Neville Goddard's lecture "Jesus" (20-11-1968) reinterprets Jesus Christ not as a historical man but as the divine plan of salvation manifest in human imagination. He argues that Christ is synonymous with "the Word of God" and that truth must be discovered and experienced internally, rather than projected onto an external historical figure. Using scriptural analogies such as the stories of Absalom and the crucifixion, Goddard illustrates how God sacrifices divinity to become the breath of life within each individual. He emphasizes that faith is belief in the truth he expresses, not in himself nor in an external Jesus, and that one must personally realize this plan through imaginative experience. Goddard also highlights that ultimate redemption and union with God unfold in the world of imagination, where one discovers the divine self. The lecture concludes by urging listeners to hold onto the truth of God's plan of salvation, which resides within and will set them free.
Because the Christian world believes in a man, this question is asked me over and over again. “Do you not believe that a man called Jesus Christ walked the earth?” It is my hope that I will be able to clarify this point for you, that you may know the truth which will set you free.
Speaking of Jesus Christ, it is said that his name shall be called the Word of God. Here we see Jesus as a person with a name, yet he is the truth that sets man free. Confessing that he came into the world to do his Father’s will, Jesus made this statement:
” This is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him, shall have eternal life.” (John 6)
Now, there is not a truth, or a lie, that does not have a man as its agent, as it takes a man to express either a lie or a truth. Jesus Christ is called the truth. He is not a unique man who was born in four BC and named Jesus Christ, but God’s plan of salvation. In the Book of Samuel the story is told of David’s son Absalom who revolted against David and tried to take over the kingdom. All during the battle, however, David inquired over and over again,” How is it with the lad, Absalom?” And when David received thenews of Absalom’s death he went up to the chamber over the gate of Jerusalem and wept crying, “Oh Absalom, my son, my son. Would I have died instead of you. Oh Absalom, my son, my son.” This, one of the saddest yet poignant statements of scripture, is a foreshadowing of the story recorded in the New Testament where we find that God the Father does what David longed to do, for only God can give his life to save his Son.
Speaking to humanity, Blake put these words into the mouth of Jesus:” Fear not! Unless I die thou can’st not live. But if I die I shall arise again and thou with me. Wouldest thou love one who never died for thee? Or ever die for one who had not died for thee? And if God died not for Man, and giveth not himself eternally for Man, Man could not exist.”
God died by emptying himself of his divinity. He is not pretending to be dead, but actually becomes the very breath of life of every child born of woman.
Now walking in the forgetfulness of man, God has prepared a plan for his return and man’s redemption. This plan is Jesus Christ, but because it is personified, man has taken the vehicle that conveyed the instruction for the instruction, and the agent that expressed the great truth for the truth itself. If truth is to be expressed, it takes an individual man to express it. Therefore, when the story of redemption unfolds in a man, he relates hisown experience.
In scripture, the words see and know are interchangeable in both Hebrew and Greek. When I paint you a word picture of the plan of salvation, I am showing you God’s Son. It does notnecessarily follow that you will understand what I am saying and believe me, so the statement is made, “To everyone who sees the Son and believes, is eternal life.” I hope you can follow my words, understand and accept them.
Jesus Christ is not a person, but God’s plan of redemption which must be discovered and understood. One must wear a body of flesh and blood in order to enter this world, but it takes a spiritual body to enter the kingdom of heaven, and my words are spirit!
No man can set you free. This man called Neville is simply an agent expressing truth. It is not good enough for you to just understand it. You must believe, not in Neville, but in the truth he is expressing.
I am telling you what I have experienced. Jesus Christ, God’s story of salvation, has been fulfilled in me. I have experienced the birth, the discovery of God’s only begotten son David, the splitting of the temple and the ascent of the Son of man into heaven and the descent of the dove. The majority of the people of the world will not accept my story. They want a person on the outside as their personal savior, unwilling to believe that their savior is a plan of salvation who is God Himself!
