The message that Jesus preached was primarily as a reformer of the Hebrew religion in sync with the prophets of old. All religion was and is a dead end. Above religion, Jesus's message was that eternity can be tasted now as a cosmic flip of the priorities of our world. The coming flip will include, the losers becoming winners and winners losers, the pious will be exposed as sinners and the sinners will experience the respect of God, the rich will become poor and the poor rich and the masters will become servants and the servants masters.
Jesus says, believe and taste the God ordained coming cosmic flip. 2000 years later, with hindsight, we can identify the beginnings of our coming of age but most of the cosmic flip awaits us all, at our own deaths as individuals and the earthbound final fulfillment to be experienced by an unknown generation in the future. No one has ever, can now or will ever avoid the coming cosmic flip.
Before we
get all confused with traditional end times preaching, allow me to say a word about the Bible. No thinking adult can
defend the understanding that all the red-letter words in the Bible were the actual words spoken by Jesus or understandings given by Jesus. These recorded
words in the Bible are the best recollections of a variety of Jesus listeners multiplied, who knows
how many times, all of which were mixed with a variety of human understandings
about the supposed reality of God.
The Bible, therefore, can be thought of as an egg. The pure
words and message of Jesus are the egg yolk, given to us surrounded by layers of human listening
fallibility or ineptitude. This is the albumen or egg whites. In the Bible it is called religion. The trick is to separate the whites from the
yolk, not an easy trick. Some biblical thinkers just throw out their brains and
take the written words of the Bible “as is”, in Zillow talk. The Bible
then becomes so complicated that the yolk is given no value or hidden, even taken as a
joke, in our complicated world.
Much of the Bible is not history, a history that can extend us in some way into eternity beyond our own demise. Eternity is not to be thought of as heaven, a storybook dumped on the Bible. Jesus called and expected our world to be ruled as the kingdom of God with God's eternal values endorsed and lived out by believers. Thanks to the Jesus Seminar and the Westar Institute, the Bible is being separated, fact from fiction. Now, the question needs to be asked, what's next? When will the next appear?
This blog is just humble enough not to make a guess as to what God is up too. For now, the kingdom of God appears to shine among us when we, as believers, order our lives to reflect eternity values. The number one value being, the inherent value of every living being that crosses our path. We shall try to make our world eternity friendly, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding but our eternal future in God is assured for all of us.
What a great day that will be! The flip is among us and will be the order of the day in eternity. Of course, you will not hear this from the pulpit because the institution of religion drowns out those eternal values of the kingdom.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
