiated what is essentially the same effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth that Jesus first began 2000 years ago.

But why did the Lord’s effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth not succeed the first time around? Actually, it seems to have been going well for at least the first three hundred years. For example, the earliest Christians buried millions of their dead in tunnels beneath the city of Rome, the latest of which burials date to the early fifth century C.E. And in all the art in the Catacombs tombs there is not a single cross to be found! Instead, the symbols are peaceful ones: the fish, the dove, the vine, and especially the Good Shepherd who carries on His shoulders not a sheep, but a goat. What amazing evidence of the fact that the earliest Christians knew that Jesus had come to uplift us all, and even the least worthy among us! This gradual and gentle spreading of His Gospel truths may have been just what the Lord intended. After all, He said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (or “is in your midst”) (LK 17:20-21).

Jesus knew that because every human mind is part of one eternal Mind, it would not take much more than this single population working to raise their personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love to begin to elevate the spiritual vibrations of everyone then living on earth. The transformation of the minds of His followers would begin the transformation of all human minds! As He said, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:33). So we have every reason to think that for those first three centuries the advent of the kingdom of God on earth was unfolding precisely as Jesus and the divine Collective of which He is a part had intended that it should unfold. But then the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye on the Lord’s Christianity, and he had his brutal way with her. No less violent term seems adequate!

There were more than three dozen “heresies” stamped out by the early Roman church that had been strains of thought among pre-Councils Christians. Those different ideas had survived in peace because the Lord’s Way was emphatically not a religion! It required only that people learn to ever more perfectly love and forgive; and as Jesus said, “He who is not against us is for us” (MK 9:40). The fear-based notion that Jesus died for our sins was just one of many ideas in a widely varied movement, and it was harmless until Constantine the Great used his Council of Nicaea in 325 to begin to impose one fear-based Christian religion upon the world. A gentle and gradual movement that was spreading nothing but forgiveness and love would have been useless to an emperor. But a fear-based religion that carried the threat of hell for any who disobeyed? That was something he could use! Six more church councils followed that First Council of Nicaea, all called or presided over by emperors and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. So a false and fear-based religion was imposed upon the world by force at a cost of what is conservatively estimated to have been twenty-five million mostly awful deaths.

Our earliest evidence that a new effort had begun to bring the kingdom of God on earth dates to the late nineteenth century, when abruptly we began to receive much easier and more frequent afterlife communications. This step might have seemed necessary in order to begin to take down both fear-based Christianity and the equally false notion of atheistic scientism, and perhaps also to make it easier for people to understand why we need to choose love over fear; but no one knows for certain why we were suddenly being shown so much more of what was behind the curtain. And we don’t know why it took God so long to reject that false version of Christianity, although perhaps Constantine’s fear-based religion had turned out to be useful. It made this planet a tougher spiritual gym where more rapid growth was possible, especially for those who were nearing the end of their need to incarnate. Then from God’s perspective outside of time, perhaps it seemed by the 1840s that we had been given sufficient generations to ensure there would be incarnation-ready bodies for anyone who wanted to experience such an extreme degree of clueless negativity. The Collective that is God didn’t intervene until It felt the need to intervene so It could head off humankind’s greatest folly.

Among God’s earliest targets in this modern-day effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth were physicists. As we neared the turn of the twentieth century, clockwork materialism remained in place in a reality that is in no respect solid, to the point where Nobel Laureate in physics Albert Michelson said in 1894, “It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” Even the great Max Planck, another Nobel Laureate and the father of quantum mechanics himself, said in 1924, “When I began my physical studies [in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly… he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science… Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but… theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

To shake up this scientific materialist complacency, the Collective did two things at once. It initiated a new age of much better communication between the living and the not really dead; and It also channeled in to the minds of Dr. Planck and a few other physicists the wonderfully disruptive theory of quantum mechanics.

What strikes me most profoundly is the way that God-as-Collective has been acting even in a clear emergency with an extraordinary respect for human free will and dignity! Everyone who comes to earth with a commission from the Godhead does so voluntarily, and it is through these willing minions that nearly all the work of the Collective is done. God works in the world with all the love and patience of a host of perfected Beings Who once inhabited bodies Themselves. What a sublimely beautiful process this is!

But of course, when the scientific community was forced to react simultaneously to the twin challenges of quantum physics and very good evidence that the dead in fact survive, it chose to deal with the first while altogether ignoring the second. This stonewalling by the scientific gatekeepers of any evidence that the universe is not matter-based and random has gone on now for more than a century. Apparently it is going to end only when God decides it must end.

There is a lot that we still don’t understand, but for the first part of the twentieth century the Godhead seems to have watched Its work unfold while avoiding further interference in the affairs of humankind… until we used nuclear bombs in warfare in August of 1945. This was apparently what God had been working to prevent, and its suddenly happening seems to have been a wake-up call that might have been unique in human history. Insofar as we can tell, four initiatives were begun at once:

  • The decision was made that we will never again be allowed to use nuclear arms in warfare. If you wonder why it hasn’t happened in the three-quarters of a century since Nagasaki, despite the fact that nuclear armaments have proliferated and human crankiness abounds, you should know that we have been told that God is preventing its happening. There are anecdotes about missile tests in which an unexplained missile would turn up out of nowhere and shoot down the missile being tested, but my hunch is that this work is happening mostly at the level of many human minds.
  • A renewed effort was begun to demonstrate to the world what actually is going on. The floodgates of broader information began to open in the fifties and sixties, and late in the seventies they opened wide! Most of what afterlife experts are telling you now is an accumulation of many bits of information that have been permitted to us by the Godhead. If it had not been God’s perfect will that we figure all these things out now, we would still be as clueless as people have been clueless through all of human history.
  • Many more minions began to parachute in. There is no time where the Collective is, so the first of this new wave of minions were born in the thirties and forties. And we continue to be born today, these people who have promised to assist in the work of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration and bringing the kingdom of God on earth. I may be typical. Apparently I am my primary guide’s comrade through many lifetimes, and I had promised him that I would come in and do some specific things that would help him put a true finis to his lifetime as Thomas Jefferson. That effort was still in the planning stage when the call came, and we answered it! We made a life-plan for me that included efforts to complete his work, and we overlaid it with this plan to help the Godhead that now consumes my life. I had to come in at a certain time and in a place that we could use, so I was conceived out of wedlock by a couple who had no soul-group connection to me and I was born just one year after the Nagasaki bomb was dropped. I ended up a female, which might have been just whichever fetus we could get because Thomas still seems to be a bit squeamish about my gender!
  • The decision was made to freshly introduce the Gospel teachings of Jesus to the world. Of course, for this to happen requires that the fear-based Christianity of Constantine the Great’s dreams must at last be euthanized, and we see this actually ongoing now at the level of billions of human minds. Our task is just to nurture the love of Jesus and His Gospel teachings, saving the baby as God discards the bathwater.

The Lord’s Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness and raising our personal vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth are needed now more than they ever have been needed before! And those of us who have closely studied the Gospel teachings are delighted to report that the way things are getting a lot worse now was actually predicted by the Lord. He told us the advent of the kingdom of God on earth would be a time of great tribulation. So, how can we make it from here to there… ?

