Posted by Roberta Grimes • March 29, 2025 • 17 Comments
Jesus, The Source, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suff’ring and shame.
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me.
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
– George Bennard (1873–1958). From “The Old Rugged Cross” (1912)
Of all the things that influence our lives, the single thing about which we have the greatest right to feel most certain is the way that Jesus, our Wayshower and our Best Friend, specifically suggests that we should live our lives. Wouldn’t you agree that is certainly true? Doesn’t each of us have the unrestricted right to be personally sure of how Jesus wants us to live while we are on this earth? I mean, if you cannot be sure of what Jesus wants of you, then how can you really be sure about anything?
But, here is our problem. When I wrote my first book in this field, The Fun of Dying, and that was fifteen years ago now, there were then by most counts more than ten thousand different denominations of Christianity being practiced on earth. True, perhaps most of those versions occupied just one, or maybe only a few church buildings. But even if there had been as few as perhaps just a hundred major versions of Christianity at that time, or – Lord forgive us! – just a thousand versions, how on earth were we supposed to know which version might possibly be the best one to follow? And, much worse to even contemplate, was it conceivably true that only one of those very many version was the “right” one, the one blessed by God? A few of those ten thousand versions actually were proclaiming back then that they alone held heaven’s keys, and if you followed any other Christian denomination, then you were flat-out going to hell. Worst of all, I am sorry to break this news to you on such a lovely Sunday morning, but when I just asked Google how many Christian denominations there are today, I was horrified! Modern Christianity is breeding all around us like metaphorical rabbits. Amazingly, there are four times as many denominations of Christianity now than there were just fifteen years ago!
There are more than forty-five thousand Christian denominations now, believe it or not. Even as the number of Christians, in the United States at least, has been slowly declining; although, according to the most recent Pew survey, the religion seems to be leveling off in the low-sixty-percent range of all Americans; still, the differences of opinion among American Christians seem to be proliferating. People are coming at us from all directions now, and many of them are telling us with lead-pipe certainty that they know just what Jesus wants us to do, yes-sir-ree, and no question about that at all. We can listen to them and ignore all the rest.
But the problem is that all these spits among denominations so often are based on trivial nothings. One group of Methodists, for example. will allow female clergy, and this other group will not. A third group will allow homosexual clergy, and perhaps there are subgroups for Methodist homosexual female clergy, and another for homosexual male clergy, and so on. Or it might be abortion that has people frothing and further splitting Christian denominations into bits. Or it might be the fact that Oprah has now become a spiritual teacher, but her demands are not strict enough and she refuses to focus on that bloody cross, so now she is alarmingly leading people astray. To tell you the truth, decades ago I looked into many of these splits upon splits as they were happening, but now they only dishearten me. The fact that people who purport to love Jesus have split what Jesus gave us as a single love-based spiritual Way into more than forty-five thousand fear-based religions, many of which insist that the followers of most of the other Christian religions are damned for eternity for not believing quite the right things, is a shame and a horror!
Today’s frame–verse trumpets the central teaching of the original fear-based Christian religion that was designed for the Roman Emperor Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E., and it remains the core teaching of the Christianity that still is the world’s predominant religion today. Most people associate that religion with Jesus, but as we again approach our celebration of Easter, and we remember that Jesus chose to die on a cross, it is important for us to also recall that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s explanation for Jesus’s crucifixion that came out of his First Council of Nicaea was based upon nothing that Jesus ever taught! We will talk more about all of this next week. But the whole notion that Jesus died on a cross as a sin-sacrifice to God was only one of many ideas that arose in the burgeoning spiritual Way of Jesus as it spread rapidly around the whole eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea during the first couple of centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection. To prove my point that Jesus never taught that His death on the cross was meant to be a big-deal sin-sacrifice to God, please just note that there are more than six million burials of early followers of Jesus’s Way in the Roman Catacombs, Those burials occurred from the Second through the Fifth Centuries C.E.. And to show you how little the manner of Jesus’s death mattered to His earliest followers, among all the many illustrations on those tombs in the Roman Catacombs, not a single depiction of a cross can be found. Instead, what is commonly seen in the Catacombs is Jesus as a brown-eyed, curly-haired Shepherd with a goat on his shoulders, to show that He came to care for everyone, not just the sheep of His own flock but also all the wayward goats.
