This is not a picture of Jesus. This is what mankind would like for Jesus to look like. Jesus was an iconoclast and destroyed false and deceptive images.
As a Christian, I don’t ever tell folks they are wrong about Jesus ,God or Jesus as God. It is one thing to notice a spiritual presence but human beings don’t know much of anything about God. I reject the notion that anyone in the flesh is an authority on a higher power.
My take on Jesus is unorthodox because I studied the entire bible without knowing what was in it at all. No one told me what to believe or what to focus on. The conclusions I made are that Jesus was real and not a fictional character. The New and Old Testaments are not perfect books. Much of the New Testament was written with a worldly agenda in mind. The truth is there but thinking is necessary to extract the truth out of the book. I can see that a lot of the scribes who wrote in the Old Testament, especially in the the books of Samuel and Kings were taking a “What is wrong with this picture” approach. Jesus was highly adept spiritually and could travel from the flesh into the spiritual world and then back again. He also knew that others could live spiritually and taught them how to do so. He also taught that consciousness does not necessarily end when physical death occurs.
Most of all, Jesus was completely sane. He was the only one who was. He taught sanity to others. To a mental health professional, Jesus’s version of sanity does not jive even in the slightest with a psychiatrist’s explanation. To a psychiatrist, anger is normal. In the Jesus version of sanity, anger is insane. Anger is a sin and to Jesus, sin is insane. To be in sin is to be insane. Or put differently, to be in is to be insane and to be stupid is insanity.
So, Jesus was the original chumpsmartener. Notice that with sinners and those sinned against, his big concern was the damage sinners were doing to themselves. Sinners or the insane were the focus of his ministry. I was left with the impression that salvation is achieved by becoming sane enough to be saved. The Beatitudes in the book of Matthew describe the mentality of one who is sane enough to have a saved soul.
Jesus treated the secular world as part of the animal kingdom. He was not at all complementary of government, or leaders. Jesus cautioned against becoming attached to life as an animal.
John 12:25: “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.”
This is often classified as one of the hard sayings of Jesus. In the secular world mankind is an animal struggling to survive. It is a brutal existence. Is there anything not to hate in light of a spiritual alternative? Loving life in the secular world is clearly a stumbling block with respect to gaining eternal live. Was Jesus a chumpsmartener?
