Roberta Grimes

Trusting God

Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 07, 2024 • 4 Comments
Jesus, The Source

Oh Lord, my God, when I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed,

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow in humble adoration
And then proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!
– Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

The problem most people have, I think, is not that they don’t believe in God. As the old saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. And many of our days contain lesser crises than foxholes that nevertheless still have us thinking quick little prayers, just in case. Every modern culture also is permeated with the thought of God, since there are old churches, cathedrals, or mosques in every city and town, all over the world, even if some of those sacred buildings now see little use. And our speech is littered with the name of God in more than a hundred languages, used someetimes in ways that are absent-mindedly profane. All of that is still true, so it is certainly true that most people still believe that God exists, even if their belief is only vague; and even if nowadays sometimes that holy name is said without much of a deliberate thought.

So, our problem doesn’t seem to be a lack of belief in God, at least in some form. No, but nevertheless I think we all can agree that there is more of a disconnect now between most people and God than there ever has been in living memory. As recently as fifty years ago, in America at least, all those churches in our town and city squares were full on Sundays. It was a simple convention that everyone had some nominal religion, and almost always it was of the Judeo-Christian variety. It is really only in this new century, so I would say in the last twenty-five years or so, that there has been such a major falling-away from our old religions. Many people see this phenomenon as a falling-away from faith in their old religion happening because that old religion no longer makes much sense to them. Thinking about the hundreds of emails that I have received over the past few decades, the one thing that strangers who have written to me have most consistently said was that they could no longer believe in their old religion, but they still believe very much in Jesus.

And with that, if people felt the need to say more, there often was a sharp subtext of fear. This was especially true of those who were getting up their nerve to leave the Catholic Church, or to free themselves from one of the stricter Protestant churches, from the Calvinists perhaps, or from one of the Evangelical sects, which generally decree damnation for those who have fallen away. So the people who emailed me often have wanted to know whether I believed what their former church believed, and if not then why not; and back in the years when I had more time, I might have had quite lively email dialogues with some of those folks. They wanted their strict former churches to be wrong, and me to be right. But with their possible eternal futures lived in flames now riding on the result of our conversations, some of the men, especially, would battle me pretty hard!

And I enjoyed those intellectual squabbles. I am an attorney, after all, and a Biblical scholar with some great quotations from Jesus just waiting in my mind to be shared, so I could readily tell those desperate people, if I was in the right mood, that the fear-based teachings of their prior religion were nothing more than a steaming pile of fear-based excrement. I could happily tell them that if they would stick with Jesus and His teachings, they were going to be just fine.  

What is so horribly fearful about the Roman Emperor Constantine’s form of Christianity that still prevails today? Oh, my dear one, let us count the ways in which modern Christianity is based in fear! As is true of every ancient religion, Constantine’s Christianity had to be based in fear as a standard convention. And there was a doozy of a central fear right there and readily available to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, just waiting to be used to fill every future Christian’s heart with the misery of fear and guilt and shame: 

• Jesus Died on the Cross to Redeem You from God’s Judgment for Your Sins. When my Thomas took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane two years ago so I could talk with Him about His planned website, Jesus told me plainly that He had chosen to die on the cross and then to reanimate His dead body in order to demonstrate the fact that human life is eternal, and not for any other reason. He could not otherwise convince His contemporaries that they would survive their deaths, no matter what He said to them. He told me that it was Constantine who had added the idea that Jesus had died to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. And of course, if we think about it for even half a minute, we will realize that the Christian dogma makes no sense, because for one thing, God never judges us, as Jesus clearly says in the Gospel of John. Jesus says there, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son,  so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
• God will Judge You, and God Will Throw Sinners into the Eternal Fire of Hell. Jesus tells us (see JN 5:22-23, just above) that God never judges us, and we also know based on extensive afterlife evidence that our judgment is only by ourselves and it happens as part of the post-death process. We know as well that there is no fiery hell, but instead the lowest afterlife level is what Jesus called “the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). The outer darkness is where we will end up if our personal vibration falls far enough away from love and toward fear, to the point that we end up there. And it is indeed cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting in the outer darkness! That is the punishment level, no doubt, and we would need to be rescued from it because we cannot escape it on our own. But we are the only ones who ever can put ourselves there, we easily can avoid it, and we certainly do not remain there forever.
• Human Nature is Sinful and Fallen. The Christianity of Constantine teaches us that our very nature is debased. But Jesus spent three years loving us and tenderly teaching us just how deeply precious to God we are! He taught us to call God our own Father, using the intrafamily term for Father, so He was effectively telling us to call God “Daddy”. Jesus always was building us up, telling us that God loves us very much, and that He, Jesus, loves us. He constantly said things like, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (MT 5:13-16).
• Jehovah God is to be Feared. Christians are taught to fear that old-fashioned, religion-based God, even today! We will hear someone approvingly described as “a God-fearing man” or “a God-fearing woman,” as if this were the highest form of praise. But Jesus was appalled to find when He first was growing up on earth just how much the Jews among whom he had been born feared God. He taught us instead to call God “Our Father, Who is in Heaven” (MT 6:9), using the familial form of the word for Father. In every way that He could, He tried to transform our relationship with God to one based entirely on parental love.
  

You and I cannot possibly love or trust God at all if we fear God, since love and fear are polar opposites. Without love, we only can tremble in terror before the great Jehovah God! But Jesus came to us to altogether transform our understanding of our true relationship with God into the same perfectly loving Parent-Child relationship that God has with Jesus. He said:

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine dresser. ² Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. ³ You are already pruned clean because of the Word which I have spoken to you. ⁴ Now, abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. ⁵ I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. ⁶ If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. ⁷ If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. ⁸ My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. ⁹ Just as the Father has loved Me, so I have also loved you; abide in My love. ¹⁰ If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and I abide in His love (JN 15:1-10).

When I asked my Thomas how each of us should see God, and should relate to God, he showed me the living room of the earliest home that I can remember. The God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with His long, white beard is sitting on the sofa in my long-ago living room, and He is grinning at a toddler who is carrying a plastic cup of orange juice. Then, Whoops! The cup tips, and all that baby’s orange juice spills on the carpet. God’s child starts to cry, but God laughs, and He leans and picks up His baby and cuddles it in His arms. God’s precious baby will learn how to carry juice without spilling it, just as you and I will learn how to grow spiritually. And meanwhile, we are being told now to take it as a core tenet of faith that each of us, individually, is in fact that precious baby. Each of us is God’s Own best-beloved child. So we can love and trust God completely! We can call God our own heavenly Daddy. And we can trust God to safely catch us, every time.   

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
– Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)