Do you know that there is a difference between salvation through works and salvation through grace? People tend to think they can purify their souls to such an extent that they will be able to earn their ticket to heaven or, as I like to say, stick the landing in Paradise when they pass over.

“The Prologue and the Promise” by Robert McCall was a popular image of Paradise that once graced the walls of Disney’s Florida EPCOT Center.

You know, according to this gospel I’ve been unfolding here at Gnostic Insights, we continually come back to Earth until we remember the Father and our home in Heaven with the Aeons. It is the memory of the Father, or gnosis, that enables us to leave this material plane and stay in the ethereal. The ethereal plane doesn’t have any error; it doesn’t contain any sin or misunderstandings. The ethereal plane of the Fullness of God is the Fullness of the Father and the Fullness is all of the possible expressions of the Son of the Father. The Son is the monad that encapsulates all of the qualities of the Father, like the bucket dipped into the sea. The Father, the Son, and the Fullness all possess the same qualities—that is why they are considered a 3-in-1 entity, and the Son and the Fullness flow from the Father as the originating source of consciousness.

The Father is all good. The Father is not a black and white, some good, some bad, gotta be balanced, Yin/Yang kind of God–that is not what the Gnostic God is. The Gnostic God is love and light, and in him is no darkness at all. Our goal here on Earth isn’t to perfectly straddle light and dark. Our goal here on Earth is to move into the light. And the only way we can follow the light is by giving glory to the God above all gods. We align ourselves with the will of God by giving glory to the Father, the Son, and the All. We can’t move into the light by performing certain rituals. That was one of the mistakes that, for example, Martin Luther made when he was a young man. He was terrified of dying in sin and going to hell, as were all the Catholics of those days, because there wasn’t any way to have a relationship with God on a one to one basis; all of the relationships with God were expected to go through the priesthood and the Pope, and it cost money to have your sins forgiven. Martin Luther spent hours every day in confession to his priest, just in case he overlooked any sin in his life that would send him to hell if he should happen to die that day. Paying money for redemption was a grift that the Catholic church was pulling in those days. What Martin Luther did was to recognize it as a grift, that is, to see it as a con game meant to convince people that, unless they gave the church money, they were going to go to hell. It was an extortion by Rome to raise money. But extortion is not faith. It’s not an expression of free will. It’s coercion through fear, in much the same way that our current political masters attempt to coerce us through fear and intimidation to follow lock step in their demands.

I just read an interesting biography of Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas, and it’s a pretty good biography. In case you don’t know, Martin Luther was the person who pried Christianity from the clutches of the Catholic Church. The major branches of Christianity today are Catholic and Protestant. Protestant means “those who protest,” because it arose as a reaction to the overreach and abuses of the Catholic Church. The biography I read paints a clear picture of the pressure that Luther was under as he was a young priest and monk coming up in the ranks of Catholicism. In those days, people didn’t read the Bible. Most had never even seen a Bible. Even monks and priests had never read the Bible. So that was the first thing that differentiated Martin Luther from his compatriots—he read the Bible and they didn’t. They didn’t know what the gospel was. They only knew the rules and practices dictated by the Pope and his enforcers. It was against the Law for an ordinary person like you and me to read the Bible. Why? For one thing, there is nothing in the Bible that says salvation comes through paying priests money to forgive us our sins. If the people had been allowed to read the Bible, they would have discovered that salvation comes through Christ and through Christ alone.

So it is funny to me that, in this day and age, 500 hundred years past the Protestant Reformation where Luther made it possible for Christians to read the Gospel for themselves, we Christian Gnostics have a similar opportunity to research Gnostic scriptures for ourselves, just like Martin Luther did with the Bible. These Gnostic scriptures were purposely cut out of the New Testament by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome because they lessened their power and control over the people. So, in much the same way that Luther was able to read the Bible for the first time and translate it into the common tongue so that people could read it for themselves, which was German for him because they lived in Germany, we now have the same privilege and blessing to be able to read for ourselves the Gnostic Gospel that was cut out of the faith by the Pope’s Council of Nicea seventeen hundred years ago.

I’m finding that there’s a great deal of confusion about what it means to be a modern Gnostic. I often say here at Gnostic Insights that gnosis involves remembering that we come from the consciousness of the Father, that we are part of that emanation of the Father through the Son, and then through the Fullness of God. And that we living creatures are the fruit of these Fullnesses; we are literally the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are like seeds or like spores of these Aeons that have come down to this material plane, which is not the ethereal plane where the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirits of the Fullness of God dwell.