Jesus Lives photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/5640576674″>Jesus Lives at Graceland</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
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Constantine photo credit: Snapshooter46 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/45475783@N07/5639601069″>Constantine the Great – a bronze by Philip Jackson</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Hiroshima photo credit: jimgris <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/80887578@N00/45886219394″>Hiroshima Peace Memorial</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Parachute photo credit: Ejército del Aire Ministerio de Defensa España <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/96874503@N04/46972308162″>Escuadrón de Apoyo al Despliegue Aéreo</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Kingdom of God on Earth (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Some who have been reading this series have told me they were eager to see how I was going to describe the advent of the kingdom of God on earth. And I was eager to see that too! I was game. I boldly set fingers to keyboard, but then I realized there were a few more things that you and I should talk about first. As Jesus tells us in the Gospels, if we hope to bring the kingdom of God on earth we must first get rid of all fear-based religious ideas, and we probably will need to escape every religions-based notion altogether. For certain, we will need to replace that judgmental and cranky human-made God with the perfectly loving Spirit that Jesus reveals to us in the Gospels. If you haven’t read those three previous blog posts, please do that before you read this one so we can explore some further truths together!

As I have sought a deeper understanding of the Lord’s Gospel message, I have developed a habit of checking the work of various Biblical scholars; so this week I looked at how Christian scholars have interpreted the Lord’s Gospel words about the kingdom of God. To be frank, what I have seen confounds me. Surely someone in two thousand years must have considered the Lord’s Gospel words to be important in and of themselves? Yet every interpretation of the Lord’s teachings I can find that talks about His bringing the kingdom of God on earth has been built on and mixed with Christian religious ideas. No one ever seems to have tried to hear those words as the earliest followers of Jesus heard His words. No one has sought to understand what was in the Lord’s mind as He was speaking them.

The only way what all these Christian scholars are doing could make any sense would be if God and Jesus had planned out the details of modern Christianity even before Jesus came to earth. But that would be inconsistent with a lot of what the Lord says in the Gospels! And if He came to start a new religion, why did He never through four whole Gospels come out and plainly tell us that? Instead, He spoke against religions! And there was no recognizable Christian religion for hundreds of years after His death. Furthermore, we never can forget the fact that the multitudes who are not actually dead now tell us in the strongest terms that every Christian dogma is plain nonsense. They insist that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. (That fact is so well established by now that perhaps it is time for us to engrave those words on a coffin-lid and finally inter the old Roman Emperors’ human-made and sadly fear-based Christianity?)

So indeed it may be, dear wonderful friends, that you and I are breaking new ground. Amazingly, we are among the first people in two thousand years of history to seek to sit at the feet of the Lord and hear His Gospel words without a beliefs-based overlay.       

How did Jesus Himself believe that the kingdom of God on earth would look? As Jesus was just beginning to teach, “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. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.’ And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He said to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’” (LK 4:15-21).

This Gospel passage is astounding! Here Jesus lays out right at its start what He sees as His public mission, and to do it He uses words that had been written eight hundred years before. Words that clearly He had chosen to read before He ever entered that synagogue. Nowhere does He talk about our sinfulness, or mention that He was planning to sacrifice Himself in order to redeem us. No, we can have no doubt that He was focused from the start of His ministry on bringing the kingdom of God on earth!

So, what can you and I tease out of these words that we hear this unknown young man speak as we sit in that synagogue long ago? He is quoting scripture, so we realize He might not have meant every one of those words, although I suspect that He did mean them all. Let’s look more closely at what His words might have meant to Him as He was saying them:

  • Jesus considers His earthly mission to be the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. Whether this was literally true – whether Isaiah in fact had Jesus in mind – matters less than does the Lord’s wish that His work be seen to be the next prophesied step in the advancement of the Jews’ spiritual history, and perhaps also of the spiritual history being planned by the Godhead for all the world.
  • He intends to aim His teachings at the poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed. (Different words are used in the various translations.) Here is a recurring theme throughout the Gospels: Jesus repeatedly reminds us that the one who is least on earth will be the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, and He urges us to help the less fortunate.
  • He intends to end wars and strife. When Jesus talks about proclaiming “release to the captives,” He is talking about releasing people being held in captivity against their will, but not criminals in general. That comes later. In His day, raids by enemies could lead to enslavement far from home, and a “release of captives” likely would accompany the advent of long-term peace and stability among the nations.
  • He intends to facilitate physical healing by the power of our minds. Healing the sick, the lame, and the blind is a constant theme of the Lord’s ministry, but what is less often noted is the fact that He keeps stressing to those He heals that it is their own minds that have effected their healing!
  • He intends to end earthly judgment and punishment. It follows from the fact that Jesus replaced the Old Testament rules with God’s Law of Love that He meant to end the concept of sin.  No longer is a given act to be seen as violating any law, but rather now it is the motive of the actor that matters. You can break every law, and if you do it all with no motive beyond the pure love of God and of your neighbor, then you are sinless. So Jesus has come to set free everyone who has been oppressed by all those human-made laws. He means to open every prison door!
  • He plans to unite all of humankind. His invocation of “the favorable year of the Lord” is generally seen to be a reference to the Biblical Year of Jubilee, when Israelite slaves are freed, debts are forgiven, and we all celebrate together. Above all, Jubilee means the shedding of as much as we can of all the various ways that life on earth erects barriers between people.    

So Jesus began His work by proclaiming that His mission was to transform humankind. He intended to create a world in which all these wonderful outcomes would unfold together! This is the result that Jesus expected His teachings to produce: this is how He foresaw the kingdom of God developing as it overspread the earth. He told us we should pray for it, and in that same prayer He revealed that the kingdom of God would be God’s will done perfectly on earth. He said that we are to pray, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:10). And again He said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21). He thereby further emphasized the fact that it is only our obeying God’s will that can bring the kingdom of God on earth. And what is God’s will that we are to obey? He lays it out repeatedly, through all four Gospels! This may be the best example:  

“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so 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. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:39-48).  

It is clear from what He says in the Gospels that Jesus expects the almost immediate advent of the kingdom of God on earth. “Now after John (the Baptist) had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; change your mind and believe in the gospel’” (MK 1:14-15). Of course, theologians dispute the fact that Jesus meant that literally. They try to retro-engineer Christianity back into the Gospels, even though the formal religion began long centuries after Jesus died. And there can be no doubt that Jesus Himself intended to begin the process of bringing the kingdom of God on earth right now. He said, “The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John; since that time the gospel of the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it” (LK 16:16). He said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; change your mind and believe in the gospel” (MK 1:15). He even said, “But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God” (LK 9:27).

Jesus came to us directly from the Godhead with the mission of bringing the kingdom of God on earth in the decades after His death, and He gave to His mission everything He had! So why did it all go so wrong? We’ll talk about that next week.

 

Lovely castle photo credit: wuestenigel <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/30478819@N08/23761123648″>Hluboka Castle</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Jesus Accused photo credit: eshao5721 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/165868022@N02/32011730737″>Il giudizio dei farisei sul Signore Gesù</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Jesus Raises Lazarus 2 photo credit: eshao5721 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/165868022@N02/32473114028″>La Resurrezione di Lazzaro glorifica Dio</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Jesus Returns photo credit: eshao5721 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/165868022@N02/44097323560″>Che significa il rapimento?</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Genuine God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The question of whether there is an Uncaused Cause is settled. Not even the most closed-minded scientist disputes the fact that the universe exists, so clearly something must have caused it! But scientists refuse to take seriously what seems to be the next big question. When pressed to identify the Uncaused Cause that brought forth the universe out of nothing, their answers more or less boil down to “Nobody knows and shut up.” Or as the great Rupert Sheldrake sums up the attitude of scientists toward the Uncaused Cause, “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”

But something brought the universe into being! And for the first time in human history, we are close to discovering what that Something is.

