Gonna get it wrong. Gonna misquote Jesus. But I hate the Bible, hate the way it contradicts itself and is somehow fine with it. How it drives people mad and doesn’t apologize for it. So I am not going to look this up. You can judge for yourself if it is close enough or if I am taking liberties.
And Jesus was asked, what is the greatest of the commandments? And he said, “Love thy brother as you love thyself. This is my greatest commandment.”
Is it in there? The damnation of almost all Christians. Let’s see. You want to look at it. I will show you the way it is ignored and then we will see if I am damned.
Because I might be. Won’t find out until this is all over, until Reality of an Unreal Mind is finished.
Sasquatch said very early that he did not consider himself a Christian. Said Christian meant “Little Christ,” and he did not feel as though he deserved that title.
So he looked around his fellow Christians and did not like what he saw. He took his Bible and went to the edge of his church. He looked at the words of Jesus, the deeds of the man himself, to decide if he could agree with the Son of God and if he wanted to keep worshipping.
What he found when he studied Jesus was that he could. He could believe in that man, but following him was a different matter. It was a struggle, and the Bible sets Christians up to fail.
So he is ministering to me, and talks to me about the act of salvation, how Jesus died for my sins. He describes in graphic detail the horror of the crucifixion and talks about the Cup of Wrath.
Said it is a cup filled with all the sins of every person who ever lived and that, to His horror, Jesus drank it. “If thou can, let this cup pass me,” Jesus said. But before He died, He drank the Cup of Wrath and in doing so, accepted all the sins of man. All we have to do is deal with it, apologize for it and He will forgive us for it.
Evidently it tastes awful.
So this is the message I get from Sasquatch.
We go on a trip. We wanted to go every year we were friends but only managed to go twice. The first time, we started talking about people in general and he mentioned how certain people disgusted him. I asked him, “Who do you respect? What does a person have to do to get your respect?”
“Well, I respect learning. Anyone trying to pursue the academics. I respect artists and creators. I respect other Christians trying to walk the world of man with the word of God as their guide.” Then he fell silent.
I was shocked. I was horrified.
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yeah, that covers it pretty much.”
What commandment is the greatest goes through my head.
“Well, I can’t agree with that,” I said.
“What does your list sound like?”
“Anyone struggling with something terrible and fighting through it,” I said. “I respect the person that works a job they hate for hours that are almost inhuman and comes home still ready to love their family and support the lives of their loved ones.
“Doesn’t matter the job,” I said. “If it is a college professor or a dock worker, they get the same respect from me. If they move a box from one side of the factory to the other, I don’t care. If they do it without hating the world, I respect them.” I really thought about it and went on. “Anyone who puts themselves before another. Anyone that cares for the sick or the infirmed. Anyone that loves with all of their heart anything worth loving, whether they do it well or not.”
He sat in silent shock.
“See Sasquatch, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Everyone is in some sort of pain. And if they are struggling and they can still love, then they have my respect.”
I sat with him once and asked him if I was going to Hell. I have to stop now and try to explain why I am giving this man so much power over my relationship with God and why I am coming to him for all this information. I need to explain the man a little and his background.
At one time, Sasquatch was in seminary. He wanted to be a member of the clergy. He studied the Bible exhaustively. He learned Greek and Aramaic. He learned how to translate the Bible from the source material. Sasquatch was taught the ways of God by those who spent their entire lives studying the Bible and its mysteries.
When he gave me that book at the beginning of our friendship, he asked me what I thought of it and I told him it sounded fine. I agreed with most of it.
He told me God had laid on his heart that I was in need of him. “God is fighting for your soul,” he said. “He is fighting to work in your life. God wants you to come to Him and serve Him. You have wandered too long. God wants you to come home. He has told me so.”
“And you are going to help me get there?” I said. I had been fighting for years to make up with God. For Camelot. For Harmony. For all the abuse all of us shared. I had been trying to get past it and love God again. I had been fighting to come home. And the fact that another man, a man with a background in study of the Word of God, was going to make it a priority to see me back comforted me.
I thought I had a guide.
So when I had a question, I came to him. He became an authority on the Will of God for me. But no man should try to be that for another man. No man should vow to bring another home to God. It ends in greed of power. It ends with that person getting in God’s way.
Rose had said to me so many years ago, decades ago, that God and the Devil were fighting a war for my soul. She told me I would serve one of them in the end. I always wanted it to be God. So now, so many years later, a man of Christ has come to me and promised to get me there.
I was given hope for the first time. And I trusted in the guide God had sent me. But I would find out this was not God’s guide. This man just wanted to say he had saved my soul.
One day I came to him with one simple question.
“Am I going to Hell?”
He said he didn’t know. He was not sure. But he still had hope. It could go either way at this point.
I had told him I had been “Saved,” and in the Baptist faith that meant no matter how far I found myself from God, in the end I would see Heaven.
His answer in the face of this fact, a fact embraced by many different kinds of Christian dominations, was, “I have to believe there has to be a re-up. That you have to rededicate yourself to God or you are going to Hell,” Sasquatch said. “Maybe there is something you have to do to please God so He will let you in. There has to be.”
Not biblical. But I let it soak into my bones. Nothing I had done so far in my life was good enough. And when Jesus had said all I had to do was accept Him as my savior and admit that I was a sinner and could not see the Kingdom of Heaven without Him, when Jesus had told me to repent, when I had been baptized in the name of the Lord, Jesus had lied.
This chapter is from Reality of the Unreal Mind, Vol. 3: The Keep.
Jesse Teller 