Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 30, 2023 • 39 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
When Mary birthed Jesus, ‘twas in a cow’s stall
with wise men and farmers and shepherd and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
and the promise of ages it then did recall.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), from “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)
People have asked me why I so strongly denounce the story that lies at the heart of traditional Christianity. And of course, you and I know that story so well! It is the whole idea that Jesus was born to die for our sins, so if we don’t claim Him as our personal Savior, then tough luck for us because after we die, we are going to burn in hell forevermore. The milder, more moderate versions of Christianity have largely done away with the burn-in-hell part, but they keep the idea that Jesus did indeed “come for to die.” And why should you and I not believe that? It even says it in the Bible! Doesn’t it? “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (JN 3:16). And wow, that is some kind of wonderful love! Don’t you think? Why shouldn’t you and I believe that Jesus came to die for our sins? What harm does it do? Omigod, what harm does it do? Oh, where do we even begin? First of all, let’s just clear this whole mess up right now.
JESUS DID NOT COME TO DIE FOR OUR SINS
It is long past time for us to say that so plainly. There is nothing in the Bible that says that the long-promised Messiah is going to come to die for our sins, and nor is there anything in the Bible that tells us that our cherished Elder Brother and Best Friend, Jesus, actually did die for our sins. Instead, Jesus came with a different and much more wonderful purpose in mind, but we will get to that shortly. And Jesus tells us right there in the Gospel of John, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). Case Closed! Because if God doesn’t judge us, then God doesn’t hold our sins against us, so God does not demand the blood-sacrifice of God’s Own Son. To whom, then, is the sacrifice of Jesus being made, if not to God? When I was a lot younger, I used to ask this question of people who should have been able to answer it easily. Not trying to be a jerk, but just assuming that much smarter people than I am must have spotted this big contradiction at the center of Christianity a long time before I did. And I really wanting to know! However, all the various priests, Biblical scholars, and others of whom I ever asked my core question refused to even take it seriously. When to me, it is one of the most serious questions in all of human history. Since the Bible itself tells us that God didn’t require the blood-sacrifice of Jesus, then to whom or to what was Jesus being sacrificed?
Finally, a theology student who had gone through the same thinking process that I had was able to give me what I think is the only possible answer. He told me that Jesus was indeed being sacrificed to God, Who did not need or demand the Lord’s sacrifice. But that student told me it was the rest of us who needed it. We feel so sinful and unworthy because of Adam’s sin and all the sins that we commit every day. But now that Jesus, who is Himself sinless and was conceived without sin, had sacrificed Himself to God and made us pure, we had been washed in the Blood of the Lamb of God, so now we could believe that we were made worthy of approaching God. And do you know, I was young enough at the time – I was not a whole lot older than he was – that his answer actually satisfied me?
Okay, great! So God, within Godself, had just put on a little play for our benefit. Jesus, as an aspect of God, had put Himself through that whole charade of suffering and being punished in our place so we would feel that sufficient atonement had been made for Adam’s sin, and for our own sins as well, and therefore we would feel washed clean, and able to approach God at the end of our lives. All better! It was not until I was maybe fifty years old that the sheer, complete nonsense of this whole line of thinking landed one day like a rock on my head. Okay, so let me get this straight. We come into this world as infants, pure as the snow, but just in being born as human beings we acquire Adam’s sin. And just in being alive we commit other sins along the way. God see us feeling guiltier and guiltier. So instead of just saying, “I forgive you everything, my beloved child!” and giving us a big hug and a great big kiss and ice cream, which is what any loving human Father would do, God sends us Jesus to die on a cross for our sins? And all of that is supposed to make us feel better? But wouldn’t it instead make us feel even much guiltier, since now we feel guilty about Jesus’s otherwise unnecessary suffering and death as well? So the gruesome death under torture of a perfectly sinless aspect of the living God was made necessary from God’s point of view because you and I are such hopelessly sinful pieces of crap?