Up there, in the ethereal plane, it’s all good, because it is the Fullness of God, and God is all good. Sin and error cannot, by definition, arise within the Fullness of God. The misunderstandings—the sin—come from the Fall, not from the Father. And I believe that the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi is an extremely important Christian scripture that needs to be put back into the New Testament, and that is actually what I’m attempting to do here at Gnostic Insights. It is a kind of a Gnostic Reformation that furthers the Lutheran Reformation. Now we can be part of a Gnostic Reformation that furthers the work of Christ and the Father here on Earth.

It is very important for us to understand that we don’t need to perform certain rituals in order to work our way up into the ethereal plane. We don’t have to be perfect under the Law. Luther discovered that fact when he studied the Bible, and it released him from his obsession with obtaining perfection through confession and works. Today I’m going to read you some verses from the New Testament that clearly state you don’t have to be perfect under the Law in order to earn enlightenment. “The Law” refers to the commandments handed down through Moses and the Hebrew nation in the Old Testament that they were required to keep. The Law of the Old Testament includes not only the Ten Commandments, but hundreds of other laws that regulate morals, religious observances, and social structures like marriage and property law.

It is well known that people are not able to keep the commandments—they serve more as a measurement of one’s need for mercy and redemption than a rule book that can be perfectly followed.

In Ephesians chapter 2, verse eight says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of ourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.” Works means doing good deeds. It means helping your neighbor. Mowing the old lady’s lawn next door. Going out of your way to do favors for people. These are works intended not only to help others, but to raise you in virtue—to earn Brownie points that raise you in elevation in the eyes of God. But guess what? Even that’s not good enough. It’s never good enough, because we’re not perfect.

And why aren’t we perfect? Well, if you’ve been listening to Gnostic Insights and you’ve heard this series or read my book called “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate,” you know that we are literally melded to this Fallen world by these material bodies we possess. A criticism of Gnosticism that I often read in the footnotes of books, even in that Luther biography as a footnote in the margins, as well as the margin notes of this New Testament translation I’ve been using by David Bentley Hart, is that Gnostics are “world haters.” The heresiologists, that is, the heresy denouncers of Christendom, present a false version of Gnosticism in their critiques. The Gnosticism the heresiologists rail against is a straw dog—it’s not true Gnosticism. We are very familiar with false narratives nowadays in our current political climate. Each side misrepresents the other side in order to magnify differences and to stir up hatred and division. This same phenomenon of false narratives—misinformation—has been used against Gnostics for almost two thousand years.

Gnostics are not world haters or Christ haters. But we do believe that sin entered the world far before Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve did not bring evil into the otherwise perfect world represented by the Garden of Eden. We are not sinners because we humans have inherited sin from Adam and Eve, despite what orthodox Christianity teaches. Human error arises from ignorance of our ethereal origins and the never-ending war with the Deficiency. We sin because, when we’re in these material bodies, we are blinded by the density of matter. Can you see through a wall? I’m sitting here facing the wall that goes into my garage and I know that my car is parked in the garage and all kinds of boxes are stacked in there. Can I see through the wall? No, of course not. Why not? Is it because I’m sinful? No, it’s because there is material in the wall. It’s because of the molecules and the atoms that create density through which I cannot see. Sometimes people have out of body experiences or experiences within the spirit, where you are out of your material body and there you are able to see through and pass through those walls. But that is not our normal condition and, in the context of this material cosmos, I don’t think we can aspire to that condition.

Many earnest people seem to believe that we can divorce ourself from our material body by meditation, prayer, or psychedelics, and achieve pure spirituality here on Earth. Yet who among us has such a strong will that they are able to resist all temptation and never sin under the Law? If that is what we must aspire to in order to reach enlightenment, that’s going to leave just about everybody else behind. Is that what you want? That only you are good enough to make it to Heaven? Do you see the impossibility of that being the system designed by the Father to bring people home? Do you think the Father expects only mystics and perfect people to return to the Fullness? No, that is not a loving attitude to leave everybody else behind. The Father, being all love, does not leave anyone behind.

Do you know that joke where you’re running away from a bear in the forest with your friend? You don’t have to outrun the bear to escape, you just have to outrun your friend. That’s the attitude of people, it seems to me, who think they can become so purified that they’re good enough to enter the perfection of Heaven through their own efforts. Surely, they can see that they are so much better, so much more loving, than their neighbors—surely, they think, they have earned their passport to Heaven. Except, that isn’t the way it works.

Getting to Heaven is a gift. It is freely given by the Father through the Christ. You receive this gift through faith. Again, quoting Ephesians: “For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of ourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.”

