Riffin' On Jesus' Teachings

“If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9

“Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Acts 2:38

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:23

Well, let’s keep this as lean as possible…it’s the Christmas season! Lol

Why would it be that both “declaring” that Jesus is “Lord” and believing fully (and effectively; belief takes wisdom before it ceases to be faith; faith isn’t a sufficient way to live your life other than in the sense that God will always have aspects to Him that are beyond our comprehension…the world/God expects informed belief from us…accumulated wisdom) that God raised him from the dead would therefore mean that you are “saved”?

Because, it means that everybody is meaningfully God. That they are meaningfully one with God at all moments.

“Jesus is Lord” means that Jesus is the Father in some sense, while not being the entire Father…while always being subject/in service to the Father in some sense of it, and this is how the equivalency is manifested/achieved (because it turns out that God’s state of Being is to be entirely in devotional service to his Creation)…and that Jesus was special because as a child he seemed to have already been there, and he didn’t have to walk much of a path to manifest/achieve this equivalency with God, nor the foundational wisdom that makes it emerge as a possibility.

Jesus’ gift to the world was to communicate that foundational wisdom to us with His entire Being. It wasn’t just the sermons He gave…it was His Life, a Life (not in the sense of once dying at the hands of persecution but in the sense of everything He ever experienced) that unfolded spontaneously in response to decisions other people in the world surrounding Jesus made of their own free will.

(This is lazy writing) Read John 14. The entire chapter. Romans 10:9 essentially is saying “If you act Christ-like, if you look into the world from the perspective Christ did, you are saved. Instantly. Immediately. Every single time, always, for everyone who does it throughout the entire history of existence, including those that existed before Christ was born.”

In regards to Theological notions…Christ’s style of spirituality is Transcendentalism. Which is synonymous with Mysticism. Christ was a mystic, and his prescription for the masses was…mysticism. In his conceptions, the Church is there to help you connect to God the Father…you should be able to clearly reach him at all moments via your own style is what Christ would say. The church is not his emissary, entirely. He would direct people to God the Father before he would direct people to anything human or man-made or…smaller than the Ruler of the Universe.

In John 14 Jesus loudly extends an offer to his followers- spiritual equivalency with Him. It’s probably sacreligious to say, but you can’t read John 14 without realizing that Jesus is trying to give a pep talk to people he truly feels are every bit as capable as him to do what he does, his disciples. If you declare that “Jesus is Lord” and believed that this brought the cessation of his suffering (in the sense that “death” forces the spiritual epiphany…our mortality rides us in horrible ways until we transcend its unbearable implications, and the only way to do as much is to learn about God…who He really is, and why He made you) in the sense that He had done the Singular duty God expects people to do should they want to experience a living state called “salvation”…

Then, my friend, you too are already Saved. Because, according to Jesus in John 14, you are capable of every single act Jesus has ever performed…because he is God made man, and so are you.

The “wage of sin is death” in the sense that what ignorance pays you is nothing at all. It’s complicated. Ignorant acts cause suffering to arise….suffering is in service to wisdom…it intends to enlighten. So at some level, the wage of sin is the eventual cessation of the sinful patterns of behavior…which are mostly ignorances as opposed to wrongdoings. Thinking you are capable of anything other than eternal life, it turns out, is a sin. It causes you to suffer because it insults the perfect Universe God created, and the loving plans He has concocted for His Creation. This is why I keep telling the Church to shut up about hell and the devil…their religion wasn’t framed for that to be anything but a childish notion that is gutted by keen wisdom.

How many of us know somebody who has died from addiction? The wage of sin is death. Sometimes the wage of sin is death, and you die before you enlighten…but even then you don’t die other than mortally, and you enlighten immediately either as that’s happening, or “after” *which is weird because we kinda assume you leave temporality*.

The “gift of God” is “eternal life” and it happens by making that man who claimed we were His equal in John 14, Jesus, “our Lord”. My friends, that isn’t a monarchy…that’s a lot closer to Democracy.

In more secular terminology… the “gift of God” manifests when Individuals take accountability for the entirety of Creation…as if they themselves were the God who made it and was tasked with keeping it running well…as if they were Jesus, himself, capable of anything in the name of Love!

The gift of God is “eternal life” and we have collapsed into thinking this means the afterlife in this day and age. No, the gift of God is the presence of “eternity” or the “eternal” or the “eternal principle” in human society…a well ran community/collective. The “gift of God” is his undeniable dominion and presence, and how we get to that without dying is by living Christ-like and transforming our social structures to behave Christ-like.

The bullet time of this one…you are the only intended conduit for God’s presence in the world…the subjective experience is where God enters our world…whatever that means lol.

Be the change you wish to see in the world…as a motto is centered around this realization.