We are supposed to take everything about our religions by faith. But faith cannot triumph over common sense. When Thomas took me to meet Jesus in the Astral plane in April of 2022, Jesus told me that He had indeed come to us two thousand years ago as the Savior of the World. And Jesus said that what He had come to save the world from two thousand years ago was ignorance! And especially all this terrible religious ignorance. Jesus insisted that He had come to us as our Teacher. And what He came to teach us was how to do what He Himself had so easily done when, in His final lifetime as a normal human being in the Neolithic period, He was able to rapidly raise His consciousness vibration and become an Ascended Being. His teachings are now preserved in the Gospels, and when properly applied, they work amazingly well! But the teachings of Jesus have never been much noticed, because to us they sound like just nicey-nice aspirational platitudes. Love. Forgive. Be kind. So what? And His teachings seldom have been tried in the past seventeen hundred years because they are trapped inside a Christian religion that has remained obsessed with the nonsense belief that Jesus was born just to die for our sins.
When you hear the Truth spoken by the Man Himself, you slap your forehead. Of course! If the religion were right about Jesus’s reason for being born, then He would have actually told people that! “Watch Me, folks! I am about to make everything all better between you and God!” He never would have wasted one single breath on talking about all that loving and forgiving stuff for three and a half years. And that sentence on which those who are sure that Jesus died for our sins pin a lot of their hopes is really just a translation mistake. Remove the word “in,” and it reads: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes __ Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (JN 3:16). So then that sentence would be only about our need to listen to and believe the words of Jesus. Which is, of course, the purest truth. (Well, the word “perish” there is still too strong.) But if you closely follow the teachings of Jesus, then instead of continuing to flounder through repeated lifetimes, when you return to the afterlife this time around, you will have made so much spiritual progress that you will advance directly to the fifth level of the afterlife, and you will be forever at home and at peace.
And it is in those two-thousand-year-old teachings of Jesus that the world is going to find its best, and perhaps its only hope. That is true, even buried as those teachings are now in a lot of old Bibles tucked away on bookshelves and never much opened anymore. If you doubt the need for us to open those old Bibles, just look at the world as it is today! It is a sewer of petty hatreds kept seething as just our normal way of life. In North America, college kids march and shout over ancient bitternesses that they cannot begin to understand. While the United States government is inexplicably unwilling to allow this nation to get past stupid racism, even a century and a half after the Civil War. We cannot allow big wars to even get started anymore for fear of a nuclear conflagration, so now the Middle East and also separately Asia, Africa, and even South America are now individual busy factories of little wars and disagreements which cause regular people just trying to live their lives almost constant disruptions and distracting pain. Imagine how things might change if even ten percent of the people in the world were living the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Or what if it were twenty percent? Or even, Omigod, on one bright future day as many as fifty percent?
But for the teachings of Jesus to transform the world, we first will have to do away with seventeen hundred years of Christian religious history. The religion of Christianity, as it now stands, is close to useless to us as a method for healing the world because it is fear-based and not love-based. It teaches its adherents to fear God, and to be needlessly suspicious of and widely separated from one another. The poisonous world that we are living in now is one that Christianity played a very prominent role in creating. But the persona and teachings of Jesus the Man are enormously appealing, as He proved to us during the first three hundred years after His Resurrection! And once we have re-started His original Way, it can be abundantly fruitful once again.
Then how did we end up so badly off-track, when the true Way of Jesus made such a great start? Jesus’s disciples, and those who had known His disciples and those that they had taught spread His teachings very rapidly all around the Mediterranean Sea. Most of Jesus’s earliest followers died martyrs’ deaths in the course of spreading His teachings. Our amusing friend Doubting Thomas seems to have made it the farthest away of all of Jesus’s original twelve, because when he finally did get it, he really got it! We are told that Jesus’s disciple Thomas was martyred by a spear in 53 CE in Madras, India. Jesus’s senior disciple, Peter, was executed by the Roman Emperor Nero in the mass executions that followed a big fire in Rome in the year 64 CE that Nero blamed on the city’s burgeoning Christian population. Peter requested that he be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy of dying in the same manner as Jesus had died. And when Nero tried to grant the old man a reprieve and have him taken off his upside-down cross, Peter insisted on going through with his martyrdom. It is believed that Saint Paul, too, was martyred in 64 CE in Rome because of that fire, his death being by decapitation.