We now understand that a big core problem with that central teaching of Constantine’s new Christian religion, which was and today remains that Jesus came to die as a pure sacrifice for all our sins, is that it makes the religion fear- and guilt-based. So the religion worked beautifully for an Emperor who needed an efficient way to control his masses! Constantine seized on and built up that one strain among the many strains of thinking that then existed in the spiritual Way of Jesus, and his armies tried to stamp out every other strain. But we have learned a lot in seventeen hundred years. We now know that:
The Gospel teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love are in fact ideally suited to help us learn to rapidly raise our personal vibrations within consciousness. If we will just follow His teachings, we can make the best use of our earth-lifetimes to grow spiritually away from fear and toward ever more perfect love, which is the entire point of our lives on earth! But, please read our frame-verse again. As you can see, Constantine’s awful, fear-based core Christian dogma is literal spiritual poison. And when you combine that seventeen-hundred-year-old teaching with the more recent tendency of modern Christians to squabble and split the religion even further over ever tinier differences in the ways they might want to worship, or in the preferred sexual preferences of their clergymen and other such trivialities. And with even their tendency to want to attach the imagined influence of a theoretical Satan to anyone who doesn’t happen to choose their own particular flavor of worship or clergy sexual preference. Frankly, at this point, you and I throw up our hands. We now have more than forty-five thousand slightly different Christian religions to choose from worldwide, with some of them actively squabbling with one another? And nearly all of them have at their core that awful dogma that says that Jesus died for our sins, so they are unavoidably teaching not love, but mostly fear and shame? Might we actually be better off with no Christian religions at all? With instead just loving and studying God and Jesus, but doing nothing more complicated than that?
Because, please think about just how horribly that awful teaching presents both God and Jesus to a world that so desperately needs them both. Poor God! What does that teaching say about the wise and loving God Who calls upon all of us to learn to perfectly forgive one another. God in the Gospels in the Person of God’s Son calls upon all of us to lovingly forgive our fellow man. But the Christian religion tells us that God flat refuses to forgive you and me for whatever we might have done wrong, unless God first gets to enjoy watching God’s only begotten Son being horribly tortured and murdered. Dear God, please forgive me, but that is what the dogma of “substitutionary atonement” plainly says! And, what about Jesus? What does that same dogma say about our own beloved Wayshower and Best Friend? Poor Jesus! It tells us that all the precious and intensely worthwhile Gospel teachings that He gave to us when He taught us for three and a half years were not the true reason why He was born on earth. Not at all! No, the dogma of substitutionary atonement tells us that Jesus’s one essential role on earth was to remain sinless for His whole earth-life so He could then take every human sin upon Himself, and His body could be tortured and killed as a pure sacrifice to God.
The First Nicaean Council’s explanation for Jesus’s death on the cross is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. And furthermore, it makes no sense:
Worst of all to my mind is the fact that in most Christian churches which play up the notion that Jesus died for our sins, actually teaching the plain Gospel words of Jesus is at the same time sadly minimized. The biggest example of this problem, of course, is Catholicism, the largest Christian sect by membership, where I spent the first twenty-five years of my marriage. A few small bits of the Gospels are read routinely as a part of the Catholic Mass; but seldom are those parts expanded upon in the priest’s homily, or are they otherwise discussed. In some Unity Churches, A Course in Miracles study groups are held; but while Jesus also led the group that channeled that book to us in the Sixties, ACIM is deep and complex and therefore often difficult to understand, and studying it is a serious commitment. By contrast, the Gospel teachings of Jesus can be read all together in one evening. They are simple to understand and easily memorized, and at the same time they are the most powerfully life- and love-affirming lessons ever delivered by anyone.
Next week, we will look more deeply at the conundrum that we all will face as Christianity yet again rolls aside the stone from Jesus’s burial cave on another Easter morning and finds an empty tomb. For two thousand years, we have been content to offer our own shallow, human-level answers to the question of what that empty tomb might mean. What fresh answers might we propose this year…?
In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died
To pardon and sanctify me.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
To the old rugged cross I will ever be true,
Its shame and reproach gladly bear.
Then He’ll call me someday to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it someday for a crown.
– George Bennard (1873–1958), from “The Old Rugged Cross” (1912)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
Dear Roberta, I had to giggle a little at the little typo in this sentence:
“But the problem is that all these spits among denominations so often are based on trivial nothings.”
I guess they do indeed metaphorically spit at each other…, which is actually no laughing matter at all. Indeed such trivialities!
In the Netherlands, some very conservative Christians had a serious conference decades ago to discuss whether the fruit in the Garden of Eden was an apple or something else. I can imagine splits into Apple Churches, Pear Churches, Banana Churches, etc., or which language the snake spoke, etc.