Now I ask you. do you believe in scripture? It is said that, “Among those born of woman, none is greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” If you insist upon believing that Jesus Christ is a man of flesh and blood, and the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist, then John is greater than Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, God’s plan of salvation, is a supernatural drama. It hasn’t a thing to do with any child which came (or comes) from the womb of a woman. His story takes place in an entirely different area of the mind. Read the 6th, 8th, 18th and 19th chapters of John to discover the wonderful hiddenness of Christ recorded there.
In the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, Jesus was Joseph’s son, but Jesus does not make that confession. He tells you, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my will, butthe will of him who sent me, and heaven is within.’ How can Jesus be sent from heaven and be Joseph, a mortal man’s son? When asked who his father was Jesus answered,
” You know neither me nor my Father, for it you knew me you would know my Father also.” In other words, if you know Christ in the true sense of the word, you know he is yourself. You will know your Father is he who is called God. Although it takes a man to express God’s plan, Christ cannot be seen by mortal eyes. He can only be known and experienced as God’s plan of salvation.
When Pilate asked one who expressed the truth to tell him who he was and where he was from, he did not answer. And when Pilate said, “Do you not know I have the power to release you or to crucify you,” truth replied, “You have no power over me unless it is given you from within.”
The world of Imagination is not this world, and the drama called Jesus Christ unfolds in the world of Imagination. I am sharing with you what I have experienced in that world.
Now, a lady writes: “In my dream I was watching the tape of my recorder move from one reel to the other. As I watched, I realized that if I arrested the activity I observed, it would freeze. As I did, my senses seemed to open and expand. But I soon discovered that I could not start the reel again until I contracted them. This fascinated me, so I repeated the action several times, each time realizing that I could not start the action in my open and expanded state. Only when I had contracted my senses once more would the reel start and move, seemingly independent of my perception of it.”
There is only God! God in the eternal state of existence! God in procession and God in return! This experience of hers is a foreshadowing of God’s return to union with himself. Wearing a female garment God, in her, is tasting a power which is completely unknown to man. Man is frightened by his own little devices and thinks they can blast the universe apart, but they are only little firecrackers compared to the power of the Human Imagination.
Our astrophysicists claim there are one-hundred billion galaxies in the universe, with each galaxy containing one-hundred billion stars, yet they can find nothing like our little Earth. The only thing in the universe that could cradle this biological experiment called Man, is right here in our small planet consisting of a sun and a moon, called Earth.
Dwell upon this thought. The entire universe was created by an orgasm of God. Have you ever seen the orgasm of a man under the microscope?
Billions of live organisms are there to attempt the likeness of the man, but only one organism is successful. Here is God’s orgasm, of which one system came out which could cradle his experiment of making man in his own image. Nothing here can do it. God had to die in order for man to live knowing, “If I die I shall arise again and thou with me, for if God dieth not for man and gives himself eternally for man, man could not exist.”
When God became man he brought his plan of salvation, called Jesus Christ, with him. The churches, however, have organized and personified Jesus. They have painted pictures of him and placed them on the wall. But Jesus Christ is God’s eternal plan of salvation which isexpressed by a man.
When I am gone, and you are asked if you believe that a man called Jesus Christ was born of Mary, lived and was crucified on a wooden cross, tell them the true story of salvation, fromexperience. For, by then you will be witnesses to the truth of God’s word. As a witness, you will be the fruit of the tree of life upon which Jesus Christ (God’s eternal plan) was crucified.Men are looking for that tree in time and space, but Blake tells us,
” The gods of the Earth and Sea sought through Nature to find this tree, but their search is all in vain; there grows on in the human brain.”
God’s plan of salvation is embedded in the brain. Engrafted there, it will grow and erupt into these four major events. Then the man in whom the eruption has taken place will linger to tell of his experience and encourage his brothers. After which he will depart, not to be restored to this terrestrial world, but to enter that age called the kingdom of heaven where he will exercise a power greater than the wildest dream of mortal man.
When God’s plan of salvation is complete, man will have returned to himself. That’s divine reunion. Then he will know from experience that he came out from the consciousness of being the Father and came into the world by being aware of its existence. Again he will leave the world and return to the awareness of being God the Father.