The flame of Jesus’s genuine teachings that He ignited in His disciples continued to burn in all the people they touched, and then in those that Jesus’s second generation of followers touched in their turn. History records that during the first two hundred years after Jesus’s Ascension, as His Way rapidly spread, so also did all those martyrdoms. For example, Clement had been taught by Jesus’s disciples Peter and John, and he worked with Paul and is mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The Romans martyred Clement in 99 CE by throwing him into the ocean tied to a boat-anchor. Another of John’s students was Ignatius, and Peter made Ignatius the Bishop of Antioch. Then on July 6, 108 CE, Ignatius was martyred by being fed to wild beasts in the Circus Maximus in Rome for refusing to renounce his loyalty to Christ. Perhaps the best-remembered of these later-generation martyrdoms was Polycarp’s. In 156 CE, the much-loved Bishop of Smyrna first fed a feast to those who were about to burn him to death. Then, as they pleaded with that dear old man to renounce Christ, Polycarp instead climbed onto his funeral pyre. No need even to tie him to a post. He said calmly, “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong.” Such was the love and loyalty of those who followed the Way of Jesus.
Until the Romans took it over, the Way of Jesus was for the most part a persecuted underground movement; but nevertheless, it still grew rapidly. it is estimated that in the year 150 CE, there were between thirty thousand and forty thousand followers of Jesus in Rome. In 200 CE, that number was between a hundred and forty thousand and a hundred and seventy thousand followers. And in 300 CE, just before the Romans seized the Jesus movement and made it into the Roman state religion of Christianity that we know today, there were an incredible three million followers of the Way of Jesus in Rome! Many of them lived near the Christian Catacombs which were just outside the city, where there were more than six million burials interred from the third to the seventh centuries. And those Catacomb burials that date to the period of Roman persecution, before 312 CE, show no depictions of crosses at all, which suggests that the followers of the Way never believed that Jesus’s mode of death mattered.
The Catacomb depictions of Jesus from those early years show Him as He shows Himself to His astral plane visitors today, with brown eyes, olive skin, and short, curly hair. And He is often shown as the good shepherd who carries not a lamb, but instead a baby goat about His shoulders. Later Christian theology has Jesus separating the sheep from the goats and throwing the goats into an imagined hell (see e.g. MT 25:31-46, which passage was likely added to the Gospel by First Nicaea in 325 CE). But the deeply loving Jesus of universal kindness and salvation of all the goats as well as the sheep that was taught by the followers of Jesus’s Way is entirely consistent with Jesus’s own Gospel teachings. And it indicates that this is the version of Jesus Who was being ardently followed right through the end of the Third Century CE.
Of course, as the Way of Jesus grew and spread over thousands of miles and through three generations, slightly different ideas were bound to arise. One such different view, and a minority one, came from the ancient Jewish belief in the blood-sacrifice of animals for the forgiveness of sins. This notion as it was applied to Jesus may first have come from Paul, who was a bit of a fussy guy anyway. And it did make sense at the time to early followers of Jesus who had a Jewish background. Given that Jews had long believed that everyone was stained with Adam’s sin, didn’t it simply make sense that God might have sent His only Son as an unblemished sacrifice to wash away the stain of humankind’s original sin?
And that sort of fear-based, guilt-drenched explanation for the crucifixion of Jesus was one that the Roman Emperor Constantine really could use! As is true of all state religions, the Christianity that the Romans designed early in the Fourth Century CE was created as a handy means of fear-based mass control. There is only so much fear that armies can instill, since after a certain point, the people will find ways to tune it out. But owning the religion, too, lets those in power own both here and hereafter. And if, every Sunday, people hear in their churches that they are so sinful that God had to come down and die for them, and if they then hear that they must tithe heavily and give their second son to the priesthood and their oldest daughter to a nunnery and leave a lot of money to the church or else hell awaits them, well, then you, as the Emperor’s sidekick Pope, can really call the shots! 
The seven first-millennium Ecumenical Councils, beginning with First Nicaea in 325 CE, created a Christian church which was robust and immensely useful to the powerful, even if its core teaching about Jesus dying for our sins had nothing to do with the genuine Jesus.
So now, as Constantine’s Christianity fades, we who love the Lord can return at last to learning and teaching and living the true Way of Jesus that came before it. And I am delighted to tell you that just a couple of mentions in blog posts have gathered such a lovely group of people who are eager to work through establishing this three-month course that can effect their individual transformations under the guidance of our living Lord, and can help to begin the transformation of the world. If you would like to join us, please let me know, because registrations are soon to close. And we are eager to begin!
