Neville Goddard Lectures: “Jesus or Barabbas?”

01 Jan Neville Goddard Lectures: “Jesus or Barabbas?”

___(??) John is my favorite, really. So in the 18th chapter of the gospel of John, Pilate is speaking to the Jews. And he turned to the Jews and he said, “You have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover; who would you have me release, the King of the Jews?” And, they cried out, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Then he adds, “Now Barabbas was a robber” (verse 39-40).

Now, we know nothing of any such amnesty as a custom. It is not attested outside of the gospel. You can’t find it as a custom at all; therefore, it’s a mystery. We have to start digging for the mystery, for it’s not a custom. And so we are told, just like an aside, Barabbas was a robber. So you have to start searching the scriptures to find out what is this robber, where is he? Now, listen to it carefully—-also in John, you’ll find this in the 10th chapter of the gospel of John—-“He who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens to him; the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out” (verses 1-7). Then we are told, “They did not understand what he was saying to them, and so he said to them again, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.’” They didn’t understand him. Any attempt to acquire anything in this world without the consciousness of the thing that you would acquire makes you a thief and a robber. The consciousness of health produces health; the consciousness of wealth produces wealth. You could inherit this very night a million dollars. Without the consciousness of wealth you’d spend it, you’d waste it; in fact, it would vanish from you. You can’t hold it. You can only hold that which you are aware of being. So the story is a revelation to man.

Now you pass judgment: “Without me you can do nothing.” Honestly, nothing? That’s what we are told. “If you abide in me and I abide in you, then you will bear much fruit, but apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). So you pass judgment, will you accept it? May I tell you, you are not going to find him outside of yourself. Tonight, there are in this country of ours, well, hundreds…how many millions? One hundred ninety million they claim? Well, take the world…they claim a billion Christians are in the world. I hate to be harsh in my judgment, but I don’t imagine that an nth part of an nth part of one percent have accepted Jesus. They think they’ve accepted him, but they haven’t, because they have some image of a being on a wall, or some being in their mind’s eye that they turn to mentally as Jesus. And that’s not Jesus. Jesus is your own wonderful human Imagination. When you say “I am,” that’s he. Will you trust him? No, I trust another Jesus, well, then you don’t know Jesus. By him all things are made, and you can easily find him if you accept that claim: “Apart from me you can do nothing.”