This world is not some accident, but a plan to create and expand God’s creative power. There is no limit to your expansion, only a limit to contraction which is man. Taking on the limit of contraction and the opacity of man, God unfolds himself in man to know unlimited translucency and expansion! Jesus Christ is God’s plan of salvation. When this is clear to you, you will believe in yourself. But if you reject this, you do not believe in yourself. The entire gospel of John tells about faith and lack of belief in self! Telling you a story about himself, John expresses truth and personifies it as a man. ft’s the truth you should worship, not the man! “Hold onto the truth, for the truth will set you free.”
If you accept the word of God that abides in you, you will know its truth and be set free. But if possessing wealth, or being famous is more important to you, I say, “O foolish one, your soul is required of you tonight. Tomorrow I will put you in a sphere where you will have your millions and your fame, but you will have to work for it.”
Don’t think that because you are now playing a noble part, you cannot move to an ignoble one. Just like an actor, you may play the part of a king on the stage of time and space tonight, and tomorrow be cast in the role of a clown. God only acts and is in existing beings or men. We are cast in role after role until the work `we agreed to do is completed in us. And regardless of what we do now, or our social or intellectual position, when we leave here we are cast in our appropriate roles. This I know from experience. Everything is done and everything is perfect. God planned everything as it has come to pass, and as it will beconsummated.
This truth must be expressed by man, so a man comes and expresses it. One must learn to let the man go, and hold onto the truth he expresses, for the truth will then engraft itself upon the individual and unfold from within. Then he will know who Jesus Christ really is, from experience.
When God’s only begotten son David calls you father, are you not God? If it is said that God’s body was split from top to bottom and it happens to you, are you not God? As these eventshappen, the Bible will open up and you will see the wisdom of Blake when he claimed that rivers, mountains, cities, villages, all are you, for in eternity all are men.
Scripture records that the Mount of Olives was split. You will know that it is your own body that is divided. You will discover you are the river Jordan. When you enter into the awareness of being the mountains, the villages and 4he cities, you will walk in their heavens and earth, just as you now walk in your own heavens and earth, for “All that you behold, though it appears without it is within you, in your Imagination of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.
All of the mountains of scripture are within you, as are the cities and the villages, regardless of their names. You become the Jerusalem, the bride who comes down at the dawn. Being God, individualized, you will personify God’s plan of salvation called Jesus Christ, for there is nothing but man and man is God.
In this lecture, Goddard dismantles the conventional historical narrative of Jesus Christ by presenting him as the metaphysical blueprint of salvation rather than a flesh-and-blood individual. He underscores the interchangeable nature of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ in biblical Greek and Hebrew, arguing that spiritual truth is apprehended through inner vision. By detaching Christ from temporal events and locating him within the realm of imagination, he reframes redemption as an esoteric process.
Throughout the discourse, Goddard weaves scriptural anecdotes—from King David’s lament for Absalom to Jesus’ references to His divine origin—to illustrate how sacred texts point to an internal, psychological drama. The Blake quotation on death and resurrection further illuminates the necessity of self-sacrifice and rebirth within consciousness. This hermeneutical approach positions the Bible as allegory rather than historical chronicle.
A central theme is the role of the human imagination as the creative organ of divine reunion. Goddard’s anecdotal dream analysis exemplifies how sensory contraction and expansion mediate spiritual insights, emphasizing self-experience over doctrinal assent. In this view, every theological symbol—from the Mount of Olives to the Jordan River—is an archetype residing within the individual psyche.
For practitioners of Neville’s teachings, the lecture offers a paradigm shift: salvation is not conferred externally but actualized through personal belief in and embodiment of the “truth” expressed. The insistence on holding fast to unfolding truth, rather than veneration of a person, aligns with his broader method of consciousness engineering. Ultimately, this talk reinforces the transformative power of inner revelation and encourages seekers to become living witnesses to God’s salvational plan.
The Bible Through Neville
Neville Bible Sparks
Neville Lecture Series
