I’ve been struggling to write this for days. I sit down to write, and I stare at the blank page just as blank myself. Something subconscious within me has been actively avoiding it, and immediately trying to find other things to do. I even changed the operating system on my laptop just to buy myself more time instead of sitting down and working this out.
What is it that I’ve been actively avoiding? Recently, I attempted to explain where my hypothesis on Hamartia as neurological in nature came from, and how it evolded, but that is not the end of the story. I didn’t feel like I could just leave it at our common human problem. I wanted to do the same thing for the solution to the problem. How did I arrive at the conclusions I did, and why? This isn’t a light subject to take on, and my conclusions about the solution, like my conclusions about the problem, tend to stand outside of the theological structures in which I grew up and in which I was at least initially trained.
The way I was initially raised and trained could best be explained by a short Gospel presentation meant for quick or cold-contact evangelism called the “Three Crucial Issues.” It’s been years, but if I remember right, these issues were 1) All are guilty of sin and deserve God’s judgment, 2) Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins, and 3) All one must do is believe that Jesus paid for their sins and they would be saved, that is, forgiven of all their sins and wrongdoing and granted entry into heaven when they died. The way I was taught, once a person did actually believe this, then nothing they did from then on could take this free forgiveness and entry into heaven away from them. It was also taught that the only people who would be forgiven and granted entry into heaven were those who believed this. All others, whether they had access to this knowledge would suffer God’s condemnation and be thrown into hell when they died. Writing it out again now as I am, there is a certain simplicity to this explanation which is of course appealing. And the way I was initially taught to read the Scriptures, the 66 books of the Protestant Bible, only reinforced this understanding, that is, as long as I used the right English translation (preferably the King James Version, but the New King James and the New American Standard were considered acceptable). People from other denominations weren’t actually Christians as I was taught, because they didn’t believe the way we did, and they too needed to “be saved.”
Looking at it written out now, there were so many things I took for granted, chief of which was that I knew what “sin” was. I trusted what my pastors and teachers taught me about it. I trusted that the books I read about these things and other points of Christian teaching, all of which were squarely within the realm of Evangelical Protestantism, knew what they were talking about. Even after I was ostracised from the group I had studied with and been a part of, I held rigidly firm to all things which I had been taught, not so secretly hoping that my “time of exile” would come to an end, and I would be able to return to what had been a kind of found family for me. That no matter how hard I tried I could not became more of a gift of God than I undestood at the time, because, freed from needing to stay aligned with the right belief system in order to remain “in the fold,” for the first time in my life I gave myself permission to question and find answers for myself.
I became Roman Catholic, and in the process of so doing, I began actually reading both the Early Church Fathers and the actual official Catechism of the Catholic Church. The former revealed to me that the beliefs of the earliest Christians had almost nothing in common with the way I had been taught. The latter taught me that the Roman Catholic Church which had been demonized in my Bible School coursework was not the Roman Catholic Church as it officially taught, and that there was more agreement than disagreement between the two. The priest who confirmed me was one of the most Christ-like men I had met, and the Franciscan Sister was also one of the most loving and kind women I have ever met. I remember distinctly thinking to myself, if what I was taught about the Roman Catholic Church was wrong, then what else was I taught that was also mistaken? I then branched out and began reading the spiritual works of other faiths as well as Greek philosophy. And in all of it, it drew me, not away from Jesus Christ, but always back to Him, whether it was Plato’s Socratic dialogues, the Gospel of Buddha, the Tao Te Ching, or even the Bhagavad Gita. I would eventually join the Old Catholic Church. I entered the priesthood there on April 2nd, 2005, and was introduced not just to Roman Catholic theological teaching, but Eastern Orthodox as well. I would dive into the wealth of the Philokalia and the writings of the Eastern Monastic Fathers in addition to more modern Orthodox writings, both theological and mystical, and my understanding of the writings of the Ancient Christian Church prior to the schism between the east and the west grew by leaps and bounds. I would also dive more and more into the original Greek text of the New Testament, relying on it more and more until I just stopped using English translations altogether except for a quick reference when needed. I became so much better acquainted with John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jesus Christ Himself in those pages, reading, translating, re-reading, and re-translating over and over and over again so many times with each book that I lost count.