Human beings always have believed in a force that was greater than ourselves. In association with some of the earliest stone tools are works of art created by people who were living on the edge of survival. What else but a mix of fear and awe could have inspired so many primitive people to expend the vast time and energy that must have been needed to make this art? Then, perhaps twelve thousand years ago an amazing temple was built at Gobekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey. For me, the most extraordinary thing about Gobekli Tepe is the fact that stone-age people built this amazing place, and then one day they buried it. Our relationship with our gods has always been tempestuous!

Modern afterlife research has demonstrated that each of us is densely connected with Spirit. Each person has the constant help of beings who are not now in bodies, and we can assume that this spiritual aspect of the human experience goes back to our beginnings. As the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Surely this spiritual connection must be why we always have had the sense that there must be an unseen force! Our impulse toward God may be the central fact of the whole human experience.

Every modern version of God is as human-made and bogus as was all that art created by stone-age primitives. None of our present Gods can factually address our deepest questions, so our yearning to know the real God remains. I have often talked about God here  as I have tried to better tease out from the afterlife evidence what more we can learn about the Uncaused Cause that is the genuine God. Today let’s try to deepen our understanding just a little more.

 A Bit About the Greater Reality

It is impossible for us to understand God unless we have some sense of the reality in which God operates. The greater reality is not only stranger than what we have been imagining, but it is stranger than we can imagine! I can give you in this limited space only what I hope will be sufficient highlights to provide a frame in which we can deepen our search for the genuine God.

The greater reality is everything that researchers have been able to determine exists, but apparently it is not all that exists. It may be twenty or more times the size of this material universe, although both time and space do not exist as constant factors in most of reality so we are talking only relative sizes. The greater reality is composed of what we experience to a limited extent as human consciousness, and in fact what we are calling consciousness turns out to be the base creative force that manifests all that exists. So what we experience as consciousness is the substance and source of the greater reality. Consciousness is the Uncaused Cause! Researchers are coming to accept this fact. Many of us now capitalize the word Consciousness, or we shorten it and refer to the Uncaused Cause with words like Source or Mind.

The consciousness which is all that exists is a kind of energy. Like other forms of energy, it vibrates. Its vibratory rate ranges from the lowest and weakest, which is fear, to the highest and most powerful, which is perfect love. So what we experience in a limited way as emotion is the essences of that base creative force! God is the highest vibration of a consciousness that includes us all; and since there is no objective time, you and I are eternal by definition.

Getting rid of that cranky Christian God has been such a relief for me that it has taken me years to realize why even this better understanding of God still feels so unsatisfying. God is perfect eternal love! We live in God forevermore! But Consciousness-as-God still somehow feels as inert and impersonal as a plush puppy. And knowing that Consciousness is the base creative force allows us to explain how the universe is created, but it doesn’t tell us why.

A Bit of What We Know About Creation

 The Creator is the created. Consciousness is all that is or was or ever will be. This material universe is a subset of consciousness, which means that consciousness creates time and space so it cannot be affected by either. I have been working for years to try to ferret out the implications of a greater reality in which objective time does not exist! For our dead friends time is optional, and learning how they view time has confirmed our supposition that in reality time does not exist at all. The implications of this fact are boggling. If anything now exists, it always exists. The past might change as easily as the future. So creation didn’t happen “long ago,” but instead creation is happening in each micro-instant. The great physicist Max Planck said, “We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” Yet again, he is exactly right.

Researchers have found bits of evidence that creation is a continuous process, and once scientists take an interest I am sure they will find many more. For one example, we are told that the universe’s stability depends on a number of forces remaining constant, and scientists assume that therefore these constants must be forever constant. But Rupert Sheldrake, a meticulous researcher, has discovered that some of these so-called constants are in fact adjusting minutely. So the universe exists and is stable because consciousness manifests it in each micro-instant. What we see as the material universe is in the nature of a thought.

Something the Bible and the Dead Suggest About the Genuine God

Everything the Bible says about God refers to the human-made religious God, but we notice a few hints here and there that the genuine God might be a collective. For example:

“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness’” (Gen 1:26).

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” (Isaiah 6:6)

This would mean nothing, except for the fact that we know that advanced beings work in collectives. One of their number will speak for them, but that spokesman never acts alone; instead, he represents thousands of beings who have become so spiritually advanced that they can think and act as one. Even my primary guide, Thomas, when he met with me through a medium so he could badger me into writing Liberating Jesus, made it plain that he was working with beings who included Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary. So I find it arresting to find Jesus saying things like, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:10). So Jesus plainly told us that He was a spokesman? He often referred to God as “the Father,” perhaps to soften his primitive listeners’ fear of their religion’s cranky God; and of course, He never could have told them He was representing a collective because they could not then have conceived of the kind of God that I will suggest to you now. Jesus tells us repeatedly that “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24). But “God is spirit” is like “God is consciousness,” is it not? It feels vague and impersonal. And we know that God is neither….

Suspecting That God is Us

Mikey Morgan is a sixth-level being who last lived on earth in the 1600s. He took a brief additional lifetime that ended in 2007 so he could speak to us in modern terms with the assistance of his mother, Carol, who has never studied any of this. It took me years to accept that Mikey is genuine. But I have seen him rapidly answer hundreds of questions much better than I could have done, and he never makes a mistake. At this point, he is almost the only person I still trust to help me answer the biggest questions. When I asked Mikey for his definition of God for his book, Flying High in Spirit, and he said, “God is the unity of pure love and all that exists,” that planted a seed in my mind. He and I had not discussed God in the intervening three years, but I asked him the question again this week. Here is what he said, word for word: “God is the Unity of Absolute Pure Love which is Infinite. The Collective or Source of all that exists.”

Very early in my research I began to encounter statements from upper-level collectives that told us the seventh level is the Source level, where God is. Eventually there was a belief among researchers that entering the seventh level would be optional, and it would mean personal extinction and merger with the Source. We even called it “the second death.” When that notion began to freak me out – why try to advance, if it would mean my extinction? – my primary guide said to me, “You will never lose awareness. You will have God’s awareness.” Thanks to other communicators and to beautiful Mikey, we now know that what Thomas said is true: the awareness you are experiencing now is eternal. We also know from Mikey and others that the Source level is by no means the top of what you and I can aspire to achieve. Mikey tells me our spiritual growth is “infinite.” Consider my mind to be officially boggled!

I am now convinced that the genuine God is a collective.

I have asked Thomas to take this notion away, but instead he has reinforced it. And since this idea first occurred to me, I have found so much evidence for it that I have been slapping my head repeatedly. For just one example, we have been told by some of those not in bodies that Jesus is “from the highest aspect of the Godhead.” What else could that mean?

My dear friends, the Uncaused Cause, the Source of everything, and the only eternal God is an infinitely powerful collective of people who have achieved the highest spiritual vibration. I will have more to say soon. For now, this seems to be enough!

 

Candles photo credit: Adam Tomkó <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31857315@N04/5274561890″>Karácsonyi hangulat – Christmas spirit</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Universe photo credit: pic fix <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/14497446@N02/32000076417″>Look and you will see</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Castle photo credit: Ulster Architectural Heritage Society <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75077138@N08/6883939738″>P4 – Necarne Castle, Irvinestown – 15-1-03</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Faithless

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

No sooner had I shared with you my insight that the Gospel words suggest the Lord meant to abolish the notion of sin than I realized there was another thing He seems to have meant to consign to history. This one is a harder call, so I wondered if I should mention it now; but I have come to see as I have written this for you that perhaps this further stumbling-block is even worse than fear-based sin as a barrier to our spiritual growth!