The damage done by Constantine is enormous. During the time of Nixon’s Watergate mistake, even Christian ministers were displaying emotions far removed from forgiveness, loving your enemies, etc.
Christians are also very different among one another and if you ask them a serious theological question, either they don’t know the answer, or their answers will differ widely, or they will say you just have to believe, or ask the church pastor.
So, there are actually unofficially uncountable many denominations.
Oh, my dear so much beloved Adrian, I nearly spit my coffee when I read your comment. It made me laugh out loud! You have no idea how carefully I proofread these posts, my dear one! But yet, it actually reads pretty well with the typo in there, which might be why I read right over it.
And wow, I can well imagine Christians holding an entire conference to argue about what kind of fruit was on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. That is just the sort of nonsense, beside-the-point thing that they obsess about!
I absolutely love your next-to-last paragraph. When I was younger and a lot more naive, I used to try to discuss the Gospels with especially ardent Christians. They would be throwing passages from Paul’s epistles at me, and I would say, “Hey, wait a minute. Let’s ask Jesus about that.” You would think that these supposedly ardent Christians would be especially able to quote the words of Jesus Himself, right? Go directly to the Source? But usually they were not familiar with His teachings at all.
Hello Wonderful Lady:
I read your messages every Sunday for fun, truth and enlightenment. I have read In Spirit and two of your Fun of books[loving Jesus and Growing Forever]. I will need to read them all again. These books are great and help me understand why I am here. I have a couple of nasty, very painful diseases. I need to grow Spiritually and I was wondering how suffering helps you grow Spiritually? I know it helps to forgive whoever is giving me this suffering and then to love them. How does suffering for a large part of my life help me grow Spiritually, is there more?
Oh, my dear beautiful Myron, I am sorry that you have these difficulties in your life. Our bodies so often let us down! What helps us to raise our vibration, dear, is the act of resisting having our vibration drawn down. Naturally, when you have pain and anger at having the pain and general negativity surrounding it, that is all negative. But if your reaction is only sweetness and forgiveness and love, then you are working against the negativity and instead raising your consciousness vibration. Do you see? Coming here is like going to the gym and working out. So when you go home, and all that negativity is gone, you will be vibrating MUCH higher!
When I visited my Dutch friends in the Bible Belt, namely Jackson, Mississippi, back during a hot summer in 1972, I also had some discussions with ardent Christians there. You would often see a very friendly boy and girl not hugging or kissing on benches outside, but studying the Bible together, and they would machine gun you with quotes if you started any kind of discussion about any theological point with them. Indeed, mostly quotes from the letters of Paul, and black and white churches were not integrated then (and I wonder how that has changed by the way, if at all). The chief of police I happened to meet about something then told me that he used to think that blacks were not humans, but being “a good Christian” he consequently believed they were human but still should go back to Africa! How far can you be removed from the unconditional love teachings by Jesus? And I have several other stories about that summer in the deep South. Wow!
Well, my very dear one, it is quite a bit better now in the American South than it was in the Seventies. The churches are integrated, although some historically black churches are still predominantly so by choice, but surely nobody wants anyone to go back to Africa! My state of Texas is 1/3 black, 1/3 Hispanic, and 1/3 white, and there is no racial tension here at all that I can see; lots of people from Asia and India as well. It’s lovely.
Hi Roberta, I listened to your teachings a few years ago but was so ingrained with the Christian concept of Jesus being the ultimate sin sacrifice, that I stopped listening to your teachings. But now I see the truth of what you are saying and how it all makes total sense! I just have a question about what do you think about Jesus‘s resurrection? Did he resurrect as the gospels say and is now in heaven next to the Father? And what was the reason for his resurrection? Thank you so much and God bless you.
Oh, my sweet Patty, thank you for giving me another chance, my dear one! And yes of course Jesus was indeed resurrected, precisely as it was described in the Biblical Gospels. What is more, He made sure that His shroud would be preserved for us as evidence of His resurrection, which is a flat-out miracle! There is no throne room since God is Spirit, just as Jesus told us God is, but Jesus remains on Level Three so He can greet newcomers to the afterlife,. And my guide, Thomas, took me to meet with Him there three years ago. Which was an extraordinary experience!
I agree with all you say but have a question. Why do you feel Jesus was resurrected? I absolutely agree that he was because the evidence on the shroud of Turin. But why?