And then, along the way, I took a job working with students with moderate to severe developmental and medical disabilities, among them Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down’s Syndrome, Angelman’s Syndrome, quadriplegic students, and more. It was in this position where I first asked the question, “What if Paul meant what he said when he said that Hamartia was located ‘in the flesh’?” and I started taking psychology courses to find out. My answer to that question is in the five posts preceding this one.
But my answer to that question, that Hamartia, the “sin nature,” is really an abnormally formed amygdala peculiar to human beings, raised several more questions. I began to see it as a disorder similar to the developmental disorders of the students I worked with every day. Their brains hadn’t developed normally, and their behaviors reflected that. Of course they still had choices they could make, but those choices would be heavily influenced by their abnormal neurological development. We had to gently correct harmful behaviors, but what we were really taking note of and keeping track of was whatever progress they were making, no matter how small. We expected the aberrant behaviors because of the disorders, but what we kept track of and celebrated were the behaviors which average human beings would just consider normal and appropriate. The same is true of any good parent with a child with a developmental or psychological disorder. You don’t keep track of the wrong behavior, you expect that and correct it when it’s happening, but you forget all about it when they do something “normal and appropriate.” You flat out celebrate that, encourage that, nearly dance for joy over that.
And similar to Jesus’s question, I had to ask, if we as human beings, being as twisted as we can be sometimes, know to do this with our own children, why wouldn’t God do so as well with us? Why would He demand repayment for each and every one of our disorder influenced harmful behaviors, much less a blood sacrifice? Why would His focus be on what we do wrong instead of what we do right? While this question may have been subversively beginning to form in my subconscious, it was a series of different podcasts by different people who had deconstructed that really brought it into focus when they asked, “What kind of a God who is love or Father would demand the murder of His own Son in order to forgive people?” While I had heard the criticism before of course, and brushed it off, now it hit me squarely between the eyes. It was the kind of thing one of the pagan tribal gods from mythology might demand, but not the God which was described in the pages of the New Testament, or even for that matter, the God who was described in the prophets of the Old Testament.
I then really began to look at this question, and go back to all of those Scriptures which I had been taught to gloss over and interpret in the light of the “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” (PSA) which had formed the basis of my understanding of why Jesus died on the cross. The more I looked, the more I came to understand that not only was PSA only one way it could be interpreted among many, but it wasn’t even the way the people to whom the Scriptures were originally written would have understood it. I came to understand that the roots and origins of PSA and the three crucial issues that I was taught were really born in the 16th century, and not the first century. And the deeper I studied the Greek language, and the Greek texts of the Scriptures, the more I came to understand that the English translations I had initially been taught to use were skewed, intentionally or unintentionally, to teach PSA when the Greek really didn’t, and it was never really the intention of any of the authors of the New Testament, much less the Old. But then this leads to the question, “What does it then mean that ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:3) as the Scriptures teach?”
Let me plagiarize myself a little here:
“The practice of animal sacrifice is an ancient one. From what I’ve been able to read on the subject, there have been animal sacrifices from the very beginnings of human civilization, and from even before this. When the first sacrifices are mentioned in the Book of Genesis in the Scriptures, the practice was already well established. What’s important to note here is that, prior to the Book of Exodus, God never asks for or requires a sacrificial offering. Many Bible Evangelicals will point to Genesis 3:21 as proof of God establishing the need for a blood sacrifice to forgive sins. But the text itself says nothing of the kind. It just says, literally, that God made tunics from leather for Adam and Eve to replace the leaf coverings they had sewn together. It never says God killed the animals to get the leather. It never says this needed to be done for Him to forgive them. The only thing the text really suggests is that God taught them the rudiments of leather working out of compassion for their new reality, and the delusion that their natural nakedness needed to be covered up. Leather happens to be a far more durable clothing material than leaves held together with grass or stalks. Another passage held up is Abel’s offering from his flock being accepted and Cain’s offering of vegetables he farmed being rejected in Genesis 4. While it is one potential interpretation to suggest that this supports God having established blood sacrifices, it is not the only interpretation. It can just as well be said this passage might be an amalgam or a metaphor for our malfunctioning human ancestors who embraced tilling the soil and farming, the rudiments of civilization, driving those other human species which existed once upon a time, all hunter gatherers, to extinction. It really all depends on how it is seen.
