Continuation of John’s message, received in March 1916, as found in, The Gospel of God’s Love, the Padgett Messages.
“The absurdity of believing that God demanded Jesus should die on the cross, as one of the necessary accompaniments of his death, is so apparent that I, and all of us in the Divine Kingdom of God, wonder that mortals can believe in such an unreasonable dogma.
“To follow this absurd proposition to its logical conclusion, not only that Jesus should die on the cross, but that Judas should become the traitor, that the Jews should clamor for his death, and that Pilate should pronounce the sentence. These were all necessary means to the satisfaction of the debt; and being so, why is it then that Judas, Pilate and the Jews are not “saviors of mankind” also?
“Jesus could not have clamored for his own death, or erected his cross or nailed himself thereto, or pierced his side with a spear in order that blood might flow. But maybe there would have been more elements of payment of debt in that method of dying than the way it was brought about.
“I, John, who loved the Master more than all the others, and who was closer to him and was with him when he was nailed to the cross, and among the first to take his body from the tree and felt his blood on my hands, tell you that his death on the cross did not pay any debt that mortals owed to God, nor did his blood wash away any of man’s sins. Oh, the pity of it all is that mortals for all these long years have believed they were saved by his sacrifice and blood, and by such belief have never come any nearer to the Master or in at-Onement with the Father.
“As I and others have written, the only way in which man can be saved from his sins and become at-One with God, is by the New Birth, which the Master has explained being the result of the inflowing into the soul of the mortal the Divine Love of the Father and the disappearing of everything that tends to sin and error.
“As this Love flows into a human’s soul, it permeates that soul, as does leaven the batch of dough, and thereby their soul becomes like the Father in his Divine nature and fitted to inhabit his Kingdom.” Amen