“I agree with the teachings of Jesus.”
Elon replied. To hundreds of millions of people. On the platform he owns. A man saying, plainly and publicly, that he agrees with what Jesus taught.
And the response told you everything you need to know about the state of Christianity.
The loudest voices didn’t say welcome.
They said not enough.
This is a pattern older than any denomination alive today.
A man moves toward God. The institution moves to intercept. Not to walk beside him but to correct him. To make sure the approach goes through proper channels. To ensure the seeker submits to the system before he stumbles onto what the system was built to protect him from: direct access.
Two thousand years ago, seven words slipped past temple guards, beneath the notice of Roman authority, through cracks in religious control.
The kingdom of God is within you.
Not behind a gate.
Not in a building you need permission to enter.
Within you. Already.
Jesus spent three years demonstrating what those seven words meant. The Father is real and present and accessible. Through trust. Through surrender. Through the lived practice of sonship. He told his followers to preach the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. The Father running toward prodigals before they finish their rehearsed apology. Forgiveness that has no ceiling.
They watched him live it for three years.
Then he died. And within a generation, the movement that carried his teaching became obsessed with his death. They preached the gospel of the resurrection when they’d been trained to preach the gospel of the Kingdom. They proclaimed what happened to Jesus when he’d spent three years showing them how to live.
They built a religion about him. He taught a religion of the Father.
The institution that formed around this inversion has been protecting it ever since. Someone gets close to what Jesus actually said, and the defense activates. Not to engage what was said. To diagnose who said it. The same reflex that demanded Jesus show his credentials in the temple is now aimed at anyone who takes his words seriously without institutional permission.
There aren’t two positions in this fight. There are three.
The first says Jesus was a wise teacher and nothing more. Follow his ethics, admire his philosophy, discard the rest. This is where Elon appears to stand. It’s reasonable. It honors the teaching. But it separates the words from the man who spoke them. The words don’t work without the man.
The second says Jesus is God, therefore you must submit to the institutional framework built around that claim. Accept the creeds. Join the church. Believe correctly or be lost. This position is theologically precise and spiritually blind. It guards the doctrine while missing the relationship the doctrine was supposed to describe.
The third is the one nobody is offering him.
Jesus was not merely a wise teacher. He was the living demonstration of what happens when a human being achieves perfect alignment with the Father’s will. The relationship he described between himself and the Father was not poetry. It was the most real thing that has ever happened on this planet. And his mission, every parable, every healing, every quiet morning alone with the Father, was aimed at showing you that the same relationship is available to you.
Not through correct belief alone. Through him. Through the door he opened by living it, dying for it, and making it permanently accessible to anyone willing to walk through.
His divinity is not a wall between you and God. His divinity is the guarantee that the wall is down.
“I and the Father are one.” The Greek is hen. Neuter. Unity of will and essence. Not heis, one person. And in the same breath: “That they may be one, as we are one.”
He didn’t claim exclusive access. He demonstrated it. Then held the door open.
They turned the bridge into a toll booth.
The religion of Jesus, the one he lived and taught and bled for, is an operating system for direct relationship with the Father. Trust him. Love without condition. Forgive without limit. Seek his presence not as theology but as practice, the way you’d seek a father who you know is in the next room. The kingdom is within you. Not someday in heaven. Now.
The religion about Jesus is a system of managed access. Correct belief. Institutional loyalty. Theological gatekeeping. It would be unrecognizable to the man it claims to represent. He opposed religious institutions that placed themselves between people and God. He didn’t oppose them gently. He made a whip.
His divinity matters because it proves the Father is accessible, not because it proves you need a middleman.
The church defender quotes John 1:1 and stops. He never reads aloud John 14:20: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” He cites councils and creeds but skips the plain words of John 14:23: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
Make our home with him.
That’s not institutional language. That’s a Father moving into the house.
The kingdom of heaven operates on mathematics that make institutional religion impossible.
A father kills the fattened calf for a son who wasted everything. Before the boy can finish his rehearsed apology. A vineyard owner pays the same wage to the last arrival as to the man who sweated since dawn. A Samaritan, despised, heretical, wrong by every institutional measure, stops for the dying man the priest stepped over.
Two thousand years of Sunday school turned these stories into moral lessons. But Jesus told them to destroy the very architecture of religious righteousness. To show that the Father’s grace runs on an economy no institution can administer, because the moment you try to manage grace, you’ve killed it.
The parables aren’t lessons. They’re mirrors. And once you see yourself in them, the older brother standing outside the feast, the priest crossing to the other side, the servant burying his talent in the dark, you don’t unsee it.
Jesus met the woman at the well and didn’t test her theology. He expanded her understanding. Thomas doubted. Jesus didn’t diagnose him. He offered his hands. Nicodemus came at night. Confused, cautious, afraid of what his people would think. Jesus sat with him in the dark. Where the man actually was.
Every time a human being took one step toward truth, Jesus met them there. Not at the finish line. At the step.
The institution demands the leap and controls the landing zone. Jesus honored the step.
The richest man on earth said seven words that should have been met with joy by anyone who claims to follow Jesus. Instead, he was corrected.
When someone affirms the teachings of Jesus and the first instinct is correction rather than welcome, the system is protecting itself. Not the seeker. The antibodies activate without coordination, a thousand voices running the same script, not because they conspired but because the institution trained them all the same way.
Elon is halfway there.
He found the teachings. What he hasn’t yet found is that the teacher and the teaching are the same thing, that the words carry the weight they carry because the man who spoke them lived in perfect relationship with the Father and then opened that relationship to everyone who would walk through.
The other half isn’t accepting a creed. It’s walking through the door and finding the Father he described on the other side. Real. Present. Within you. The way Jesus said from the beginning.
The common people heard Jesus gladly two thousand years ago. They’re hearing him again now. Through cracks the institution can’t seal. On platforms the gatekeepers don’t own. In seven words that bypass the toll booth and land where they were always meant to land.
In the chest.
You don’t need permission to live this. You never did.
The kingdom is within you. The Father knows you.
Go live like you believe it.
<3 EKO
I wrote a book on the religion OF Jesus versus the religion ABOUT Jesus. It’s called The Jesus Frequency, an operating manual for the relationship Jesus actually offered.
And if you want his parables the way he meant them, not tamed, not safe: Parables Unsealed will change how you hear everything he said.
Beautifully written. I hope Mr. Musk sees it.
Well said! Many who claim they follow Jesus actually want nothing to do with Jesus. The reason there are more than 44,000 recognised 'Christian" Denominations (divisions) in the world today is just that, what most religious persons want is to be right. So they become hard-core biblicalists. In that case, their "faith" becomes a mental practice, not a heart/spirit practice. Because of this, I find it very helpful to acknowledge that Paul's writings, both the authentic and the pseudepigraphal, add very little to a heart that wants to follow Jesus. Jesus' actions are the pattern.