Here in chapter 3 of the letter to the Romans, verse 10, it says, “As it has been written, there is no one righteous—not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become useless. There is no one practicing kindness, there is not even one.” Ah, well, then. Are we all going to go to hell? Because here’s the thing; now follow the logic here. Follow the logic. The ethereal plane is all good. The Fullness of God represents all of the attributes of the perfection of God—perfection only—for there is no sin in God. We come from the Fullness of God. We are the fruit of the Fullness of God and the Fullness of God is all good. There is no sin in the Fullness of God. So, if we are the fruit of the Fullness of God, then at the end of days, after the big roll up, when the density of the material cosmos passes away and God calls everyone home, who will be qualified to go home? Only mystics and saints? Hardly.

Everybody will go home. Every fruit of God is going to come home because we are of God, and in order for the Fullness of God to become full again, we all need to go home. You see how this makes sense, right? How could the Fullness of God leave 90% of itself down on the earth or send 90% of itself to eternal damnation? Then it wouldn’t be the Fullness of God anymore, would it? It would be the 10% of God. God would be diminished to a fraction of itself. You know, it says at the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate when talking about the attributes of the Father that the Father is immutable. This means the Father cannot be changed. The Father didn’t come from anywhere and the Father is not going anywhere different. The Father doesn’t start out as one thing and then become a different thing.

And if the Aeons of the Fullness are each particularized parts of the Father, each with their own point of view and each with their own little ego—if the Fullness of God consists of the variables of the Father—then how can they not be made whole again? How can they not be returned to their Fullness again, with Logos and the Demiurge and all of their fruits redeemed and restored? Because then that would mean that the Father had changed. It would mean that the Father is not immutable and the Father can be changed by things that happen here in the cosmos. And that simply cannot be the case because it’s an a priori statement that the Father doesn’t change. Therefore, everything that emanates from the Father must be able to be fully recalled back into the Father.

To me, that is the logic behind universal salvation. Everyone will be saved because the Father can’t leave anyone behind. The Father can’t send anyone to hell. The Father is not going to condemn anyone to eternal damnation because then the Father would never be made whole again. And that is not in the Father’s nature. At the end of days, at the end of the material cosmos, everybody’s going to find themselves back up into Logos, back up into the Fullness, back up into the Son, back up into the Father in that nested and fractal way. Do you understand what I’m saying?  We can use logic to figure this out; we don’t even have to go into all of the particular scriptures that say it over and over again.

And that’s what makes us Gnostic Christians, because we are able to apply logic and gnosis in a way not available to Catholics and Protestants. We are Gnostic Christians because we realize that all we need to know is that we come from the Father, as when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. If you see me, you see my Father.”  Like Jesus, we also come from the Father, but Jesus was fully aware of it. He walked in the spotlight of glory. He walked in the holy beam of the light of the Holy Spirit at all times, without fail. That is what it means when we say Jesus lived a sinless life. His human side was wedded to the material, as are we. But Jesus was fully cognizant of the Holy Spirit at all times, and this kept him centered within the Fullness of God. Therefore, his material flesh did not lead him to error.

We, on the other hand, don’t live every moment fully centered in the holiness of God. Once in a while we give glory and step into it and then we feel the presence of God. We may even perform miracles at those times. But the world sneaks back in. The world brings us back down, and next thing you know, we’re yelling at our neighbor or cursing the foolishness of the other political party. So it’s very hard to stay within the glory beam of the Father and to pass away while we are within the glory beam of the Father. Therefore, the Christ and the 3rd order of powers was created to assist us. The Christ possesses all of the mojo of the entire Father, Son, and Fullness of God and the undifferentiated ALL. They all put their hearts and minds together as one and prayed for redemption for us, for the 2nd order of powers. And that redemption comes to us through the Christ.

The Cross of Christ bridges the gap between the Fullness of God and the Deficiency, redeeming us all

So if you reject the notion of needing a Christ, well, right there, you’re full of yourself. If you reject the Christ because you believe in the strength of your Ego more than the Christ’s, then you’re not on the glory beam. Think about it. We need the pattern of Christ’s human inheritance plus the Father’s perfection and love to overlay upon our souls. This lends us the perfection of Christ that redeems us from the karma and memes we have generated. That is the way to achieve full enlightenment.