My dear, Jesus came to us as our great spiritual Teacher. He wanted to teach us how to forgive and love in order to rapidly grow spiritually, and He wanted to teach us that our lives are eternal and we never will die. But no one would believe that we don’t die, because the custom then was to lay bodies out in caves to rot away, and then to gather their bones in boxes, called ossuaries, labeled with the person’s name. So nobody would believe Jesus when He taught that nobody dies. They needed a demonstration! So Jesus ordered His protective Archangels to stand down, and He chose to die a public death and then reanimated His dead body. “Ta-DA!” It was a demonstration. “See? I didn’t die! Nobody ever dies!”
back in the day I tried a few of those denominations. I pretty quickly began to understand that they’re all deadends. I have encountered many people who want to know if I’m a Christian. this is presumably so that either they can convert me or feel more comfortable in my presence. I think I’ll try “Gnostic Christian” and see how that works.
Ah yes, my dear Lorie. They are dead ends because they are based in fear and not love, and they don’t teach the Gospel teachings of Jesus as He taught them.
Dearest Roberta,
I do feel that our Wayshower Jesus did give us His teachings to take us upward from fear to Love; from the lowest, icky vibration to the highest Divine expression.
I know in my bones, Jesus came to give us transformation of soul so we may become love, Spirit.
Jesus is love not fear. Jesus makes each of us one with God. He is not associated with guilt, damnation or separation from the Divine.
He who gave loaves and fishes to everyone around Him was ever so generous. Jesus is more than large-hearted. Would He then damn us to a miserable hell for simply being ‘messy’ human beings, stumbling through life? Jesus is far too magnanimous for that sort of thing.
Roberta, one thing that my often chaotic life has taught me is this: People just want to be accepted as they are, and they want and need to be loved. That is basically it. That’s why caring individuals meet people ‘where they are at.’ Hence, for truly giving souls there is no judgment and no belief in the need to judge anyone.
Authentically caring individuals simply need to help others out of a sense of abiding, accepting love. They sometimes say: If you need it you should have it!’ Then they help an individual with whatever they can supply.
We’ve all known such caring people and they touch our lives as no one else really seems to do. They may be a mother, a father, a pastoral worker, a teacher, a friend, a doctor or a stranger we meet on the street when we desperately need help. What seems to be common is they act from an internal, presence of love. This is the power of Jesus and He is deep within every act of love and selflessness.
My own life has become the richer for knowing this simple life truth. I’ve learned never to keep accounts, or accounts of wrongs done. I’ve learned never to believe in a hierarchy of value concerning people whether they are rich or poor, refined or rough, family/friend or stranger …
So how can I accept religious conditioning or stricture that makes followers feel guilty, unworthy; that teaches people that God keeps grudges and may damn someone to hell?
I just can’t accept a drastic, punitive God. Also, a person can’t be really open-hearted and feel free and worthy of love if they believe they probably won’t be accepted by the Divine. Ultimately we have to feel worthy of love ourselves, in order to raise our vibrations towards perfect Love.
If we believe God loves us and will ‘save’ us after death, then we can grow happily because we just want to rise higher to be with He-Who-Loves for eternity. 🌅
Oh my dear, so very precious Efrem, this is all so beautifully said! My goodness, one of the greatest joys of my life has been watching all of you in those two classes that we did last year so steadily grow and grow ever upward. All of you, my very greatly beloveds, you do astonish me!
Why in the world would anyone need or want a “sin sacrifice?” None of that makes any sense. I can’t imagine how that ridiculous idea started, nor why it lasted so long. So God supposedly threw Jesus under the bus to die for our sins at the hands of a bunch of drunken sadistic Roman soldiers, and all is okay–how can anyone seriously believe that?
Oh my sweet Lola, the term, and the perceived need, comes from a long previous Hebrew history. They had been sacrificing perfect lambs and calves for their sins in the Temple for a thousand years! And then Jesus chose to demonstrate the fact that we never die by letting Himself be crucified and then rising from the dead, and afterward Paul or someone used all that long Hebrew history to twist Jesus’s death into the ultimate sin-sacrifice. And Constantine later seized on that one strain of thought in very early Christian history, added a fiery hell, and made a guilt- and fear-based religion that he could use to keep his people in line. But Jesus tells us right in the Gospels that God never judges us, so Constantine’s train was off the tracks before it left the station.
I read you regularly and find that I usually agree with you. Can you tell me what other prophets from other parts of the world, spread the true message of God to other cultures.