If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
a star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
or all of God’s angels in heaven for to sing,
he surely could have it, ‘cause he was the King.
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), from “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)
Am very much interestedaken time to read and understand the above. Thank you very much.continue praying for me God to open my ways to enable me over come challenges so that I freely work for God Jesus Christ
Oh my dear, I believe that all of us here hold one another in our hearts. This is not an easy path to be taking, and not an easy place to be! But we are in this together, my dear one.
Dear Roberta,
Your analysis presents such clear, common sense reasoning, it would be impossible for a rational mind to believe the nonsense about a vengeful God who sent his Son to suffer as a means for expunging sins that none of us ever owned upon our innocent mortal birth.
I credit proselytizing traditional Christians with good will for trying to save others from eternal Hell by pusing them into professing belief that Jesus was crucified to spare us of the sin of being born as Human from the line of Abraham– but have wondered at their belief that almighty God would own such a petty, vindictive, mean spirited personality that faults the newborn with an ancestor’s sin, and would punish His Son to set us free from a sin we never committed. Unfortunately, Muhammad adopted this version of a mean spirited vindictive God when defining Islam, so we have two major religions painting God as vengeful, when the real God created the Heaven as an act of love and populated it with spirits who could apply their free will to enjoy His company and Creation.
If only everyone could understand that the true God is motivated by love, not any sinister hatreds, and that our mortal lives are His means for providing us with a necessary education about the nature of love and its opposite in selfishness and hate.
Wishing for you and everyone that the new year will shift away from increasing world strife and civil turmoil. At least we may be assured that we will return to Heaven when life is over for us–and may hopefully have graduated to a higher level of spirituality.
Dear Jack, you have said it even better than I could! Yes indeed, Perhaps in 325 CE the ancient Romans didn’t know any better than to use their false vision of a fake, angry God to beat people over the head, but so many opportunities were missed in Christianity over more recent centuries to recast those first dreadful lies About a God that is nothing but infinite love. Instead – as you say – Christianity set the worst possible example for the younger Abrahamic religion of Islam. Horrible.
Dear Roberta. My ears ( I’m reading. Should it be my eyes ?) certainly pricked when I read the part of the frame verse “come for to die “. What a relief when you went on to reveal this teaching as more man made guilt tripping. Hearing how the early martyrs were just not going to assist in stopping the true teachings was inspiring.
Your eyes pricked? How sweet you are, my delightful Ray! And yes, my dear one, I recall reading about those first three hundred years after the Lord’s crucifixion, and all those cheerful martyrdoms was an inspiration to me when I was in college. How they all loved Jesus, and especially the ones that never even had met Him personally!
Good morning, Roberta!
The line that really encapsulated the huge lie of Jesus’s death for our sins was that we were “such hopelessly sinful pieces of crap”.
Carrying that load of guilt can really mess with your mind!
If you cling to the lie, His death was a failure: we
are sinning all over the place!
I bought The Fun of Dying because my initial
reaction was- yeah right. But now I know it brought me to you.
Little did I think a course would be offered by
Jesus Himself— for me!
Thank you, Roberta, so much!
My dear beloved Erica, thank you for remembering, and for reminding everyone here that this is all Jesus’s work. And Jesus’s course. Everything that any of us does is His work, and we do none of this on our own. He has decided, and has let me know that He would prefer to be referred to now not as the Christ, not as a big shot, but rather just as our Elder Brother and Best Friend. I think that He even would prefer that we not capitalize those terms, but He is giving me a break and letting me take this one step at a time….
Glad I didn’t get that “Christ The Big Shot” tattoo. That would have been embarrassing.
Seafr Roberta,
Thank you for the very clear explanation that you have given us. It makes sense to me. I was Roman Catholic for many years and the guilt instilled into us was certainly based on false doctrine. I have come to see this since finding you online. Many protestant Churches also espouse much of what you have said above. I am so glad to be relieved of the burdens I have carried in my mind of never measuring up to what God expects of me no matter how hard I try. God Bless you in the New Year-and all the amazing revelations that are to come from your classes.
Oh my dear Jennifer, the guilt that the Roman-invented religion of Christianity instills in people even to this day is overwhelming! You can see it in Catholics, especially, the way they feel that they have to go to Mass at least at Christmas and Easter. I felt it, too, once upon a time. And since guilt is such a low-vibration emotion, practicing most religions – and especially practicing Christianity! makes growing spiritually very much, or even at all, almost impossible.
