Jesus Saves

The words, “Jesus Saves” are prolific. This phrase would have more meaning for me if it was used in an advertising campaign for a bank.

I cannot believe that every time I sin that Jesus will save me – and everyone else who is sinning. What would be the point of that! What would we learn from it – there is a level of unconsciousness about it. If I have learnt anything about the Bible it is that there is a very important point behind every single word. So clever is the Bible that not even the misguided translators have been able to skew the real meaning.

In the New Testament the statement that Jesus saves is first found in Mt1:20-21, when the angel speaks to Joseph about what is about to happen, specifically “… she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

The name Jesus is said to mean saviour or deliverer. The question is: does the saviour do the actual saving? A deliverer simply takes something from one place to another. It seems to me that we must save ourselves which is made easier now because Christ was able to unite himself with this earth; in fact Jesus delivered him here!

 Now the word ‘sin’ in Greek is hamartion and it means ‘to miss the mark’. If we had a quiver full of arrows, and these arrows represented our thoughts, how often would we hit the mark because our thoughts were true? We must admit that, left to our own devices, we don’t know what to think about some things. The reason for this is that we are not consciously aware. Essentially, the birth of Jesus heralded in a new era of human consciousness. Unless we understand that human consciousness changes we cannot understand the significance of the birth of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus so that he could receive the Christ spirit into himself fully, and the subsequent resurrection.

In a nutshell, before Christ (BC) we didn’t think our own thoughts. Whatever thoughts we had were instinctual. We did not have the ability to make our own concepts from all that we saw in our environment. This instinctive process began to fade away and we started being able to put two and two together in our own minds. This process has reached its zenith in present day sciences. Now many scientists are admitting that there are answers beyond their ability to prove their concepts. We could say that a higher instinct is entering into human consciousness, but this time it must be thought through.  We could call this awareness higher imagining, higher inspiration and higher intuition. In order, these are our ability to create pictures from our own ideas, our ability to hear new ideas echoing within us, and our ability to experience something new so that we know it intimately. Many people who invent things will tell us that this is how they came to understand their invention in the first place.

So the term “Jesus Saves!” doesn’t mean that we can sit back and hand over to him. It means that we must understand what he did and its implication for our consciousness. We could say that Jesus has saved us from the abyss between the death of unthinking instincts and the birth of these higher faculties of picturing, hearing and experiencing beyond what physically meets our five senses