Thought Adjuster: “The lengthy process of salvation initiated, outlined, and completed by Jesus, a divine son incarnated as a man among men to show YOU the ‘living way,’ was dwarfed by human misinterpretations, shortsightedness, preconceived ideas, and lingering ignorance. It was presented as a miraculous and instantaneous collective redemption performed by a superhero who shed his innocent blood as a ransom for the sins of humanity to assuage the God of Love. Can you make sense of such inconsistency?

“The cross is not the symbol of the sacrifice of the innocent Son of God in the place of guilty sinners and in order to appease the wrath of an offended God, but it does stand forever, on earth and throughout a vast universe, as a sacred symbol of the good bestowing themselves upon the evil and thereby saving them by this very devotion of love.” [UB, 188:5.9]

In reality, the process of salvation is ongoing, lengthy, and sevenfold. Your faith is the vote of confidence that initiates it. By following the ‘living way’ trailblazed by Jesus, you incrementally ascend “from the material level of self-consciousness to the spiritual level of God-consciousness” [UB, 117:3.3] —before and after death parts you from your physical body.

After his death, the ascending Jesus opened the way for his ‘followers’—those making the conscious decision to walk the ways of righteousness throughout eternity—to the next chapters of their salvation.

The salvation he brought to this world and beyond runs deep: “1. Salvation from material fetters in the personal realization of sonship with God, who is spirit. 2. Salvation from intellectual bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth shall set him free. 3. Salvation from spiritual blindness, the human realization of the fraternity of mortal beings and the morontian awareness of the brotherhood of all universe creatures; the service-discovery of spiritual reality and the ministry-revelation of the goodness of spirit values. 4. Salvation from incompleteness of self through the attainment of the spirit levels of the universe [. . .] 5. Salvation from self, deliverance from the limitations of self-consciousness [. . .] 6. Salvation from time, the achievement of an eternal life of unending progression in God-recognition and God-service. 7. Salvation from the finite, the perfected oneness with Deity [. . .] And all this, in potential, is contained within the reality of the faith of the human experience of religion. And it can be so contained since the faith of Jesus was nourished by, and was revelatory of, even realities beyond the ultimate.” [UB, 101:6.9-17]; [Emphasis added]

Jesus started at ‘the material level of self-consciousness’—just as you did. Animated by an ardent desire to solve the many riddles of the human condition, he grew quickly aware of the many conflicting and illogical interpretations about his Father in heaven.

His groundbreaking realization was that the Father is in him as he is in the Father. Once he established a living communion with his in-house divine Partner, he worked his human way to the spiritual level of God-consciousness and became ‘the living way of ascension from the self to God.” [UB, 117:3.3]