‘Ok smart guy, if life is the vehicle for God’s ultimate plans moreso than religion, why do any of the religious stuff at all?!’

I mean, ideally you do it because there is a single formula for transforming the foundation of your very life from survival to bliss, and religions are supposed to masterfully be able to teach you this formula in an effective format.

In every religion I’ve looked at, there is a clear way it’s supposed to be interpreted, and that way is utterly perfect, and will lead to God intervening in this world in a positive (and bombastic; devotional and wise behavior is particularly rewarded) way as people engage the material.

In every religion I’ve looked at, there are authority figures making bonehead moves (although, and this is an anomaly…doesn’t hardly happen too much in Buddhism and I don’t understand how that can be given how loosey goosey Buddhism really is in most parts of the world) in regards to interpreting the materials.

Still there are trends. I’d be a bad man if I didn’t admit that this, as a period of time, the early 21st century, is a low point for the Church in the West from what I’ve seen. At the moment, there are Hindu and Buddhist teachers in the West who are unbelievably talented and the things they are doing consistently… the Universe itself seems to be really pushing them as far up the ranks of this tangled hierarchy that is existence as it can, and quickly.

Their services are available for free all over. All you would need is youtube and the internet to save your life, no matter what situation you were facing.

I have gone and tested waters. I’ve visited priests one on one… I would send an 18 yr old who recently was turned Batman…lost their entire family but are so rich now that they have nobody really telling them what the next smart move is… I’d send them to Youtube.

I feel bad saying it and hope no priests read this. But it need be said.

Anyways, “baptism” is not for the soul…it’s for the psyche. I wish they waited until children were older…perhaps even adults, before they baptized them. Because, and I believe this is John 14 too ((I’m getting hella lazy now but have written on this in the past)) the Holy Spirit is sometimes interpreted as “the spirit of truth”. Every young adult must face the undeniable fact as they mature that they have to actively seek truth in the world that surrounds them. Nobody is just going to show up and change their lives/save them like Jesus did with the Apostles, and if people started doing stuff like that in 2022, they’d be called cult leaders, etc.

You need to seek truth in the world that surrounds you…and ultimately God is truth. Transcendentalism means transcending the appearances of the world around you to get to the “truth” of it…the “God” that is substantiating it in live time.

I used to think it was preposterous to look out at the world which surrounds you in an attempt to perhaps spot God somewhere out in it…maybe a flash of an angel or the light body of Jesus himself…you always want to do it, but you also feel preposterous doing it.

Now it’s preposterous to me to look at anything ever and have that not simply be an image of God that communicates love thoroughly. Every square inch…of everything… why were we even given the gift of sight at all, but to see as much?!

Being baptized in the name of Jesus for the “forgiveness of sins” means that you are actively calling out to Christ to help…enlighten you. Babies are baptized…other than original sin what have they done wrong?! Well, it was intended kinda like the Egyptian myth of Osiris who gave immortality to a young mortal she was tending to by burning away the elements of his mortality with “magic”…that’s an Egyptian myth about mysticism. You use magic, information about the gods or God, to transform the state of a mortal creation from normal to divine.

You “burn” away (or wash away, with Baptism) your inclination towards sin by aligning your identity with that of the ideal…which is both Jesus and God in this instance. You must consider yourself divine, you must consider yourself a Son of God, you must consider that it’s a rule that no life-form other than God can ever be regarded as superior to the rest of creation without us getting launched back into ignorance and “death”. Baptism is about washing away improper conceptions of Creation…getting to the foundation of all living things…which is the Source of life incarnate, and this Source is “all-loving”.

If you do as much, you will “receive the Holy Spirit”…kind of an anticlimactic ending, amirite? It keeps happening where we start out thinking there’ll be some huge pay day on some event horizon, and somehow it keeps happening that the gift is about the journey, not the destination. Well, not exactly. The spirit of truth, the holy spirit…it is something outside of you. Think of it like habit… or how some people think of Karma… it’s one of those things where it’ll bring “angels” into your life… it’ll have your back and serve you where you need as much.

That is partially why we practice devotionally. This is God’s kingdom, He does run the show here, and your life ultimately is about…joy. The only road there is Love, which really is just God in disguise.

Ultimately, to walk your own path to freedom, to seek truth or to seek God or even to begin by seeking happiness… is the very same as asking or begging God or Jesus or John the Baptist even to save you. That is salvation, and I don’t mean to paint too lean of a picture in which everyone has to be effective Alphas and never fall off of their horse (which I do tend to have a tendency to do)…being hopelessly lost is fine just fine in the lightest sense of it… it’s just that I am pretty sure there is only one path out of that.

"Ma'm we'd certainly love to fill you up!"