Jesus meant to raise in us a dissatisfaction with religious faith, and to teach us instead to seek and find a more solid spiritual certainty. What else can He have meant when He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8)?

My difficulty in trusting the evidence that Jesus spoke against religious faith seems mostly to have stemmed from the fact that He used the word “faith” or “faithful” so often, and in three different ways:

  • He used the term as a synonym for loyal and steadfast service. For example, He quoted a master as saying, “Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master” (MT 25:21). And He said, “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much” (LK 16:10).
  • He used the same term to praise a belief in Him that allowed Him to draw additional power from the minds of the sick as He was healing them. For example, “Seeing their faith, He said, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven you’” (LK 5:20). “Then He touched their eyes, saying, “It shall be done to you according to your faith” (MT 9:29). “And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (LK 8:48).
  • He used the word to rebuke His disciples whenever they doubted Him. For example, when a storm threatened to capsize their boat and alarmed His disciples, He said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” We are told that the wind died down and He then said to His disciples, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” Then they said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?” (MK 4:39-41)

In none of these cases does the word “faith” refer to believing in any religion. Arguably, in the second and third instances He is talking about belief in the powers of our minds being essential to our being able to use those powers, which was a concept His listeners could not have understood, but it does make sense to us today. Realizing the yawning gap in understanding that existed between Jesus as an ascended being and the primitives He was teaching gives you a lot of sympathy for Him! It makes you all the more admire His determination to overcome their ignorance and educate them to the point where they might bring the kingdom of God on earth even in that ancient, more primitive day.

Only once in all four Gospels is Jesus quoted as saying, “Have faith in God,” and even that sole example is another reference to our need to believe in the powers of our own minds. “Peter said to Him, ‘Rabbi, look, the fig tree which You cursed has withered.’ And Jesus answered saying to them, ‘Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him’” (MK 11:21-23). Surely Jesus is not saying that if we have sufficient religious faith then God will at our command perform the parlor trick of moving a mountain? Of course not! We know now that He is talking instead about the vast creative powers of our minds, those same powers that He often says He is using to assist Him in healing those who approach him, hoping to be healed.

Nowhere in the Gospels do we see Jesus using the word “faith” in a religious sense! On the contrary, Jesus sees religions beliefs as stumbling–blocks between us and God, and He rails against them as obstacles to our obeying God’s command that we learn to love perfectly. He says, “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9). And “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). The fact that practicing any religion so often produces people that you would rather not be around was something He saw as a tremendous strike against religions as a whole. He said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

That was the Lord’s opinion of religious faith, as painful as it might be to read! Jesus told us two thousand years ago that it was time for us to move past mere belief in man-made religious dogmas, and to put into practice His own teachings so we could begin to live God’s perfect truth. He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

So it does seem likely that yet another thing that Jesus came to do was to eliminate religious faith. The question then becomes, why did He think giving up our faith would be a necessary prelude to the dawning of the kingdom of God on earth? Here are some thoughts:

  • Beliefs that are not based in facts are superstitions. We hear the word “superstition” negatively, but its dictionary definition boils down to “an irrational belief.” And we hear the word “faith” positively, but it means “a belief in something for which there is no proof.” The words are synonyms! And no matter how Christians might celebrate their faith, the plain fact is that every Christian belief is based in teachings many hundreds of years old that come from the non-Gospel parts of the Bible and the fear-based notions of ancient primitives. From now on you might want to replace the word “faith” whenever you see, hear, or even think it with its synonym, the word “superstition.” Jesus wants you to know the truth! He has given you the right to demand God’s truth, and He urges you to settle for nothing less.
  • All beliefs not supported by facts are of equal value. If all we need is religious faith, then how can we find and know the genuine God? What about Moloch, the Canaanite god that demanded infant sacrifice? If unsupported faith is a good thing, then how is having faith in Moloch any less worthy than is having faith in an invisible god that demands the sacrifice of its own son before it can forgive us for Adam’s sin?
  • Having faith makes it much harder for us to come to know the true God. Since having faith assumes that no evidence is needed, we can – and we do – imagine many of the characteristics of our personal deity. Having faith alone means that we have created an idol in our minds, rather than following the Lord’s direction that we seek the perfect truth.
  • Having faith cannot banish our fears. I was there once, so I know that faith is thin gruel in the middle of the night. You think there is a God. You want to believe! But how can you really know? And worse, without any certain characteristics of the genuine God to guide your thoughts, you cannot help worrying that your imaginary God might be angry and judgmental and might condemn you to hell forever after all. If you don’t come to know the genuine God, it is easy for you to fear the worst!

So to summarize our discussions of the past few weeks, Jesus tells us in the Gospels that He came to abolish religions, teach us to relate to God on our own, teach us to be seekers and teach us how to grow spiritually, and also teach us to abolish fear-based notions including sin and even religious faith, all so we will be able soon to bring the kingdom of God on earth. It feels astonishing to read this list! Yet the evidence of what Jesus came to do is stated in the Gospels in plain words that make sense and come together well even after two translations over two thousand years. The fact that Christianity has largely ignored those Gospel words has only delayed the moment when we can at last empower the Lord to speak to a people who love Him enough to hear and respect what He is saying! Without religious dogmas in the way, we can come to know the true Jesus. And through Him we can come to know at last the genuine, eternal God.

Knowing what we have been learning from the Lord, you and I can much better see that the forty-thousand-odd versions of modern Christianity must be anathema to the Jesus of the Gospels! Knowing that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being, and knowing how important our following His Gospel teachings is to the genuine Lord, we can see that every living Christian faces what might be for some a hard choice. We can cling to a set of fear-based dogmas that have nothing to do with the risen Lord, or we can instead become among the first true followers of Jesus and His Way. And in truly following Him at last, we can help Him save the world!  Or to put it even more plainly:

Jesus came to abolish religions, teach us to relate directly to God, and give us the tools to raise our personal consciousness vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

Jesus was determined to remove from our lives every source of spiritual fear so our personal vibrations could naturally rise to the point where the love-based perfection of the highest afterlife levels could overspread the earth. And as I write, I realize there is one more thing that Jesus came to do….

 

Adam & Eve photo credit: www.ilkkajukarainen.fi <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/130333033@N08/41963999232″>6Q3A8287</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Isaiah photo credit: Andrew-M-Whitman <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/23967095@N00/28816066756″>Victoria & Albert Museum, London</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Sinless

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I had mostly drafted my promised ideas about the dawning of the kingdom of God on earth when I realized that before I posted them I ought to share with you one more thing that Jesus came to do for all of humankind. He came to abolish the concept of sin and transform our notion of right and wrong! I blush to admit that this added mission has only lately occurred to me, when clearly it was not an afterthought. In fact, I am beginning to see that killing the whole fear-based notion of sin is the core of what Jesus came to do. It really changes everything!

Jesus talks about sin throughout the Gospels, which is probably why I missed what He was saying. He cleverly misled the Temple guards, and He just as cleverly misled me! For Jesus to speak against the prevailing religion would have been a capital crime, so He could not flat-out tell the world that He had come to abolish all religions, toss out the entire Old Testament, and end the very notion of sin. All of this was His earthly mission, but He couldn’t say that plainly! We have been talking of late about how He was able to get most of His message through by using some devices that we must keep in mind if we hope to understand His message. By accepting those tricks and digging deeper, we have learned from the Gospels that Jesus came to help us relate to God on our own so we can better raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, and thereby bring the kingdom of God on earth.

