The following is excerpted from Do You Like Jesus – Not the Church?

Written words, especially words thousands of years old and not in the original language, can lead to various interpretations. Add to this the manipulators of word and fact. As we have seen, wrong translations, personal agendas, lies, and manipulations of truth have caused much suffering and bloodshed over the centuries—a fact still true today. What then is the truth?

I believe our truth comes from knowledge, the experience of that knowledge, and our connection to and experience of nature as revealed by heaven and earth. It does not solely evolve from what someone else has written, whether it is supposedly God inspired or not.

Jesus felt this way. It’s very evident Jesus looked to nature, the “kingdom outside us,” for truth. He did not stop people in the street or gather them by the seashore and quote from the Torah. He asked people to look within themselves and to look to nature. “Unlike the teachers of conventional wisdom of his day, Jesus was not a ‘Torah sage.’ His teaching ordinarily did not take the form of elaborating or commenting upon the Torah, even though he obviously knew it and sometimes referred to it. Rather than appealing to sacred text or citing opinions of earlier teachers, he most often appealed to the world of human experience or made observations about nature.”[i] Accordingly, let your Bible as literal truth collect dust. Let us turn to nature and our heart for truth:

“Seek not the law in your scriptures, for the law is life, whereas the scripture is dead. I tell you truly, Moses received not his laws from God in writing, but through the living word. The law is living word of living God to living prophets for living men. In everything that is life is the law written. You find it in the grass, in the tree, in the river, in the mountain, in the birds of heaven, in the fishes of the sea; but seek it chiefly in yourselves. For I tell you truly, all living things are nearer to God than the scripture which is without life. God so made life and all living things that they might by the everlasting word teach the laws of the true God to man. God wrote not the laws in the pages of books, but in your heart and in your spirit. They are in your breath, your blood, your bone; in your flesh, your bowels, your eyes, your ears, and in every little part of your body. They are present in the air, in the water, in the earth, in the plants, in the sunbeams, in the depths and in the heights. They all speak to you that you may understand the tongue and the will of the living God. But you shut your eyes that you may not see, and you shut your ears that you may not hear. I tell you truly, that the scripture is the work of man, but life and all its hosts are the work of our God. Wherefore do you not listen to the words of God which are written in His works? And wherefore do you study the dead scriptures which are the work of the hands of men?”[ii]

This law, the living vibration of living God, is the divine spark and starlight and divine consciousness that is within all things of creation. This is the true message of Jesus.

[i] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, 98.

[ii] Edmond Bordeaux Szekely, The Essene Gospel of Peace, 13.