Dear Roberta,
I recently asked this question in other blogs and still wonder how your readers might respond. How does Christianity explain to other religions of the world that the Bible insists “No one comes to the Father except through Me”? If Jesus is the only way, that would leave millions and also generations of lost souls who cannot enter Heaven. It sadly makes no sense.
Welcome, dear Nise! On my dear one, but to the Romans who invented Christianity, there was no need to explain what they saw as not a bug at all, but a feature of Christianity! Their religion had something that no other religion had: they had the keys to eternal life, and they used that fact routinely as they explored and conquered the world. They would routinely burn pagans at the stake, with the promise that if their victims would accept Jesus as Savior, they would be mercifully killed right away and spared the pain of burning all the way to death. And this made Biblical sense to the Romans and to later Christian conquerors, since they were converting those being tortured and murdered and getting them into heaven as they died! Christopher Columbus reportedly burned a hundred Native American chieftains at the stake at once for precisely this reason. Good grief.
Dear Nise.
I puzzled over the need to go through Jesus….. or else for a long time. I believe He said He was “the way, the truth and the life.” So much of what Jesus said is not based on the physical but spiritual and this is another example. Accepting Him means you follow “the way”. I believe his early followers identified as those who followed ” the way”. I don’t believe the early followers called themselves Christians.
My dear Joan, What Jesus really said was, “My teachings are the way, and the truth, and the life.” Because, as you so wisely say, so much of what Jesus said was based not on the physical but on the spiritual aspects of our lives. And no, Jesus’s earliest followers considered themselves not to be Christians – a term which would have made no sense to them – but simply to be His followers, and they lived by His teachings… as all of us are about to do once again.
Happy New Year to all!
Seems like this obsession with sin goes back to Adam and Eve. Is it reasonable to assume that story is nothing more than an allegory designed to make a point?
My dear Thomas, the Adam and Eve story is a religious story, so of course – as you say – an allegory is precisely what it is.
Happy New Year to All!.Can we.still make spritual growth if we mite not be able to participate in the course? I pray and meditate and have removed.not watching the.news amongst many other things.
I think the question I have is if everyone graduated to 5th level by making spritual growth by Jesus’s teachings, then who would be ledt on this earth to learn and experience life?
This is just a thought!
Oh my sweet Litsa, there are so many ways to grow spiritually! Jesus’s teachings are just one of the easiest ways. And if everyone magically were there now, my dear one, OMG that would be so wonderful! No more wars and everyone helping and loving one another? That would be a literal heaven on earth!
Thank you, thank you, Roberta, for boldly bringing the facts of Jesus’s life and teachings to the public. I’ve been aware that the bible and religions were man-made manipulations since I was 42 years old. I Am 86 years old now.
Oh my dear Nora! You were there well ahead of me!! And yes indeed, my dear, it is quite time now for all of us to be sharing these truths with one another!
Hello Roberta,
I can understand why Jesus does not want too much attention.
This is the moment.
I have been very careful not to speak about Him
to the cynical,’intellectual “ones.
Also the church crowd.(I became a Lutheran just in case baptism was a vaccine I needed! I love my girls there, but I don’t go now. Actually , I bet I ‘ll go back
for the hymns and quieting atmosphere after the course.
My past is a duffle bag, but I want to drop it and not look back in remorse. Remember the good stuff.
And figure out how to get Zoom on my tablet!
Oh my dear lovely Erica, I don’t think that it is so much that Jesus doesn’t want attention, but He doesn’t want the wrong kind of attention anymore. He emphatically does not want to be worshiped! Looking back, I can see that this has been a very careful and extremely long process for Him, this separating Himself from Christianity. I’ll talk about it when we meet next week. He first withdrew altogether, and He did a lot of working with my Thomas to build up and make more robust the human aspect of Himself. He is, I am sure, the only Being in existence vibrating anywhere near His level who even HAS a human aspect! And now He is doing things like wanting to experiment with teaching this course – and yes, I don’t kid myself about Who the actual Teacher is – to get back into His teaching mode. He suddenly tells me that He doesn’t want to be called “the Christ” or “the Lord” anymore, please. “Ask people to call Me Elder Brother. Or if they are willing, ask them to call Me their Best Friend.” In this new, different mode of relating, He is eager to receive a lot of attention!