He accomplished much of this with a single stroke! When He was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead He said,“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). The Law and the Prophets was of course what the Jews of His day called our Old Testament. And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

The concept of sin is grounded in religious laws. In throwing away the Old Testament, Jesus discarded every Jewish law, so by definition He abolished sin! But was this what He intended to do? If He had been able to speak to us plainly, would He have said, “Take heart, you who labor and are heavy-laden, for I have come to abolish sin, and with it every reason you might have to fear”? I think the answer to this question is yes! Let’s see why.

Jesus Broke Religious Laws Repeatedly

To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that He pushed what were then inviolate laws and gave us cagey reasons for doing so look like a campaign to discredit those laws. Here are some examples:

“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields 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 sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’

“Departing from there, He went into their synagogue. And a man was there whose hand was withered. And they questioned Jesus, asking, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’—so that they might accuse Him. And He said to them, ‘What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.’ Then He said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand!’ He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal, like the other” (MT 12:1-13).

“And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.’ And some of the scribes said to themselves, ‘This fellow blasphemes.’ And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, ‘Why are you thinking evil in your hearts?  Which is easier, to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up, and walk”? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—then He said to the paralytic, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home’” (MT 9:2-6).

Jesus Made a Point of Loving and Caring for Sinners

The strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).

“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’ So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!”  In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).

“The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act.  Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?’  They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more’” (JN 8:3-11).

Jesus Came to Give Us New Definitions For What is Right or Wrong

The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the thought that perhaps He abolished sin, the more you realize that was indeed precisely what He did! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s law of love, and in doing that He was announcing that we were ready to move above a stark and puerile thou-shall-not morality and begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts! If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything we do from out of that love is good and moral by definition. This is a much stricter standard than any old-style law could be! It requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts. It may be that only when we achieve this level of spiritual development can we begin to bring the kingdom of God on earth. We’ll talk about that next week.

Micah of Moresheth was an early Hebrew prophet, a contemporary of the great Isaiah. He has not been much considered, perhaps because He spoke for mercy and against religiosity. You might say he was three thousand years ahead of His time! He long ago foresaw a day when we would serve a gentler, more loving God that did not inspire our quivering fear or demand our sacrifices, and certainly one that did not demand that we sacrifice God’s beloved Son. From a time eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Micah speaks to us. And His words sing!

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

 

Praying photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/43088689381″>How Peter Came to Know Jesus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Seaside photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/41277066900″>How Peter Came to Know Jesus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Prophet photo credit: L’art au présent <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/144232185@N03/35794148312″>RUBENS (d’Après BUONARROTI Michelangelo) – Le Prophète Zacharie, Chapelle Sixtine (drawing, dessin, disegno-Louvre INV20229) – Detail 59</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Kingdom of God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Recently we sat at the feet of the Lord and listened as He taught His flock. Among other things, freshly listening to Him made us realize that He was bent on achieving the almost immediate arrival of the kingdom of God on earth. He expected His spiritual revolution to start small and then grow rapidly, and to be substantially completed within the lifetimes of some of those who heard Him speak. This astonishing insight seized the imaginations of some of our readers here, and it prompted them to ask a question that also has been on my mind.

What would the modern world be like if the kingdom of God arrived on earth today? Let’s talk about that. This week we’ll discuss in more detail the kingdom of God that Jesus meant to begin here. Then next week we will all catch hands and step together into the possible world of our beloved Lord’s dearest imaginings!

In studying the words of Jesus, we have one big advantage over traditional Christians. We have the detailed and consistent testimony of people that we used to think were dead. For reasons I prefer to think are innocent, Christian leaders have long insisted that communicating with the dead was evil, and that all our dead communicators were actually demons in league with the devil. In fact, these warnings are patent nonsense. The Bible holds a number of accounts of ancient people speaking with those not in bodies! And for moderns who need Biblical permission, 1 John 4:1 assumes that we all talk with spirits. It says just, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” Every reputable medium of whom I am aware does exactly that. And we are being given now by those not in bodies extensive new ways to communicate across dimensions, including real progress with electronic communication that we are told will result in a telephone! In the face of this great effort being conducted at the highest levels to establish better communication, for Christians to continue to try to prevent our loving dialogue with higher levels is a literal rejection of the will of God. So we test the spirits, then we eagerly welcome what the dead have to say about the meaning of the Gospel words of Jesus.

I should mention for readers new to this space that one thing we know for certain is that Jesus did not come to die for our sins. The dead tell us that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being, which should not surprise us when Jesus Himself tells us that God does not judge anyone (see JN 5:22). The fact that God does not judge us has been plain in the Bible for two thousand years, but Christians have altogether ignored it! The whole doctrine of substitutionary atonement – the notion that Jesus came to die for our sins – was human-made in a primitive day when animals were being sacrificed in temples. It was a way for those who had been devastated by the unexpected death of their Messiah to make sense of that death in first-century terms, and to turn it into something that to them seemed positive. In our more enlightened age we are able to see the whole idea as a frank barbarity, an insult to God and a humiliation of Jesus, so we are relieved to learn it is bogus! And our knowing Jesus didn’t come to die for our sins now frees us to look to His Gospel words for a different reason still big enough to explain the amazing fact that God came to earth in the body of Jesus.

When we sat and listened at the feet of the Lord, we heard Him tell us He had come to abolish fear-based religions and teach us to relate to God in love so we could bring the kingdom of God on earth. And if attempting to bring God’s kingdom on earth was so important two thousand years ago, then surely in this more enlightened age you and I ought to give it a second try!

What is the Kingdom of God?

Translators called it the kingdom of Heaven in the Book of Matthew, where Jesus mentions it more than thirty times. He refers to it fourteen times in Mark, and more than thirty times in Luke. No one reading the Gospels can have any doubt that God’s Kingdom is the Lord’s obsession! We know now that everyone on earth arrives in the self-same afterlife, so what then might be this more selective place that Jesus urges us to try to reach? The kingdom of God is the joyously blissful upper levels of the afterlife that can be attained only by people who are spiritually very far advanced. As Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21).

What we experience as human consciousness is the only thing that objectively exists. Every human mind is part of that consciousness, and we spoke last week about the fact  that consciousness exists in a range of vibrations, from fear at the lowest to love at the highest. When we talk about our need to grow spiritually, what we really are talking about is our need to raise our personal consciousness vibrations away from the fear-based end and toward the love-based end of the spectrum. Jesus makes it clear in the Gospels how we can raise our own vibrations: He tells is that we must learn to love perfectly and learn to forgive completely. Christians take the Lord’s words as aspirational – just things we should try so we can make God happy – but no one who actually reads the Gospels can see His words as less than divine commands:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so 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. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48).

Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23).

Jesus tells us we are always either growing or shrinking spiritually, and we are coming to see He is precisely right. Consciousness cannot remain static! He says, “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. And throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 25:29-30).

What Is It Like In the Kingdom of God?

Here our willingness to listen to and learn from those that we used to think were dead is a great asset! There is a nearly infinite gradation of consciousness vibrations in the afterlife, but for convenience we on earth group these vibrations into seven general levels. What Jesus called “the outer darkness” is the lowest afterlife level. Virtually everyone enters at Level Three, and we are told that reincarnation on earth in order to achieve more rapid spiritual growth is no longer necessary once we reach the upper part of Level Five. The highest level below the Source, Level Six, is what Jesus refers to as the kingdom of God. Few who have attained that exalted level ever have communicated with us on earth; and in fact, for most of my research career Level Six was assumed to be non-material. Mikey Morgan is a being who achieved Level Six after having last lived on earth in the 1600s, and he wonderfully took a brief additional earth-life that ended in 2007 so he could better understand modern people and thereby know how he might best teach us. Mikey’s book, Flying High in Spirit, is again in print, and it is one of the reasons why we now realize that the Sixth Level is gloriously material! The Sixth Level is full of spectacular flowers and amazing universities. Those who live there often teach in the lower afterlife levels, and a few – like our beloved Mikey Morgan – have made it their personal mission to teach people who are still in bodies.

