Roberta Grimes

Jesus Lives!

Posted by Roberta Grimes • March 30, 2024 • 21 Comments
Jesus

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1772)

We have witnessed a genuine miracle. And the fact that the miracle happened two thousand years ago and was planned as a personal gift to humankind, and we can see now how it was accomplished, we can peek behind the curtain and watch it as it happened makes that miracle even more wonderful. It was, in fact, a whole set of miracles, the last of which is the fact that Jesus has managed to preserve for us over the past two thousand years sufficient evidence of His life, death, and resurrection that even all these many years later we still can know with certainty that it actually did happen. The fact that we have the Shroud of Turin, and we now can document its miraculous nature tells us monumentally wondrous things about the extraordinary nature of Jesus as well.

Two years ago, I also experienced my own miracle. My spirit guide, Thomas, took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane because we were about to work together on creating a website for Him (although I didn’t know anything about this at the time). Jesus told me during that first visit that He wants the world to have His genuine backstory now, to replace all the religious myth-making. And He especially wants us to know that six thousand years ago, He was just a man in a human body who was working to perfect Himself spiritually, just as you and I are working, each toward our own spiritual perfection. Jesus told me that once He had perfected Himself and achieved the level of the Godhead, He was so troubled to see how difficult the struggle for perfection still remains for most people living on earth, especially since they still receive no guidance at all about why they are born on earth or how they might best achieve spiritual growth. Even now, most people continue to pointlessly drudge through lifetime after lifetime on earth, while making little or no spiritual progress.

So the entity who was later to be born as Jesus persuaded the Powers to allow Him to be born again on earth, directly from out of the Godhead. This sort of Godhead-level birth of a perfected being had never previously been attempted. And Jesus did not do it just so He could die for our sins. That bogus sin-offering concept was an old Hebrew religious idea, and entirely unnecessary now, since as Jesus Himself quite pointedly tells us, God never judges anyone (see JN 5:20-23). And for the record, Jesus doesn’t judge us either, as He tells us at JN 12:45-47. Jesus was born to teach us that we undertake lifetimes on earth in order to raise our own spiritual vibrations, and also to raise the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind, which He calls bringing the kingdom of God on earth (see e.g. LK 8:1, 9:2, 9:11). And Jesus also was born to teach us how to grow spiritually so rapidly that we can end the cycle of repeated rebirths and make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. So that was the reason for Jesus’s three years of teaching! His teachings are not just the make-nice platitudes that most people have long considered them to be. Instead, they are a beautiful spiritual lesson-plan so efficient that they can transform your life within months.  

The whole idea that Jesus had to die to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins, which modern Christians call “penal substitutionary atonement,” is not based in anything that Jesus said. Indeed, that Christian religious idea directly contradicts the truths that Jesus shares with us in the Gospels. And it is frankly altogether repellent. Try asking yourself which of your own beloved children you would most enjoy watching being horribly murdered so you can forgive the rest of your children for messing up your living room. God insists that you and I must forgive every wrong ever done to us, when at the same time we are told by our religion that the God that we worship is so unforgiving? Jesus tells us to forgive “not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven times” (MT 18:22). So apparently God insists that you and I must forgive, while at the same time God demands that we participate in the sacrifice of His own Son to Himself, or else God refuses to forgive us? This bogus idea that God is unable to forgive unless God first gets to watch His Son being murdered is such a terrible insult to the genuine God, and a complete humiliation of Jesus!

But if Jesus didn’t have to die as a sin-sacrifice, then why did He go to the cross on Good Friday? And was He still somehow doing it for us? Jesus’s reason for dying on the cross is something else that He explained to me on that amazing night when I first met Him in the astral plane two years ago. He told me that His death on the cross had not been any part of His original life-plan, but His plan instead had been that He would simply walk away from His companions when His teaching work on earth was done, and He would be subsumed back into the highest levels of reality. But the one thing that was severely vexing Him while He was on earth was that, try as He might, He never could convince most people that their lives were going to be eternal. After all, they knew better! The custom of the day was to lay dead bodies out in caves for several years to decay away, and then when there was nothing left of them but bones, their mourners would collect those bones into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, and then store the filled ossuaries marked with people’s names and re-use the caves. Everyone knew that people died and decayed away! No matter what Jesus said, He could not convince them otherwise.