I personally try to follow the Teachings of Jesus in the Gospel because they are so straightforward and not clouded with dogma. My prayer is that all nations will learn to love and forgive, no separation by thinking their religion is right. There should be no need to make us feel fearful or filled with sin. A “church” of acceptance and love.
Oh my sweet Nise, you have said it precisely! That is our universal prayer, and it pains me terribly to say that the Christian church that I loved for most of my life has been the source of all that fear and negativity. The Christian church has even damaged and obscured the teachings of Jesus as we find them in the Biblical Gospels, but fortunately we know enough now to be able to set them right.
I am a philosophy professor and came across your teachings. There are many other “Atonement” theories than the protestant “penal substitution” theory, e.g. the earliest Christians believed that Christ by dying conquered death, ergo he rose again. Christ dies to destroy the “punishment/penalty” of sin, namely death. Death now cannot hold us.
Christ himself did see himself as a “ransom for many” or his life being given for the sheep (“I lay down my life for the sheep”). He also says “this is the cup of my blood, poured out for you and for many so that sins may be forgiven.”
I agree with you that God the Abba does not need blood, of course. The majority of Christians (e.g. Catholics and Orthodox Christians) do not believe this. However, we do believe that he understood his death as a sacrifice, as a victory over sin and death, and as, somehow, setting us right with God.
I love that you are promoting love, who is God. God bless you. Perhaps you are saying the same thing as I am.
My dear Dr. Armitage, you honor us with your presence here in our merry band of commenters! And yes, Jesus did make an almost last-minute choice to die publicly instead of being subsumed back into the astral at the end of His earthly life so He could re-animate His dead body and rise from the dead – Ta-da! – in order to prove to His followers that death is an illusion. His problem was that the custom of the day was to lay corpses out in caves to rot away to bones, which were then collected and stored in ossuaries that carried the names of the decedents. So everybody knew that of course the dead stayed dead! They loved Jesus, but He could not convince them otherwise. His little (well, not little) rising-from-the-dead trick did convince them. And, as you know, scientists who have studied the Shroud of Turin tell us that even today, they could not by any means known to man generate sufficient energy to duplicate the scorch that Jesus produced on His Shroud! (I just love that detail. 🙂 )
I would love to see Biblical citations for the three quotations that you give in your second paragraph, if you have them? I’m sure they are there, but they seem atypical for Jesus.
But I guess that the only place where you and I really would differ is in whether or not either God or Jesus has ever seen the Lord’s death as at all necessary to set us right with God. Oh my dear one, that is just ancient Hebrew fear-based nonsense, carried over into Constantine’s fear-based Christianity. There has never been any tiniest moment when God has ever less than purely loved God’s precious creation! Since God never judges us (JN 5:22), why would such a sacrifice of Jesus be needed? And you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. Jesus clearly never saw His death as a sacrifice, and nor does He see it as a sacrifice to this day – He saw it and still sees it as a demonstration that He was glad to make to prove to all of us that our lives truly are eternal, since we are all Doubting Thomases. We would not otherwise believe His teachings about eternal life.
Sir, it really is lovely to meet you!
Ronerta: You are exposing the fact that the human condition is in fact an experience of limited imperfection. Jesus did come and gave us the gift of new life that is in the very nature of God’s love. But imperfect humans, responsible for governing by controling people, turned it into a utilitarian tool, using human tendency to fear, and changed the message, and the people of the Way .eventually bought it. A few years ago an author by the name of Gustov Aulein declared that human beings are incapable of producing a just and ethical society because of humanities imperfection, like greed, anger and fear. The basis of that limitation is fear, which is the antithesis of God’s love, as revealed in Jesus’ teachings. So how do we handle our imperfection? With fear? How do we handle fear? Not by anger, condemnation, or selfindulgence, but with God’ love.
Oh my sweet Larry, “the people of the Way” – I love the way you put that – never bought the way of fear, but rather they were beaten down and suppressed and destroyed by the Romans. The “human imperfections” that this author you cite says would make a just and ethical society impossible are easily conquered by Jesus’s teachings acting on the human heart!
Hi Roberta,
I think we talked about this before and ever since I have been thinking and referring to Jesus as our brother.