With this in mind, the first actual mentions of animal sacrifice in the Scriptures assume it as a well established practice with meaning, and one which God did not explicitly ask for. In every instance, the initiative is taken by human beings to build an altar and offer a sacrifice in order to honor Him in some way. The one exception here is actually Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, a human sacrifice no less (also practiced from extremely ancient times), which the text makes clear that God had no intentions of Abraham going through with it. This understanding of blood sacrifice as an established practice continues into the Mosaic law. If you notice in the text of the law, in a similar way that it treats things like slavery and polygamy, the Mosaic law doesn’t found or establish the practice of sacrifice in order to forgive sins, but it regulates it, establishing rules, rituals, and specific ways it had to be done from the building of an altar out in the bush to what the official place of sacrifice was to look like to the priesthood in charge of that sacrifice.
So, what am I driving at here? That animal sacrifice, much less human sacrifice, in order to forgive sins wasn’t God’s idea in the first place. It was an idea born out of our malfunctioning mind, that we could somehow transfer our guilt onto an innocent animal or person and then destroy it by destroying that creature, and had become integrated very early in human culture and society.
So what does God have to say about sacrifices? In the passage I translated at the beginning of this, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 which says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and a knowledge of God more than whole burnt offerings.” In Psalms 40:6-8 the psalmist writes, “Sacrifice and offering you didn’t desire, but ears you prepared for me; You didn’t require whole burnt offering and sin offering. Then I said, ‘Look, I am here! It is written about me in the head of the book. I delight to do your will, my God. Your law is within my heart.” In Psalm 50:7-23, God is explicit that sacrifices of animals don’t impress Him and that He could do without them. Instead, the worship He wants is gratitude and people doing what they promised. He really takes issue with folks quoting His laws and covenant and then hurting and harming others. In Psalm 51:14-17 David writes, in his great penitential psalm, addressing God says that “You don’t delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give one; burnt offerings don’t please You.” He continues by saying, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” This last part is significant because God very clearly talks about despising the animal sacrifices brought to Him by the people of Judah in Isaiah 1:11-20, animal sacrifices and rituals regulated by the very same Mosaic law which He instructed Moses to write. God tells them to stop bringing them altogether because He’s sick of them. He then tells them what He wants instead, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the ruthless, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Notice He says to stop bringing the sacrifices, but then says “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean.” How were they supposed to do that without animal sacrifices if animal sacrifices were absolutely necessary for forgiveness and absolution? In Jeremiah 7:21-26 God tells the people that He didn’t even command Israel regarding sacrifices or whole burnt offerings when He brought them out of Egypt. Instead, He commanded them that if they obeyed what He said, then He would be their God, and they would be His people. So there is an implication that even the sacrifices spoken of in the Torah were someone else’s idea, and not God’s. 1 Samuel 15:22-23 also sums up which God prefers when the prophet tells Saul that God prefers people listening to Him to offering animal sacrifices. Finally, there is also Ezekiel 18 where the entire point of the chapter is that if someone who has done a life of wrongdoing turns from that wrongdoing to do what is right, God would forgive him and he would live. Nowhere in this chapter are sacrifices mentioned as being necessary for God to forgive that person.
The thrust of the New Testament arguments are that animal sacrifices, the blood of bulls and goats and sheep, could do nothing about our inherited malfunction. The best they could do was make us feel less guilty from a psychological perspective because something had been tangibly done to make up for it. In reality however, God never needed them to forgive us. He just needed us to realize our screw ups, turn around, and seek Him.”
If Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures say, then it wasn’t in order to forgive them. But if it wasn’t in order to forgive them, then what was it for? When we talk about the New Testament, Christian concept of salvation, we’re talking about the New Covenant which was prophesied by Jeremiah. It is called the New Covenant to distinguish it from the covenant or contract God made with Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai, and Jesus Himself uses these words (Byzantine and Textus Receptus texts) when initiating what is called “The Lord’s Supper” as well as “Mass,” and He linked it directly with His own body and blood. In the initial prophetic text, the New Covenant was to be made with “the house of Israel,” but in the New Testament, it is made with the entire world and is considered to apply to the entire world.
The terms of the New Covenant as recorded in Jeremiah 31:33-34 are these, “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it on their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (KJV) What I saw this time, after reading it dozens of times and even memorizing this passage, was where God Himself actually put the emphasis. Sure, forgiveness was a part of it at the end, but the first thing, the substantial meat of the New Covenant was that he would put His law “in their inward parts, and write it on their hearts.”
In other words, the new covenant was that they would do by nature what His law required, and as Rabbi Gamaliel said, as well as Jesus Himself, the entire law given by God to Moses, the Torah, can be summed up in this, “You will love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength, and all of your conscious mind; and you will love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus added to this the proscriptions to “love your enemies” and to “love one another as I have loved you.” So what was it that God would put in their inmost parts and write on their hearts? Love, and for all of their behaviors to be produced from this rather than what produces the harmful ones, which I have previously described as an abnormally formed amygdala which puts the person into a nearly constant survival mode based on threat assessment which is motivated by fear.
Another feature of the New Covenant which is frequently overlooked or dismissed is when He says, “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD…” Consider this in the light also of 1 John 4:7-8 which reads, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”(KJV) Consider also, in reference to the human amygdala driving behavior through fear based threat assessment, that the Apostle also writes in the same chapter in verses 16-18, “And we have known and have trusted the love which the God holds within us. The God is love, and the person making their home in love makes their home in the God and the God makes His home within that person. By means of this, love has been brought to completion with us, so that we possess a freedom to speak on the day of decision, because just like that One is, we are also within this world. Fear doesn’t exist within love, but the love brought to completion tosses fear outside, because fear has discipline, yet the one being afraid hasn’t been brought to completion with the love.” (author’s translation)
So what is the New Covenant then? Is it about forgiveness and deliverance from a hellish afterlife? No. It is nothing short of God Himself becoming the source of the person’s behaviors. It is nothing short of bypassing or disengaging from the human amygdala, rendering it inert or on constant standby while God Himself, who is love, takes over and suppresses or disengages that survival response. If it is God Himself who is the source of behavior, is He going to murder, lie, steal, cheat, cause schisms, do drugs, commit adultery through you? No, of course not! In the New Covenant, rather than being concerned with finding a way to forgive us, we see God working to treat our neurological problem directly. The forgiveness we find in the New Covenant comes from agreeing with Him about our problem and seeking to do what He wants just as He said in Ezekiel 18, and not from a blood sacrifice as such.
Paul writes copiously about this, but you wouldn’t know it because of how English translations have rendered what he wrote. He uses the Greek word δικαιοω and its various cognates in order to describe it. Starting with an explanation of what we can observe about the problem, He then goes into how God solved it. The problem in the modern translations is that they almost uniformly translate it as “justify,” which is nothing short of a transliteration of the Latin rendering from the Vulgate, “iustifico,” which translates as “to act justly towards, do justice to, justify, pardon, forgive, vindicate,” all of which implies a strictly legal understanding of pardoning or acquitting someone from a crime. But the base meaning of δικαιοω is “to make or set right” in a wide variety of contexts. The legal context as with iustifico to be sure, but in many, many more as well. Its adjectival cognate δικαιος literally means “observant of duty or custom,” especially in a societal context, but also in a religious context. In other words, it means that the person who is δικαιος is doing what they are supposed to be doing, and δικαιοω is returning something or someone to the way it or they are supposed to be. The concept can also be applied to restoring something to fairness or balance which had been unfair or out of balance. And so the very underpinnings of Paul’s understanding of the New Covenant and salvation in his letters in general center around this concept of setting the person right. But what did that mean?