Why Should We Want to Bring the Kingdom of God on Earth?

A lot of what we hear Jesus say when we sit at the Lord’s feet and closely listen feels like gentle urging toward freeing our minds from fear so we can vibrate toward more perfect love. For example He says, “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? Look 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?

“And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But 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! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (MT 6:25-33).

So what Jesus came to earth to do was to teach us how we can make this anger- and hatred- and fear-filled planet into a love-filled mimic of the highest heavens. Even if you are a traditional Christian who believes Jesus came to die for your sins, don’t you agree that if He considered bringing the kingdom of God on earth to be important enough that He spent three years teaching us how to make it happen, then perhaps after two thousand years of misery we ought to give His ideas a second try?

What would our world be like if we followed the Lord’s directions now? Let’s talk about that next week….

You Shall Know the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The first time I reached my mother through a medium she said, “You were right about everything!” That was good to hear, but it made me groan because this woman had resisted all my efforts to convince her she would survive her death. I had read to her from The Fun of Dying. I had told her repeatedly how it all works, how excited I was that she would be there soon, and which loved ones might be coming to take her home. Not every day, but often I would find ways to reintroduce the topic. Sadly, though, as Jesus tells us, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household” (MT 13:57). My mother never believed a word! She had to see it for herself. And like the loving but demanding parent that she always had been, as soon as she had assured me I was right, she added, “Now I’m traveling around to make sure you have everything right.” (We don’t change after death nearly as much as we might wish we would!)

In case you are wondering why I was confident I was talking with my actual mother, there were some great validations. For example, my mother had almost nonexistent eyebrows, and after the medium said my mother was now checking my work, she added, “But why is she pointing at her eyebrow? Oh. She says now she doesn’t have to paint them on.”

Alas, my mother is not an outlier. Fear of death is the core human fear, and that fear remains rampant in 2019 even though for nearly a century now we have had overwhelming evidence that every human mind is eternal. And together with that ego-based fear of death, too many people also have a terrible religion-based fear of God, even though we also know for certain that all that objectively exists is the transcendent love of the genuine God that continuously manifests this universe. And you in particular are God’s best-beloved child! The harm done by all this fear-based negativity is compounded by the fact that mainstream scientists still have no idea about what actually is going on, so they perpetuate the rampant fear on earth which is the worst human-caused pollution of all.

To know why negativity is so dangerous, you will need to better understand how consciousness works. Since every human mind is part of one great Consciousness, for too many minds to be obsessed by fear can have severe consequences on the macro-level. The aggregate of the highest level of Consciousness – what Mikey Morgan calls “the unity of pure love and all that exists” – is the genuine God that continuously manifests this universe. Consciousness is a kind of energy so it vibrates, and its vibratory rate is from the slowest, which is fear and the other awful emotions, to absolute love at the highest level. And since all our minds are part of the same base Consciousness, our minds all influence one another, so a tendency toward fear in any significant number of people will drive down the vibratory rate of us all. Humankind’s obsessive drive toward fear comes largely from the ego’s fear of death, from fear-based religions, and from the scientific insistence that our minds die with our brains. And because both religions and science perpetuate fear rather than helping humankind to grow beyond it, our fear has gradually lowered our entire planet’s vibratory rate to the point where we are told now that unless we soon can elevate humankind away from fear and toward more perfect love, our planet will rapidly degrade from here. Our species soon will face extinction.

I haven’t talked much about this existential threat to all humanity. Researchers don’t entirely understand it, but we are getting the warnings and by now we understand it well enough. This sense we have that things are getting worse, that human interaction is becoming more rancorous, is the result of too much fear and hatred, and it is no longer self-correcting. So we cannot afford to let anyone on earth remain ignorant of how much our planet needs us! It is going to be essential that each of us learns how to raise our own consciousness vibration so we can do our part in ridding the earth of the awful human poisons of fear and negativity. Each of us has a responsibility now to learn how to ditch our old fears of death, of God, and of suffering some horrific outcome! In fact, the genuine greater reality is love beyond our ability to comprehend it. Your mind is a beautiful, powerful, eternal, and infinite part of all that love.

Deciding to take your own spiritual growth as seriously as you will need to take it if you are to help to save the world is going to be your gateway to the greatest joy there is! To quote the Introduction to A Course in Miracles, “This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. … The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way: ‘Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.’ Herein lies the peace of God” (In-1:1-8; 2:1-4). And to quote Master Jesus, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). Therefore, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

All we need do to free ourselves from fear is to take some time to learn the truth! The truth about what is going on is so much more wonderful than your most optimistic imaginings that, as Jesus says, your learning that truth will set you free from fear and from every other kind of negativity. So here is a quick tutorial meant for everyone who is afraid of death, or really afraid of anything at all. Internalize these facts, and soon you will be free from fear forevermore!

  • All of reality is energy. All that exists is composed of and governed by a kind of energy that we experience as human consciousness, which exists in a range of vibrations from fear at the lowest vibration to love at the highest vibration.
  • The highest vibratory rate is the Godhead. Insofar as researchers can determine, there is no separate Big Guy on a Throne giving orders. Instead, at the highest vibratory level there are glorious entities working together in perfect love, and the highest of these may in fact be Jesus.
  • The lower consciousness vibrates, the less powerful it is; the higher it vibrates, the more powerful it is. This means that what we experience as love is the literal engine that powers reality! It means many other things too, including the fact that there can be no powerful evil entity in opposition to God. There is no Satan. There are indeed demonic nasties, but they are pitifully weak: if we resist allowing them to influence our minds, they cannot harm us at all.
  • Nearly all of reality has neither space nor time. Energy is compressible and expandable, and space and time are artifacts of just this material universe, so the greater reality is both infinitely large and smaller than a pencil-dot. And anything that ever exists, exists eternally. Your mind never began and it never will end.
  • Dying will be as easy as changing TV channels. Right now, your mind is tuned to that particular body in this channel of our energy reality that is vibrating so low that it is perceptible to the senses as matter (that explanation comes from Albert Einstein). When your body dies, your mind will tune to a consciousness channel that is vibrating somewhat higher, and it will there pick up a whole new beautiful, immense, and solid-seeming reality!
  • You will be escorted home by loved ones you had thought were dead. From the hours or days before you transition and through the whole process, you will be assisted by loved ones who have predeceased you, all now young and beautiful but still the same people they were when they lived on earth. Your death with be the most convivial time of your life!
  • The “matter” at those higher levels is different from the matter here. It looks and feels solid, but it is not composed of atoms and it is easily influenced by more developed minds. Mental energy is even how they build homes in the afterlife levels! Matter beyond this material universe is just a bit translucent, and it can be intensely colored in shades not seen on earth because they fall beyond the visible light spectrum.
  • Your mind will merge with your higher mind very soon after you arrive home. We leave behind perhaps ninety percent of our vast, eternal minds, so when we go home and merge back into them we are suddenly a great deal smarter and we remember so much more!
  • The greater reality is composed of many vibrational levels which we on earth loosely organize into seven primary levels. The lowest is what Jesus calls “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). Above that come the gorgeous Summerland levels at three through five, the causal or teaching level at six, and the source level at seven. Those living there seem not to think in terms of levels, and of course all of this is both tiny and enormous! Each vibratory level may be even larger than this physical universe.
  • You can travel anywhere instantly, by thought. No time and no space multiplies the fun! But you can go only as high in the post-death levels as your level of spiritual development will allow, which is why we keep coming back to earth to learn how to vibrate ever higher.
  • The higher you go in the consciousness levels, the more beautiful everything will be. Nearly all of us spend our time between earth-lives in the Summerland, which is full of flowers in amazing colors, gorgeous buildings and landscapes, and vast vistas that may be complete with snow-topped mountains over fruited plains. And best of all, we are young and strong, we never sleep, and we can choose from literally endless happy playtime things that we might want to do!