I started this episode by reading the letter to Romans, chapter 3, verse 10. Here it is again: “As it has been written, there is no one righteous—not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become useless. There is no one practicing kindness, there is not even one.” Skipping ahead to verses 22 through 31 from Hart’s translation, “And, by the faithfulness of the Anointed [Jesus], God’s justice is for everyone [as well as upon everyone] keeping the faith; for there is no distinction: For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, Being made upright as a gift by his grace, through the manumission fee paid in the Anointed One, Jesus: Whom God set forth as a place of atonement through faith in his blood, as a demonstration of his justice through the dismissal of past sins… Where, therefore, the boasting? It has been excluded. By what law? That of observances? No, rather by faith’s law. For we reckon a man as vindicated by faithfulness, apart from observances of Law… Do we then abolish Law through faith? Let it not be so! Rather, we establish it.”

So, then, the one act of righteousness that redeems all humankind also takes place through a single Aeon—that Aeon being the Christ that is God in Human form. “Manumission” means “release from slavery.” Faith in Christ releases us from slavery to the Demiurge. “Redemption” means “paying the price to retrieve goods,” like getting things back from a pawn shop. We second order powers have been redeemed from the material world. We are no longer slaves. We are only here waiting to be picked up from the pawn shop to go home.

The Law of Moses, the law of the Old Testament—the 10 Commandments and then all of the other laws added to those in the Old Testament and the Torah, were never meant to free us from this material world. The Law was meant to bind us in slavery to it. And while these Laws are given by what conventional Christians and Jews call “God,” in our Gnostic system of belief, we tend to think the Law was given by the fallen Demiurge to put us on a treadmill of enslavement. Because we know that no one can live up to the Law. You can’t ever hope to fulfill the Law if you are a man who looks upon a woman with lust in your heart—for the Law says that you’ve already committed adultery with them in your mind and you’ll be condemned to hell for doing so. The same thing goes for other people’s possessions. The Law says “Don’t covet your neighbors possessions.” Covet means wanting. Means wishing you had it. Isn’t advertising all about stirring up covetousness? And how about all these selfies posted to social media? Are they not meant to make you covet what that person has? Oh, well, then you’re going to hell, according to the Law. So that’s what this verse is talking about. Those are just two of the commandments. The actual purpose of the Law isn’t to give us a guidebook so that we can be perfectly moral folks. It’s to show how sinful we are that we can’t possibly live up to the Law.

OK, all you good Christians—are you observing the Sabbath? That is one of the Ten Commandments. As the Orthodox Jews do, and as the 7th Day Adventists do, but none of the Catholics and none of the other Protestant denominations observe the Saturday Sabbath, which means you’re not to do any work on the Sabbath. And by the way, the Sabbath is apparently supposed to be on Saturday, not Sunday. You’re supposed to spend the entire day not lifting a finger. You’re supposed to spend the entire day in prayer, and reading Holy books. You are allowed to make love if you’re married because the marriage bed is a sacrament and so, lucky you. But you’re not supposed to spend the day surfing the Internet. Or watching television or going to the movies or mowing your lawn or going to Little League games. That’s all enough breaking of the Law right there to keep you from going to Heaven.

No, we need the Christ in order to forgive the sins that we know we are committing, as well as the ones we may be unaware of. Therefore, we need to realize that we need the Christ to redeem us, despite our sins. As it says in First Corinthians 15:22: “For just as in Adam all die, so also in the Anointed all will be given life.” This verse says that sin reigns in death, meaning not physical death like we usually think of death, but death as ignorance of the Father, death as the dominion of the material cosmos. In other words, this world is reigned by death, whereas the Fullness of the Aeons is gnosis, life, righteousness, and love.

We’ll talk more about this in future podcasts, but please, what I’d like you to take away from this one is that we need faith in the Savior, the Anointed, having been sent from the Fullness of God for us. So there’s no downside to having faith in the Christ. There’s no downside at all. Have faith. And it is through this faith and the grace given to you that you will find yourself not wanting to sin. Sins lose their allure when you have the Christ dwelling within you. The glory of God, the peace and happiness given by the Christ, far outweighs the temporary highs from sin. A personal relationship with Jesus as the Christ is available to everyone who prays for redemption and invites him in.

Please, I’d like to hear your comments. I don’t have them opened at the end of these podcasts, but if you would like to comment, please go to the website home page for GnosticInsights.com  and use the contact me form and send me a letter and I’ll write you back. God bless us all. Keep the faith. Onward and upward.

Please join me in spreading this Gnostic Gospel far and wide. Do you know that I have no one helping me put out these podcasts, other than my brother’s stellar feedback on each episode? I write, record, and edit the audio all by myself. If Gnostic Insights had some cashflow, I’d hire an editing company to do the technical editing portion for me. I purposely don’t allow advertising on this podcast or website because this space trusts only in God and you, the listeners.