I understand that many want to show him respect which is why they refer to him as “Christ” or “Lord”. I have to be honest, I still like “The Big Shot”. haha
For me, there is a great connection I feel when groups of family/friends hang out, joke and tease each other. It just lifts all of our spirits. I hope more people think of Jesus like that. Someone to hang out and joke around with. Someone who will always have your back no matter what happens.
Personally, I think the best way we can show Jesus respect is by helping each other.
Happy New Year Everyone and Much Love!
My dear Thomas, I am trying to think where Jesus fits on that friend- spectrum, now that you have laid it out that way so nicely. He has clearly had it with being called “Lord” or “Christ.” The very last thing that He ever wants again is worship! He finds it cold and distancing, when there He is, so full of love for each individual person. But I don’t know that anyone has ever tried to tease Him, or joke around with Him, or if He would understand it. He has been so long away from the earth! I guess that Thomas does it, though. They play-fight to maintain Jesus’s humanity. The way I have seen Him interact with people is just very sweetly, mildly, gently. He is wonderful, though, now that I think about it, with the teenage boys in the aborted-children’s villages, and he does joke with them, maybe throw a ball. I think he learns pretty quickly what people need to have him do. I think that maybe He is just now trying out this post-Christianity, post-Christ persona for the earth. And He will soon become very good at it!
That makes a lot of sense Roberta.
I am still looking at this from a human perspective. Personally, I find the joking and teasing leads to some of the best experiences of being human. I was hoping we would experience the same when returning home. I wouldn’t want Jesus to behave anything other than what he already is. It was more about making him feel loved.
Oh yes, my dear. But remember that for those who are there with Jesus in the astral, and able to feel His truly incredible personal energy, even just being around Him is a distracting shock. I would not be able to joke around with God, which is how it feels to be in Jesus’s actual presence!
Reference to the comments of Dr. Armitage:
Is it not fair to say Jesus did lay down his “life for the sheep” given that some of his followers may well have suffered the same fate had their leader not been eliminated? Seems like Jesus did not change anything concerning life after death except to illustrate its existence. We who judge ourselves in the final analysis are the ones who ultimately forgive sins be they our own or those of others. Could the reference to blood being poured out for the forgiveness of sins refer to the example of Jesus forgiving his captors with the expectation that his followers would do likewise?
My dear Thomas, Jesus has told me – and you can see it in the Gospel accounts, if you look closely – that His crucifixion was just a last-minute demonstration that He decided upon because there was no other way to convince such primitive people that they were in fact eternal beings. It was emphatically NOT to set anything right between us and God! In fact, He told me that doing it meant breaking His deal with God because He had promised not to allow Himself to be harmed by people, and I am still not really clear on whether He got divine permission first to make this change. What He told me was that He saw it as necessary, so He was going to do it, regardless. Because Jesus was in fact the Son of God, He was protected throughout His life on earth by Archangels, and He had to order them to stand down in order to even let Himself be arrested, and never mind let Himself be murdered! You can see all of this in the Gospel accounts.
But, please let us all be clear on this, once and for all. There never has been one scintilla of an instant of non-time in all of human history when humankind has not been perfectly right with our infinitely loving God!
Thanks, Roberta, I have no disagreement with what you are saying and was just trying to make sense out of some biblical statements pointed out by another reader. When refuting erroneous ideas, I often find it beneficial to trace the logic or lack thereof from which they derived.
You make an excellent point, my dear Thomas, and it is related to one that I will make in my blog post this coming Sunday. If we hope to understand what Jesus is saying AT ALL, then we must go back before the very first translations of Jesus’s words ever were attempted. I have begun to hear from a number of good-hearted and well-intentioned Christian ministers who say that they mostly agree with me, but there is always a little “but…” in their statement somewhere, and it is almost invariably related to what I think is their own faulty understanding of Jesus’s true teachings.
Dear Roberta. The biblical translations that don’t use begotten Son (JN 3:16) are leaving out Adam. It’s there in the “begats”, LK 3:38 “…, the son of Adam, the son of God”. Of course this really doesn’t change anything. It’s just my attempt at some trivia/humor.
Heh – my dear Ray, I think it’s funny, too, that they trace Jesus back through Joseph on the male side. It can be hard sometimes to keep all our mythology straight….