According to Paul, in Romans chapters six through eight, it meant the rendering inert or neutralization of Hamartia through death, and specifically, through the person being “grown together” by means of baptism with Jesus Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. As he writes, “knowing this that our old human being was crucified together with Him, so that the malfunctioning body would be neutralized, for us to no longer be enslaved to Hamartia, because the one having died has been made right from Hamartia” (Romans 6:6-7, author’s translation). And because we have been “grown together” with Jesus Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, as he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, “deciding this, that if one person died in place of everyone, then all people died; and He died in place of everyone, so that those living no longer live for themselves but in place of the One having died in their place and risen.”
But then the question must be asked, if it wasn’t about payment or retribution for our crimes and wrongdoing, how could His death and resurrection make us right from an abnormal or malfunctioning amygdala? Here, I need to talk about the aftereffects of Near Death Experiences (NDEs), and first I am going to quote those scientists who study the phenomenon:
"Regardless
of their cause, NDEs can permanently and dramatically alter the
individual experiencer’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. The
literature on the aftereffects of NDEs has focused on the beneficial
personal transformations that often follow. A recent review of
research into the characteristic changes following NDEs found the
most commonly reported to be loss of fear of death; strengthened
belief in life after death; feeling specially favored by God; a new
sense of purpose or mission; heightened self-esteem; increased
compassion and love for others; lessened concern for material gain,
recognition, or status; greater desire to serve others; increased
ability to express feelings; greater appreciation of, and zest for,
life; increased focus on the present; deeper religious faith or
heightened spirituality; search for knowledge; and greater
appreciation for nature. These aftereffects have been corroborated by
interviews with near-death experiencers’ significant others and by
long-term longitudinal studies."
(Greyson, Bruce. "Getting
Comfortable With Near Death Experiences: An Overview of Near-Death
Experiences." Mo Med. 2013 Nov-Dec;110(6):475–481. PMCID:
PMC6179792)
A longer list of the aftereffects are:
(From "Aftereffects of Near-death States" by by P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D.)
Near-death experiencers come to love and accept others without the usual attachments and conditions society expects. They perceive themselves as equally and fully loving of each and all, openly generous, excited about the potential and wonder of each person they see. Their desire is to be a conduit of universal love. Confused family members tend to regard this sudden switch in behavior as oddly threatening, as if their loved one had become aloof, unresponsive, even uncaring and unloving. Some mistake this "unconditional" way of expressing joy and affection (heart-centered rather than person-centered) as flirtatious disloyalty. Divorce can result.
One of the reasons life seems so different afterward is because the experiencer now has a basis of comparison unknown before. Familiar codes of conduct can lose relevance or disappear altogether as new interests take priority. Such a shift in reference points can lead to a childlike naivete. With the fading of previous norms and standards, basic caution and discernment can also fade. It is not unusual to hear of near-death experiencers being cheated, lied to, or involved in unpleasant mishaps and accidents. Once they are able to begin integrating what happened to them, discernment usually returns.
Most experiencers develop a sense of timelessness. They tend to "flow" with the natural shift of light and dark, and display a more heightened awareness of the present moment and the importance of being "in the now." Making future preparations can seem irrelevant to them. This behavior is often labeled "spaciness" by others, who do their best to ignore the change in perception, although seldom do they ignore the shift in speech. That's because many experiencers refer to their episode as if it were a type of "divider" separating their "former" life from the present one.
There's no denying that experiencers become quite intuitive afterward. Psychic displays can be commonplace, such as: out-of-body episodes, manifestation of "beings" met in near-death state, "remembering" the future, finishing another's sentence, "hearing" plants and animals "speak." This behavior is not only worrisome to relatives and friends, it can become frightening to them. A person's religious beliefs do not alter or prevent this amplification of faculties and stimuli. Yet, experiencers willing to learn how to control and refine these abilities, consider them beneficial.
Life paradoxes begin to take on a sense of purpose and meaning, as forgiveness tends to replace former needs to criticize and condemn. Hard driving achievers and materialists can transform into easy-going philosophers; but, by the same token, those more relaxed or uncommitted before can become energetic "movers and shakers," determined to make a difference in the world. Personality reversals seem to depend more on what's "needed" to round out the individual's inner growth than on any uniform outcome. Although initially bewildered, families can be so impressed by what they witness that they, too, change-making the experience a "shared event."
