To this end was I born,
and for this cause came I into the world,
that I should bear witness unto the Truth.
— KJV; John 18:37
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In “The Word Is The Bread of Life“, we elaborated on a position that is a cornerstone of this series: that Christ’s Eternal Word is the only reason He came to Earth.
“Believing in Him” is not believing things about Him. It is believing in His Message sufficiently to put it into intensive practice, which brings about experiences that reveal It’s depth and authenticity (ref. “Act To Experience To Know“):
If a man love me, he will keep my words:
and my Father will love him,
and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.
He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings:
and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.
— John 14:23
Of course to keep The Word we must know The Word, which means we must have studied It personally and thoroughly.
Without the knowledge contained in His Message of Salvation, the human race was doomed:
Except ye repent,
ye shall all likewise perish.
— Luke 13:3
When we put aside our ultimately self-defeating pseudo-knowledge and study The Word to discover the principles gifted by Christ, we gain real knowledge and spiritual life:
The words that I speak unto you,
They are spirit, and they are life.
— John 6:63
Unfortunately, modern followership of Christ is not a path of ever-deepening knowledge and discovery, but a personality cult curated by religious organisations.
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Missing The Forest For The Trees
We can reflect on Christ’s Word primarily with our spirit or with our brains/intellect.
When we reflect on it with our spirit and, above all, seek to put what we have divined into practise, our very nature changes and we set in place a virtuous cycle of ever-increasing spiritual insight and earthly alignment.
But when we read the word primarily from a material standpoint, we ascribe unwarranted importance to the earthly events surrounding Christ’s life, such as the circumstances of His birth, His childhood, His family relationships, persecutions by religious authorities, etc. We miss the forest for the trees.
This is what led to the Christian personality cult of today. Everything was focused on His Personality and His earth-life (and therefore His death too) instead of on His Message, His Word.
But Christ rejected this overly personal approach every time He encountered it:
Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
…
whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven,
the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.
— Matt 12:48-50
And immediately the leprosy departed from him.
And he charged him to tell no man…
— Luke 5:13-14
And Jesus said unto him,
Why callest thou me good?
There is none good but one,
That is, God.
— Mark 10:18
He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory:
but he that seeketh His glory that sent him,
the same is true,
and no unrighteousness is in him.
— John 7:18
His fundamental point in all this? It’s not about me!
But on one side we have religious organisations for whom it is all about His personality. It is like a gathering of physicists that ascribe more importance to the details of Einstein’s personal life than his theory of relativity.
On the other hand we have intellectuals who have researched His life on Earth and concluded that He was just a human being to whom Divinity was later ascribed by overzealous disciples. Such people only demonstrate that they have never really tried to penetrate into His Message.
The promotion of earthly externals to a primary place in Christ’s Mission has led to uncountable errors. These include the prevailing misinterpretation of the Crucifixion, which we shall address in the next essay.
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