The Historical Jesus Christ: Go For A Visit

The question is always asked, "Was there a historical Jesus Christ?" (or, "Was there an 'istorical Jesus Christ?"--can’t leave the Brits out). I say, "Yes!" whether there was or wasn't.

First off, because Jesus has spoken to me and has healed me, and he couldn't have spoken to me or healed me if he didn't exist.

Second, because the Season of Grace (see Daniel 9) was physical and historical, certainly its concluding acts (verse 24) must also have been physical and historical.

Third, while I know that the scriptural Jesus Christ is a symbolic representation of the SPIRITUAL Milta (the essence of Allaha manifest), that does not preclude that facet of the Conscience of the Ineffable Being --the Milta--from manifesting in history just as we have.

Last, even if all the scripture related to Jesus Christ is instructional illustration of certain spiritual truths, John's saying in 1 John 1:1 that "the One whom we heard and saw with our eyes, saw and felt with our hands, He who Is the manifestation of Life" (Alexander) means that REGARDLESS of Jesus Christ's physical historicity, the person, the Manifestation, was EXPERIENCED. These first century encounters were PHYSICAL to the disciples' perceived senses whether they were on the literal-historical plane or the mystical plane. I.e., the Milta may have incarnated and walked around us as a man, or have been imagined in the disciples' minds as a man having "all the tones of physical reality." 

My point is that the guy who said, "Come unto Me," held the view that we are able to do so. John saw and heard and felt with his hands the PHYSICAL Jesus Christ, whether that physicality was out here in a physical body or was only perceived as physical within John's imagination. We can see, hear, and feel physical existence within our minds. Jesus gave us a destination, a goal, and a command: "Come unto Me, all ye . . . " Now. Present-day obedience must be in our imaginations. Kind of reminds me of Ferrar Fenton's Lord's Prayer (see also). Imagine being with the real Guy!

We HAVE What God HEARS (1 John 5:14-15), So Let Us Control What We SAY

"And this familiarity we have with Him, that whatever we ask of Him, He is pleased to hear us. And if we ask in faith* (resolved) that He hears us in regard* (over) to anything that we may ask of Him, we can rest assured that we have already received the requests we made of Him" (1 John 5:14-15 Alexander, footnotes incorporated, emphases mine).

When we ask, God hears, for He is us. What He hears, we have. I.e., WE HAVE WHAT GOD HEARS.

IF WE HAVE WHAT GOD HEARS, let us speak well and speak wisely. Let us watch what we SAY. We say what we ARE: "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: 'Eat and drink,' saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee" (Proverbs 23:7 KJV; i.e., he doesn't really like you). "It is like a man swallowing his pride that you eat and drink with him, and his heart is not with you" (Alexander). What we "say" is what we THINK, REALLY think in our inner man. What we THINK IN OUR HEART, that is what we are and is the thing we "say" that God hears. And what we thus say, God HEARS, and we HAVE.

SO SAY (IMAGINE) WHAT YOU WANT, WHAT YOU GENUINELY WANT, AND IMAGINE YOURSELF HAVING IT. Prayer is controlled imagination: HAVE what you WANT. Appreciate YOUR joy in others' health and prosperity. Imagine everyone's serenity. Rejoice in God's name being hallowed, His kingdom come, His will being done, tomorrow's bread served today.

The "Gospel" Isn't A Message, It 's A Reward, THE Reward--Man's New Status Before God In The Promised Redemption By The Son--Satan's Head Crushed, And MAN ALIVE WITHOUT SIN

"Likewise also the Messiah offered Himself one season, through His [human] Essence He obliterated the sins of many, so as in the second season those who held onto Him would see themselves Alive without their sins" (Hebrews 9:28 Alexander, and I am SO sorry if you stick only with Western Bibles and do not temper their views with Alexander's). Work on this idea: the gospel is not a message but is a reward. THE Reward (search my blog for the word euaggelion). See yourself alive without your sins NOW, for this IS the second season, and Eternal Life is given NOW, if we will but confess our sins, accept Christ, and receive the Holy Ghost, who is the reward.

We are told that the gospel message is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16 KJV). What if Paul was here referring to the reward God gave believers and not to a message about it? Eternal Life is GIVEN!! Paul wasn't ashamed of the reward God gives--GAVE--for it is the REAL reward (the Pagan religions also claimed to give salvation to their believers--empty promises to be ashamed of). Kind of a stretch? I don't think so. The original meaning of the Greek word euaggelion, which was translated as "gospel" and "glad tidings"--i.e., a message--by the New Testament translators, HAD ALWAYS MEANT "THE REWARD FOR PRESENTING GLAD TIDINGS." Euaggelion did not mean the glad tidings themselves. This switch was an errant application, a misconceptualization by the unregenerate in the church (2 John 6 and 7). They didn't understand that the Holy Ghost is GIVEN and needs only to be received (un-yourself in surrender and submission to God, accepting what He will give).

What reward is there for believers that is the power of God unto salvation? In the second paragraph here: "4) The reality of His Life today in believers"; i.e., the reward is man's new status before God after being fully redeemed by the promised and long-awaited sacrifice of the Son (Genesis 3:15). This new STATUS, a concretely effected transition--our becoming a new creature--is the reward which when believed upon saves us and heals us. Life in the Holy Ghost is constant--it is not coming in the future. We are just too stupid to RECEIVE what has been GIVEN to us. Overcome this stupidity.

I believe the meaning of Deuteronomy 6:4 is that Israel, "Eil's Prevailing in Manifestation," is IN the one God YHWH is.

"Whoever believes in the Son of God, has this testimony in his soul. And whoever does not believe God, calls* (makes) Him a liar, by not believing the testimony that God gives* (testifies) about His Son. And this is that testimony, that God has given us Life to [the end of] the universe* (everlasting life), and this Life is in His Son. Whoever takes the Son, also [receives the everlasting] Life, and whoever does not take the Son of God, does not [receive the everlasting] Life. These things I write you so that you may know that you have Life eternal* (the the end of the universe), [you who] believe in these things in the name of the Son of God. And this familiarity we have with Him, that whatever we ask of Him, He is pleased to hear us. And if we ask in faith* (resolved) that He hears us in regard* (over) to anything that we may ask of Him, we can rest assured that we have already received the requests we made of Him" (1 John 5:10-15 Alexander, footnotes incorporated, emphases mine).

PS: a note posted elsewhere: The Greek word euaggelion did not mean glad tidings. Look it up. Euaggelion was the REWARD given to the one who brought glad tidings. It wasn't the message, but the reward given for it. Jesus received a reward after dying for us--the right to forgive repentant sinners and to restore them to eternal life. We are to believe in AND ENTER the reward, reconciled to God, ALIVE WITHOUT SIN.

Controlled Imagination: Abdullah's Contribution

Learn to control your imagination. "With every enlightenment guard your heart, because it is from him that the Life* (Everlasting Life) emerges" (Proverbs 4:23 Alexander).

"You are IN Barbados," Abdullah told Neville. "You have GONE to Barbados, and you WENT there first class" (Neville Goddard God's Law and His Promise, 15:00 and 16:06, 18:20). Abdullah instructed Neville to persist in that assumption, that he had GONE to Barbados first class, and it worked. "If I dare to assume that I AM what I desire to be, and I am FAITHFUL to that assumption, it will come to pass" (21:20).

Interestingly, "come to pass" in Hebrew is hayah: is, am, was, were, to be, will be, become, come to pass, quit, & etc. THERE IS TRANSITION INVOLVED. "And the earth was for Him and by Him" (Genesis 1:2 Alexander). The earth transitioned from one status into another status: for Him and by Him. AHWH and YHWH, the names of God, are forms of this word.

Learn to control your imagination. It works for God.

God "Speaks" In Symbolic Illustration

God does not have a corporal body. Being Imagination, He "speaks" in symbolic illustration: "Light." If you are paying attention, everything is God's Word. He has become us, and we, being Him, create our world by our imagination. THIS, OUR PERSONAL EXPERIENTAL WORLD, IS HIS SPEECH. Learn to listen. Our primmer for the language of God is the Bible. Correlate THAT, the relations in the Bible, with THIS, the world YOU have created.

A wonderful book on this is Learning the Vocabulary of God: A Spiritual Diary by Dr. Frank C. Laubach (published by The Upper Room, 1908 Grand Avenue, Nashville 5, Tennessee, 1956, 2012).

If God speaks in symbolic illustration, then He hears in symbolic illustration, too. Our lives are how we speak to God; our speech is our doing, our thinking, and our believing. Listen well, and speak well.

Heading For Healing 40.75: Be Willing To Present/Be The Message

In November, 1947, Daisy Osborn heard William Marrion Branham preach in Portland, Oregon. Daisy reported Branham's message to her Pentecostal preacher and failed missionary husband, Tommy (T. L.) Osborn. T. L. went with his wife the next night and heard Branham's message for himself. Convicted that Branham's message--the BIBLE'S message--was true, T. L. and Daisy launched their highly successful international evangelistic healing crusade ministry.

T. L. and Daisy Osborn wrote prolifically about William Branham's message. One of my favorites is The Message That Works: What We Have Told Millions In 73 Nations For 53 Years (1997). Can you guess what this book is about? Just Branham's message. On page 18, Osborn presents the message as four realities: 1) Our origin in God; 2) Satan's deception; 3) Christ's death and resurrection and what that means; and 4) The reality of His Life today in believers. THIS, Osborn says, is the Good News.

I think Neville Goddard would refer to these realities as eternal states of being, each open to man's dwelling within in his process of awakening (the living spirit within each man actually being Jesus). For "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever," "I am the Lord, I change not" (Hebrews 13:8 and Malachi 3:6 KJV). This process is the course of God's becoming; i.e., we Are Jesus, and we DO Christ, subject to the state we are in.

Well, what did Billy Branham preach in Portland that so inspired Daisy and T. L. Osborn (and unnumbered others) to begin and base their life-long ministry upon it? Man's redemption BY Jesus Christ. "Truly He anticipated our sorrows and was [destined] to carry the burden of our wounds, and we would consider (count) Him as troubled and someone beaten (denigrated) by Allaha and made humble. He would be killed because of our sins, be humbled because of our abomination; courage will be fulfilled in Him and He will [come to] be healed by His own grace" (Isaiah 53:4-5 Alexander). By the way, note that in Isaiah 53:4 Jesus was destined to carry the burden of our wounds on the cross. In Mark 15:34, according to Victor Alexander's translation from the ancient Aramaic, Jesus says on the cross, "To THIS You destined Me" (paraphrase and emphases mine). Destiny FULFILLED!

Regardless of what we were before becoming born here, we enter an ignorance of amnesia in becoming born. Blind to the invisible world of the consciousness of God, we believe we are "it." We direct our own lives. We do whatever we think is the best thing for ourselves without regard for what God would will--no thanks to Him, no appreciation, no recognition to God, and no submission--we do things on our own. And while we are in this rebellious state, God recognizes it is His, and takes the blame for our being unlike Him upon Himself. One hundred percent.

In Christ, are we restored to what we were before the ignorance beset us, innocent and pure and fully accepted by God? No. We have progressed. As number 4) above, we are something better. We didn't know what we were, and now we do. We are God's consciousness, His imagination. We have His nature, His characteristics, His eternal attributes--we are IN the One He is. We are submitted, cooperative in all He wants to do. We think well, what we believe would be His will, and allow His Kingdom (powers) to manifest it--or not--as He sees fit. We present Him to the world in and through our being, through our thoughts, words, and actions. FOR HE WANTS TO BE SEEN. God wants His message to be seen and heard as evidence of His Glory. 

I think that if we are willing to be, share, and present God's message, verily Christ Himself, He will take us in with healing.

Death in Prayer is Forgiveness

I have just a minute to mention that when I say we have to die as a part of prayer, this "death" is forgiveness. We have to forgive the world we are in to move into the world we desire. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive . . . " Unless we "die"--forgive--we receive NOTHING. Jesus was beaten, scourged, crucified, and was being mocked and jeered at, and He forgave those who were doing it: "Not My will . . ." He received.

Heading For Healing 40.5: Prayer--Praise, Worship, Thanksgiving, and Death

Notable in my own experience with healing and in the testimony of others, in prayer, other than believing you receive what you pray for, YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING EXCEPT SURRENDER, I.E., "DIE." The Passover, wherein all the children of Israel were healed, was a sacrifice. The substitute sacrificed died for the people, so they were accounted as DEAD. Prayer, Neville Goddard said, is praise. It is thanksgiving, and the accounting of your rightful death as upon your substitute. Your substitute DIED for you to be passed over. Surrender and submission, your death, MAKES YOU LIKE HIM, CHRIST, GOD. It is part of our presentation OF God. I think it is built into God's act of assumption. God doesn't force His assumption's becoming, He DIES to it. He as-if-dead allows His power, His Kingdom, to manifest. It is in "death," this allowance, that it becomes. Which is why all of us are here in death: "He appointed human beings to die one season" (Hebrews 9:27 Alexander). There, where we were, is Life. Here, where we are, is death. The Temples were images of Man, and they were butcher shops--sacrificing substitutes all day long for surrendered, humbled Man to continue before God.

So prayer is praise, worship, thanksgiving, and the surrender of one's self into the substitutionary death suffered by his or her sacrifice. "How fully can you surrender and not be afraid?" --Dr. Frank C. Laubach.

A Brief Overview of My Theology, or "God as I See It"

I consider myself a Oneness Pentecostal, but I do not consider the One God to be separate from us. There is only one God, and He is a part of the Ineffable. We are a part of Him, thus we also are a part of the Ineffable. The Ineffable is the Spiritual Unity, which has the consciousness/imagination we call "God," OF WHICH we are. There is a lot more to God than us, but none of what it is is separate from us. The Ineffable is just one Being, a single Whole, and we are in that single Wholeness.

There is only one God, and everything is His becoming. There are not three Beings working in concert as God, but one Being whose three modes of consciousness work all things in concert. It isn't that we CAN become as It is becoming; it is that we ARE becoming as It is becoming--THIS is Exodus 3:14. We can become consciously and cooperatively, or ignorantly and contrarily. "Except as it is written in Scriptures, Eye does not see and ear does not hear, and over the heart doess not rise, the thing Allaha graced to those who mercy him" (1 Corinthians 2:9 Alexander).

Heading For Healing 40: Present God

There was a concerted effort to get me interested and wondering about the context of healing. Why is it done in crowds, in front of people? The question was inculcated, thoughts were cultivated, and suddenly an illuminating revelation of reality was shown. Giving credit where credit is due, a catalyst to the concluding vision was an observation made by Manis Friedman in his YouTube video Why Jews don't believe in Christianity, which was that God needed the Jews and took them out of Egypt (4:30 in the video, and note his comments after 6:10). God NEEDS His presentation in this dimension. He needs Himself to be presented, to be put on display. We are to BE His image, verily His Milta (Aramaic), His Manifestation. We are to publish God here for all to see. Creation began with God's desire to BE manifest as our constant, and as Friedman notes, "It's do-able." THAT is Christianity.

The Jews are an everyman. Just as we are all born enslaved in the darkness of ignorance, the Jews were enlightened and converted through Moses' demonstrations of God and entered the death of Passover. Then, as a whole they left Egypt to freedom healed: "And there was not one feeble person among their tribes" (Psalm 105:37 KJV). THIS WAS THE REWARD*, THEIR GETTING TO BE THE ACTUAL PRESENTATION OF ALLAHA (ARAMAIC FOR THE GODHEAD). The Jews were not healed to run around willy-nilly after their own purposes, but to present God to the world that the whole world might be converted to become God's presentation, verily the manifestation of the Ineffable. That was God's purpose, and THAT'S what the Mount Sinai experience was about: "You shall present Me."

I believe that is why we are to GO to get healed, most often in a crowd where our healing will be seen by others and will encourage them: "They came to him from everywhere," and "great crowds followed him, and he healed them all" (Mark 1:45, Matthew 12:15 Alexander). Through this God is telling us that He wants His works PROMULGATED, demonstrated, published and presented. Many churches have services dedicated to healing where others can SEE your healing. You can go to the church elders separately for prayer and the laying on of hands, or have them come to you, that they might PUBLISH the report of your healing in their preaching. You can go to a Kathryn Kuhlman type healing service, or to a T. L. Osborn type mass-healing crusade. When my back was hurt in Hawaii, I flew to my church in California to get healed. And was.

But you do not have to physically go. J. Rodman Williams, my New Testament Theology professor, was in his study. Janet Gunther was in her private devotions. I was stoked in a trance seeing all reality as the Intelligence of the Ineffable. The thing is, we PUBLISH it, we present these things as evidence of God to the world. I am reminded of what God said to Dr. Frank C. Laubach: "I am in travail to set you akindle with the Christ-thing which has no name" (Letters by a Modern Mystic, entry for March 9, 1930). The Christ-thing is presentation. God needs OUR PRESENTATION OF HIM, OUR MAKING OF HIM SEEN.

Judaism and Christianity are not for our merit. They are for bearing witness and putting God on display. That is what He gives us life for--not to do as we direct, but as HE directs. Then what we do will be His "son," Christ. We are to father Christ into this world. That is why, says Neville Goddard, David calls the awakened one "Father."

If you want to be healed, TESTIFY OF GOD. God does not need accolades; He needs to be EVIDENCED. Why call the elders of the church? People BELIEVE them. Them. You, maybe not so much. They will testify truly of what they have seen. God wants to be seen, to be our reality. The Ineffable wants to be manifested. Its character, Its nature, Its values, Its opinions and emotions can only be seen in God's actions, which are manifestations of His assumption. HE HAS NO OTHER CORPORAL BODY TO BE SEEN WITH THAN BY OURS. God only has imagined assumption by which to act, but His imagination is all powerful.

Testify. His Life is DOABLE. The historical Jesus Christ at the end of the Season of Grace DID it: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God" (Mark 8:29 Alexander). And now you ARE Him.

* The original meaning of the Greek word euaggelion was not "gospel," i.e., "glad tidings," but the reward given for bringing forth glad tidings. The Jews entered into bearing, presenting the nature of God as seen in the Passover, and the healing and freedom of actually being His presentation, of being His manifestation, was their reward: "However, it is destined beforehand that you preach my hope (faithful anticipation--the reward) among all nations" (Mark 13:10 Alexander, "reward" is my enlargement on his translation; see Mark 13:10 and Matthew 24:14 in the King James Version).

Need is Rejection; Fear is Receiving

If I may enlarge upon my post What Is Rejected Will Leave, when we pray with the feelings of need, desire, and want, these feelings state that we do not have the thing, that it does NOT exist in our world, that it is not a part of us. That is understood by the subconscious as REJECTION, "this is NOT in my world," and we will never get it. Fear, on the other hand, states that the thing currently exists in our world, and is understood by the subconscious as our HAVING RECEIVED it: "this IS in my world." Thus what we fear happens.

We are the manifestation of God, and God is one. The things we assume ARE OF OUR WORLD, are a part of us. If it isn't in our world as part of the one, then it is nothing to us.