The average near-death experiencer comes to regard him or herself as "an immortal soul currently resident within a material form so lessons can be learned while sojourning in the earthplane." They now know they are not their body; many go on to embrace the theory of reincarnation. Eventually, the present life, the present body, becomes important and special again.
What was once foreign becomes familiar, what was once familiar becomes foreign. Although the world is the same, the experiencer isn't. Hence, they tend to experiment with novel ways to communicate, even using abstract and grandiose terms to express themselves. With patience and effort on everyone's part, communication can improve and life can resume some degree of routine. But, the experiencer seems ever to respond to a "tune" no one else can hear (this can continue lifelong).
(Copied from https://iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/common-aftereffects.html)
Atheists become pastors, selfish people become selfless, ordinary people develop paranormal abilities; and as a person exceptionally familiar with the New Testament narratives and letters, I cannot help but see the parallels with the experiences of the early Christians which were written about therein. I also cannot help but recognize the emphasis placed on "dying to self," "dying with Christ," and as Paul wrote point-blank in his letter to the Colossians as to why they were to be mindful of the things within the heavenly realms instead of minding the things on earth, "because you died and your life is hidden with Christ inside God."
Jesus taught that His followers needed to die to themselves, and the embrace of this death is the underpinning of all Christian practice. As Paul also wrote in his letter to the Romans, "Don't you know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were then buried together with Him through the baptism into His death so that just like Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father so also we should walk in a freshness of life." I read the list of aftereffects of an NDE, and it seems like that is exactly what these folks are experiencing after literally returning from being clinically dead, sometimes for relatively long stretches of time.
Thinking again about where it says in Romans 6, "The person who died has been made right from Hamartia," as it relates to the aftereffects experienced by people who have had Near Death Experiences or literal "Death Experiences" and have returned to life. That is, people who have literally died for a period of time (sometimes quite extended) with either brain death, the stopping of the heart, or both, and resuscitated (or resurrected). The thought which occurred to me is that this is literally a mechanic of death and resurrection regardless of how it happens. That is, a disengagement from one's malfunctioning responses and engagement with the Logos of God, that immaterial part of oneself suppressed by the malfunctioning amygdala, is a natural and normal result of death and resurrection as is evidenced by people who have had NDEs and consistently display a greater love, joy, peace, compassion, loss of a fear of death, a greater interest in spiritual things, a greater sense of connection with God, and even paranormal or supernormal abilities regardless of the belief system they started with.
And so this is the answer to why Jesus Christ died, voluntarily sacrificed Himself, in the place of every human being. So that every human being would be able to free from the domination of their abnormally functioning amygdala by experiencing death and resurrection without actually having to physically go through it, that is, that they would be free to choose God Himself as their source of behavior rather than this bit of malfunctioning flesh. And this is the assumption which Paul makes throughout his letters, urging those to whom he is writing to choose to “operate with the Spirit” rather than with the flesh; to remain connected with the Head of the body, the Logos who is Jesus Christ of whom we are all members, pieces, and fractals, and who is identified with the God Himself. And he is clear about one’s options in this matter. One is either enslaved to one’s abnormal amygdala, one’s flesh, or one willingly enslaves themselves to the God of whom they are a part, the Spirit. There are no other options.
And what does this have to do with the afterlife then? Actually, not a whole lot. Because the understanding I’ve come to is that the salvation which the New Testament teaches has very little to do with where one goes when one dies, and everything to do with being freed from Hamartia in this world, in the here and now. The salvation which is taught has to do with being freed from the harmful behaviors caused by our constant, fear based survival responses, and being free to communicate once more with that part of ourselves which is one with God Himself. It is about the realization of the New Covenant, and having the heart and will of God activated and written within each of us so that we do not cause harm to one another, and so that we love as He loves because He is the one loving through us.
And how do we actualize this? By being told it happened, and trusting that it is true enough to where we act on it. It is like being told there is a billion dollar bank account with your name on it. You have to trust that it is true in order to make use of it. If you don’t trust that, if you don’t believe the person who tells you, then there’s no way you can make use of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment