IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 7
7 Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you know Him. Therefore, you must be guiltless. Yet if you do not accept the necessary conditions for knowing Him, you have denied Him and do not recognize Him, though He is all around you. He cannot be known without His Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing Him. Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete, that knowledge is swept away from recognition in the very mind where God Himself has placed it. If you would but listen, and learn how impossible this is! Do not endow Him with attributes you understand. You made Him not, and anything you understand is not of Him.
Journal
Jesus is making it very clear that my function in the Atonement is to know my guiltlessness and to know my brother’s guiltlessness. I cannot know God until this is done. It is not that God is withholding Himself from me until I do what He wants. Rather, it is that guilt prevents me from recognizing God. When we don’t recognize God as He is, we have a tendency to create Him in our own image, and we then project our mistaken beliefs onto Him.
That is how we wound up with a scary God who believes in guilt and is a God of judgment and vengeance. We projected our own beliefs onto God and now are afraid of Him. But all of this is just in our mind. We did not create God and we do not understand Him. To undo this tangled mess we made, we must begin where the error started, right in our own mind. We must let go of the belief in guilt, and refuse to believe in it regardless of the form it takes. When we do that God will become known to us because it is His Will that this be done. God Himself placed the knowledge of Himself in our mind. He must want us to know Him.
The only thing that makes this seem difficult is that the ego points out situations in our story that seem to prove the need for guilt. We are shown pedophiles, murderers, rapists and all sorts of sinners. We experience unkindness and attacks almost daily even within our own homes and from people we love. We perpetrate these unkind acts and outright attacks ourselves, and on people we love. We do this sometimes deliberately and often thoughtlessly. Then we take this as proof that guilt must be real.
We have it backward, though. We accept the ego proposal that guilt is real and from that belief, we project situations that prove what we have decided to believe. So we do not believe in guilt because of what we see and experience in the world. We see and experience these situations because we believe in guilt. The solution is to disregard the evidence our senses show us because we know it is unreliable. Instead, we begin with the understanding that guilt is not real. It does not exist, and from there we can accept a different way of seeing what is happening.
The ego has shown us “proof” of guilt because we asked it to. Now let’s ask the Holy Spirit to decide for us what these situations mean. When you think that something you are experiencing proves guilt is real and warranted, say this: “Holy Spirit, decide for me what this means.” Open your mind and heart to a different answer than you are accustomed to. Your innocence will be revealed to you because you are ready to acknowledge it. This will come in a way that is as undeniable as it is nearly impossible to describe. In this certain knowledge of your innocence, you will know your brother’s innocence as well. This is possible because God would give you a function you could not fulfill.
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