More on "Attitudes are Imagination in a War for Life"

Another level of correlation just struck me. As I said in Attitudes are Imagination in a War for Life, "The invisible is in us, actually IS us, and we find God alive in our attitudes. We step out in faith, hope, and love. Abraham left his home, Isaac sewed seed during a drought, Jacob served fourteen years for Rachel. The Israel he became is 'The Prevailing of Eil, of God.' God overcomes the world in and through our attitudes." The correlation I see is the sequence of creative imagination. Abraham LEFT the world he was in, Isaac is the BELIEVING of the world desired received, and this left world becomes the desired world--Jacob BECOMES Israel--"Eil's Prevailing."

What Is Rejected Will Leave

The departure/elimination of the rejected is a principle I read about in Dr. Joseph Murphy's writings, probably in The Power of the Subconscious Mind. That what you reject - that what God rejects - will leave/be eliminated is a scary thought, my friend. Murphy was talking about people complaining about their wages, their bosses, and maybe about their spouses. Don't do it, Murphy warns. Complaint and criticism are rejection, and what is rejected will leave; i.e., it will become separated from you--eliminated. You become separated from your low wages, your deplorable boss, and your unappreciated spouse BY GETTING FIRED. Vic Alexander in his translations from the ancient Aramaic uses term obliviation: "Obliviation refers to the act or process of causing someone or something to be forgotten, erased, or eliminated from memory, typically through magical or supernatural means."

What is scary about it is that this is an eternal principle, a characteristic in the nature of God that always is. Everything that rejects Him, doesn't want to obey Him, doesn't appreciate Him, GETS FIRED. That can become a very literal experience. "I don't believe in a literal hell," you say. I don't either. But I do believe that THIS experience is states of consciousness I IMAGINE. What is "real" to me is being imagined into "real" existence by God. I can imagine people believing that they are in the state of a literal hell. Knowing that you are only imagining experiencing hell won't make you any happier there.

So don't complain. Instead, imagine things well, happy--all that Philippians 4:8 stuff. Engage in the war of self-controlled happy-thought. Imagine the experience of good and light in spite of all evil and darkness. That this is necessary is kind of weird to me: to get myself acceptable to God in the first place I had to relinquish all self-control of myself. I saw that my sin against Him was I was directing "my" life, that I did everything I wanted with it. But He led me to realize that this is GOD'S life, and my self-lordship was rebellion against Him. So to get acceptable to Him I had to cast all control of myself out of myself and surrendered fully to Him. Now the battle is to control my thoughts to God's thoughts, to that what I believe is His will. Everything else is "fornication." I do not want to be what He rejects.

Note that the temptation to sin, to imagine other than what He would want, is adultery. Just the word fornication suggests that imagining is generative. We are to imagine--assume as existing, if you would--Paradise. Paradise is Him. Paradise is Him in us, and us in Him. What a battle it is to consistently imagine THAT in light of our daily dose of THIS. Life is the constant appeasing of the hunger we wake up with, and it is likely the wrong one. "I haven't even had coffee yet, and You want me to war?" Well, that is the world we are in--the visible AND the invisible. The physical is a lot easier to hold onto, but it is the spiritual that matters. Fight to imagine it, to assume it real. Be there. Be it. And thank God for self-control.

___________________

Edit: Remember Lot's wife. Our ignorance has us looking back on all the "good" things we are leaving. It makes us pine for the "leeks of Egypt"--things we don't, can't, and shouldn't have. Instead of that, we SHOULD be praying for--assuming--what good things God desires for all of us--all that Lord's Prayer stuff.

Per Vic:

"Our heavenly Father,
hallowed is your name.
Your Kingdom is come.
Your will is done,
As in heaven so also on earth.
Give us the bread for our daily need.
And leave us serene,
just as we also allowed others serenity.
And do not pass us through trial,
except separate us from the evil one.
For yours is the Kingdom,
the Power and the Glory
To the end of the universe,
of all the universes." Amen!