Learn the truth by heart and let it free you from fear. Each of us must do our part! The earth faces a present threat that few people even know exists, and we may have little more than a century in which to raise its vibration enough to save our home planet from burning away. Without our help, rampant low-vibration consciousness is about to make global climate change look by comparison like a day at the beach.

 

Old TV photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/41971287282″>Motorola</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Summerland house photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/45290798382″>Aurora Ontario – Canada – Hillary House Museum – Historical Society – Heritage Building</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Flowers and river photo credit: 1991568456rtbp <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/140145408@N04/30029683587″>God’s Utterance “God Himself, the Unique IX God Is the Source of Life for All Things (III)”Part One</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

Listening to Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I read frequent communications from three very different clergymen. One is an eloquent Catholic monk who has devoted his life to elevating whatever he finds to be of value in Catholicism while he happily ignores the rest. The second is a pastor who trumpets all the mainline Protestant ideas and especially insists that Jesus died for our sins. The third is a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose entire goal is to get every one of us to claim Jesus as our savior because God’s judgment is upon us and if we are not “saved” we will go straight to hell. Reading them together is an education! It is clear that all three are devoted to Jesus, and it just never has occurred to them to wonder whether their own particular Christian denomination might not be the one that the Lord prefers. Or might it even be possible that the genuine Christ, Who came to us as God on earth, actually wants something else altogether?

These three clergymen and so many others remain still oblivious to the fact that God is about to rock our world. Based upon abundant evidence, we know at last that God is real, God is Consciousness and all that exists, and our minds are part of that infinite eternal Mind which continuously manifests this universe. So for the first time in human history we can begin to understand the true nature of God. We even can start to figure out what it is that God actually wants! For awhile longer, the advent of God on earth will mean little to the billions of people who are still stuck in the world’s religions. But for you and me it presents some very exciting possibilities!

As you may know, afterlife researchers and others have lately been made aware of an ongoing effort being made by those at the highest levels of reality who are working through many people on earth to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet away from fear and negativity and toward ever more perfect love. This is an urgent matter! We are told that unless this effort succeeds, within just a couple of centuries our planet will be a desolate wasteland. So getting it right will be important! And Who better to tell us what we should be doing to powerfully transform the world and avoid its imminent destruction than the genuine God Whose Mind continuously manifests this universe?

Let me say here plainly that for various reasons I consider it more likely than not that almost everything that Christians believe about Jesus is true. He is the promised Jewish Messiah, born of a virgin as God on earth and eventually crucified, entirely dead, risen from the dead three days later, and bodily assumed into heaven. All quite possibly – even probably – true. But we also can conclusively demonstrate that Jesus didn’t die for our sins because God already forgives us all. In addition, now we know that everyone who practiced any religion on earth – or even practiced no religion – goes to the very same religion-free afterlife. But these Christian errors cannot in the least diminish the fact that the life of Jesus is now demonstrated to be a miraculous gift from God! And God doesn’t give us miraculous gifts just to show off. So we know that the gift that is the life of Jesus must have had an important purpose. And since we know now that purpose was definitely not the religion that was later built around Him, don’t you agree that it is well past time for us to give the Lord another chance to tell us in His own words why He came?

We began to set the scene last week. You and I are observant Jews who have discovered an itinerant Teacher so compelling that we have lately begun to follow Him around and listen to Him. We have no idea what the next hour will bring, so for certain we know nothing about Jesus’s later charge that we should spread His teachings, nor His crucifixion, Paul’s letters, Christianity, nor anything else that the future might hold for this Teacher. We just enjoy listening to Him now. So, what do you and I hear Him saying?

I will give you here five primary things that I can hear the Lord telling us, but you might be hearing other things, too. I urge you to open the Gospel words that we now can confirm are genuine, and read and think and draw your own conclusions. But for now, the sun is hot on our heads. From nearby comes an unforgettable Voice…

Jesus Came to Abolish Religions

Religions are a fear-based holdover from the millennia when people served multiple Gods. Now that our people serve one God, Jesus has come to take us past the need for religions altogether. He begins by throwing away the entire Old Testament – what the Jews of His day call The Law and The Prophets – and replacing every religious law with God’s law of perfect love. When asked what is the greatest commandment, He says, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). He assures us that His outright abolition of religious laws is part of God’s plan when He says, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

Jesus speaks out against religious traditions, and He especially reviles clergymen. He says, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). And, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). Wow! is what you and I are thinking, sitting here and listening at the Lord’s feet. Is the Teacher telling us that God is abandoning His Chosen People?

Jesus Came to Teach Us How to Relate to God On Our Own

Actually, Jesus is telling us that we have grown beyond our need for religions, and God would prefer that we begin with Him a one-on-one relationship. He says, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6). And we can see that Jesus is trying to avoid being seen as a religious figure. For Him, it is His teachings that matter! He says, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46). “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21). You and I, at the Teacher’s feet, glance at one another. We cannot help but conclude that, amazingly, God no longer wants us to practice the religion of our fathers, but instead God wants us to begin to develop a personal relationship with Him.

Jesus Came to Teach Us to be Seekers

The Lord knows that humanity will continue to advance in understanding past this sunny afternoon by the Sea of Galilee, so He wants us to keep seeking more knowledge as we become better able to comprehend it. He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). He also says, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). Again we share a glance. We think we understand this, too. We should be looking for more truths to come, but what the Teacher is telling us now is a basic set of truths that will not change.

Jesus Came to Teach us How to Grow Spiritually

The teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love are the easiest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been given to humankind. And clearly Jesus knows that. He keeps telling us how those teachings will transform us when He says things like, “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41). And, “But 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. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). Sitting at His feet and looking up at Jesus, you and I realize what He is saying. He is telling us that following His teachings on forgiveness and love is going to help us become more like Himself.

Jesus Came to Bring the Kingdom of God on Earth

Right at the start of the Lord’s ministry, “after John (the Baptist) had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (MK 1:14-15). And He said, “How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though it is smaller than all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and forms large branches; so that the birds of the air can nest under its shade” (MK 4:30-32). Jesus talks incessantly about the kingdom of God and His planned role in bringing about the advent of the kingdom of God on earth. For example, He once tells His listeners, “I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose” (LK 4:43). He expects the kingdom of God to dawn on earth amazingly soon! He says, “There are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God” (LK 9:27). Of course, sitting there at the feet of Jesus, you and I as first-century folk have no clue what Jesus is talking about now, nor can we see how it fits with the rest of what we have been hearing Him say. But after two thousand years it does make sense.

Jesus is telling us that He came to earth to help the world’s first true monotheists move on from religions altogether and establish individual relationships with God that would better enable them to grow spiritually. And He adds that their rapid spiritual growth, had it happened as it had been planned to happen, would fairly soon have brought the dawning of the kingdom of God on earth. His mission was hijacked soon after His death by religion-builders steeped in human ideas, but its fulfillment has only been delayed! What we see as modern Christianity is nothing more than a distracting wrapper. And the genuine teachings of Jesus that still are safe within that wrapper are needed now more urgently than they ever have been needed before. Doesn’t every Christian on earth, including my three zealous clergyman friends, owe Jesus His right to at last be heard?

 

Child Jesus photo credit: Waiting For The Word <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/60532802@N07/5563066352″>Jesus at Twelve 39</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Risen Jesus photo credit: eshao5721 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/165868022@N02/32473423548″>Gesù parla ai discepoli dopo la resurrezione</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
 

Sitting at His Feet

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A week ago came one of those moments when you really help me grow. The previous week I had published a blog post on scientific cluelessness that had been months in the making, was rich with linked articles, and was a lot of fun to write; and it had attracted precisely one commenter and not a single email. Then during that next week it occurred to me that it might be good to write about the ego, and the result has been so many comments and emails that I have lost count! So I finally do get it. Growing spiritually has become foremost in your mind! Most wonderful for me has been the fact that your words have helped me realize some things that never would have occurred to me without your help. So thank you for once again thinking deeply and taking the time to share your thoughts. We fight for humanity’s future together!

I am coming to see now, thanks to you, that we have a big new task before us. There is a growing interest in the afterlife, and more and more people are coming to realize that we enter these earth-lives so we can grow spiritually. All of this does feel like progress! But our pressing task now is to figure out how we can help everyone on earth to achieve the spiritual growth that apparently is the whole reason why this universe exists. All our deeply fear-based religions are anathema to spiritual growth, and there is no other obvious source of information about how we can raise our spiritual vibrations and make a big success of this lifetime!

Except, of course, for A Course in Miracles. ACIM is what amounts to a Ph.D.-level exposition of the teachings of Jesus, and the Lord Himself is its likely head author. I recommend the Course without reservation, and I find it to be an especially useful way to draw out and smack down your ego. I said this last week, and a perceptive commenter responded with a quote from Marianne Williamson. Ms. Williamson is one of the foremost experts on A Course in Miracles worldwide. Our commenter remarked that this is what Ms. Williamson has to say about what happens when you invite the Lord into your life:

“When you ask God into your life, you think God is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture, and that everything needs just a little cleaning — and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and you see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch. Jesus and his wrecking ball. Suddenly the image of Jesus standing at the door and knocking is transformed. ‘Hey, anybody home? I want to knock this sucker down so we can totally rebuild it. You ready for that?’ It’s what Jesus and his wrecking ball is set to do. Knock it all down to its very foundation. Rip out the foundation if necessary. Jesus wants to make room for something new. Jesus wants to knock down every part of you that doesn’t reflect God’s realm.”

I was shocked and horrified! Here is a shortened version of my answer:

That is not the Jesus of the Gospels! He would say the only problem with your house is there are mice running around in it, squirrels in the attic, and even squatters that you allowed to move in because you were too busy to keep them out even though they are a nuisance and you hate them. So you follow Jesus’s suggestions about how to remove whatever is not a part of your eternal self from the house, so soon there is nothing more in it of earthly imperfections but it is entirely of God. And how beautiful it is! It doesn’t even need much paint, once you and He have scrubbed the walls clean. And with all the little creatures gone and the squatters decamped, the Lord helps you even to do the repainting.

The more time you spend at home with Jesus, the more perfect your whole life starts to feel. You become so happy in your life with the Lord that one day you say, “You know, Jesus, maybe we should put a wing on the house? Then we can invite those homeless people back and have them bring their friends because I have just realized they are all my cousins! And I find that I do love each of them, now that I have reclaimed my eternal home with You and come to realize that it is built on and made of and filled with love.”

Eventually you and Jesus might add that wing, or you might even build an entire city around your house so you can better love and care for the world because it turns out they are all your cousins! But this love that fills you now is nothing new: it always was your own true nature. Your rediscovery of it is the beautiful fruit of your having been encouraged by the Lord of the Gospels to reclaim who you are eternally! Your foundation IS God. All you need to do is remember that fact and get rid of every earthly distraction. The Gospel teachings are meant to help us return to our foundation in God so we can reclaim our eternal nature, not to make us start all over from scratch and become someone else altogether!

I remained horrified by Marianne Williamson’s words until the following morning, when I realized she is right. If you are a Christian, you have built your spiritual house out of fear-based dogmas that make you feel terrible about yourself. “I am so sinful that God can’t forgive me so Jesus has to die or I am going to hell” is the core of what Christianity teaches us to believe about ourselves. “That Christmas Baby lying in the manger is going to have to suffer and die because I am so unworthy of God’s forgiveness. And Jesus will die for me! Of course He will, because unlike me, Jesus is beautiful and perfect. So now I know that I am “saved,” but that doesn’t make me feel even one whit better about my unworthy self. I am sinful. My core nature is evil. Because Adam ate the apple, this is who I am.” So if I am a practicing Christian, I am going to need that wrecking ball! My entire spiritual foundation is rotten. No choice but to trash it all and start over.

A Course in Miracles has to repair the damage done to us by Christian teachings before it can begin to help us grow spiritually. As I look at the Course freshly, I see that a lot of it is aimed at getting rid of those false Christian fears that keep us from realizing that our spiritual foundation is nothing but God. Our genuine nature is perfect love. If it were not for Christianity, our spiritual growth would be so easy: we could simply reclaim what we already are!  

So now I am coming to think that the only way we ever can help the Lord to build the love-based movement He came to earth to start will be if we can find a way to erase Christianity from our personal histories. We will need to go back two thousand years and sit down together at the feet of the Lord and listen to Him. Listen only to Him! We are dressed in homespun, you and I. Our feet are bare, the sun is hot on our heads, and the breeze smells sweet and green. We are looking up at the face of the Teacher, marveling with all the people around us at the amazing new ways that He talks about God.

We know God as a stern but loving Parent. God insists that we obey His commandments and live and eat and dress in ways that keep our minds focused on Him, but God deeply loves us! God has chosen us from all the world to be His own people, so we joyously sing to Him songs of praise:

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good,
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
Give thanks to the God of gods,
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
Give thanks to the Lord of lords,
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
To Him who alone does great wonders,
For His lovingkindness is everlasting (Psalm 136:1-4).

You and I as first-century Jews live in the certainty of God’s love and care. We are sinners, we make mistakes, but God understands. We suffer travails in the world, but God will send a Messiah in the line of David who will be our King in the better world to come. The Teacher speaking to us now might even be that Messiah! But we are confounded by the things He does, and especially confounded by the things He says:

“… Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

“Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (MT 5:9-12).

You and I so much want to believe that Jesus is the true Messiah who will bring to God’s chosen people the dawning of a much better world! But as observant first-century Jews, how are we to make sense of His words? Let’s begin to talk about that next week….

 

Jesus as Infant photo credit: JZ-DESIGN <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/97784294@N04/29056964601″>Thiméo.G Shooting</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tidy house photo credit: Spencer Means <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/28643687@N08/32006422078″>Little house in Ellsworth, Maine</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Your house photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – Vacation OFF <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/43643005010″>Aurora Ontario – Canada – Poplar Villa – The Chateau 1912</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Jesus captive photo credit: byb64 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50879678@N03/41596213070″>”El Expolio” 1577-1579, El Greco, sacristie, cathédrale Sainte Marie (XIIIe-XVe), Tolède, Castille-La Manche, Espagne.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Torah scroll photo credit: Lawrie Cate <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/24298372@N04/3370795563″>DSC03531</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Raising Lazarus photo credit: eshao5721 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/165868022@N02/44144524830″>La Resurrezione di Lazzaro glorifica Dio</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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