So Jesus decided to give every one of us, both those alive back then and all the rest of us until the end of time, a demonstration that human life really is eternal. He told me on that night two years ago that He wasn’t even sure that He would be able to revive and re-use His body after it was crucified, but He had been experimenting with reviving small dead animals with some success. He could bring dead animals alive again after they had died, although not for long. Still, He was determined to try this. He said that He was protected during His lifetime as Jesus by invisible archangels, so He had to order His archangel guards to stand down in order for Him to even be arrested. (I found these little details so fascinating!) He told me that He never managed to get the Godhead’s agreement to this change in His life plan because it seemed to be a humiliation of an Emissary from  God, and the thought of that was insupportable. But once it was clear that Jesus was determined to do it anyway, with or without God’s permission, He did at least receive God’s promise that if He went through with it, He would die on the cross well before sunset on Friday. He would therefore (hopefully) die with unbroken and still usable legs, since it was routine for the Roman guards to go around and break the legs of people on crosses who were still alive when the sun was setting as the Saturday Sabbath arrived at sundown. Without usable legs, they would no longer be able to push up and breathe, and they would soon die of asphyxiation.  

Who really is Jesus? When my Thomas first came out to me in 2015, the first thing I asked him was whether Jesus really came to us as the Son of God, or whether He was only a wise prophet. Thomas told me that Jesus is much more even than just the Son of God. He said that Jesus entered that lifetime from the highest aspect of the Godhead. So since the evidence suggests, and both Thomas and our regular Seek Reality guest Mikey Morgan together have confirmed to us, that the God of this reality is a Collective of Perfected Beings, they are telling us that God literally walked the earth in the Person of the historical Jesus. Indeed, Jesus Himself suggests His own divinity in the Gospels, although those who heard Him speak and then passed His words down orally for a couple of generations before those words were written down may not have fully understood what He was saying. He would say things like, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). Jesus lived on earth in a fairly primitive time and place. It is important that we always keep that in mind! The fact that so few of Jesus’s listeners were able to grasp the reality that God had incarnated on earth in the Person of Jesus should not much surprise us.

I began researching death and the afterlife in the nineteen-seventies in an effort to understand my childhood experiences of light. It took me more than a decade to really understand that many hundreds of perfectly consistent communications from people that we used to think were dead, received on two continents over nearly a century, did make it pretty much statistically impossible for the afterlife that they all talked about so consistently not to be real. And although I was very familiar with the Gospels, and in the end quite frustrated about the fact that Christians mostly ignored Jesus’s teachings, it was only late in the nineties that I realized that the dead were actually confirming what Jesus had said when He was on earth, and in detail. That was when I was at last able to abandon the Christian religion altogether, and to give my whole heart to Jesus alone. 

But being confident that Jesus is a genuine historical figure, and understanding that He came to us as God on earth, is still a far cry from believing that His actual burial shroud might still exist. And for a long time, I doubted the claim that the burial shroud and sudarium (face-covering) of Jesus are with us to this day. But on these matters, I am a skeptic no longer. As was true of all that afterlife evidence, and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels that I have researched so diligently, the modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant, and it is irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

• Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made can be carbon-dated to the time of Jesus. It is of a weave in common use at that time, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
• The blood on both relics is male and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
• The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s reported injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they both covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
• The Shroud carries an image of a man. That image is only smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed. There is no image on the Sudarium, but still those smudges on the Shroud can be seen. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532 and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
• The image on the Shroud turns out to be a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image.
• No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it doesn’t penetrate at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim happened well after the blood had dried.
• Something to think about… Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce them would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body roughly equivalent to or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge.

Jesus’s reanimated body was not made fully alive again. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated and its flesh was decaying, and those who knew Jesus did not readily recognize Him wearing that rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His body to be so fragile now that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could fully re-inhabit and re-animate the body to the extent that it could again walk and talk, and He could use it to demonstrate His own survival; then after perhaps a day or two, He apparently cast it away, and He used an astral body from then on until He ascended, some forty days later. That astral body was why He could so easily appear inside the enclosed and fortified room where His disciples had hidden themselves (see JN 20:19-20). And having created mimic wounds in His astral body, He invited doubting Thomas to probe those wounds and satisfy himself that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Jesus. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then He was tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists to this day, and laid in a tomb. Two days after that He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy from it that was at least equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on the earth generated at once. He then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and to us, that human life is indeed eternal and none of us will ever die.

One of the criminals who were hanged there was saying,
“ Save Yourself and us!” The other was saying,
“Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
And He said to him, “Truly I say to you,
today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:39-43)