God Is Not For Sale — Part 3: The Gospel of Judas and the God of Awakening
A Note Before We Begin
I want to be clear: this is not about being against the church, or the Bible, or faith itself. My intention is not to tell you what to believe.
My intention is to name distortion, manipulation, and illusion where they’ve taken root — and to uncover the history we’ve been taught to ignore.
We’re told not to repeat history, but just as dangerous is the temptation to ignore it. To say, “things are better now,” while pushing aside what the institution actually did to survive: silencing voices, erasing texts, branding awakening as heresy.
Yes — the coming together of like-minded people can be a beautiful thing, when the focus is truth and empowerment. But when the focus turns into judgment, superiority, and control, that gathering becomes something else entirely.
I was reminded of this recently on a hospice call with a Vietnam veteran. He was pitiful in his grief, convinced that the things he had done in war meant he could never enter heaven.
He had been just a young man when he was sent into that war — told it was service, told it was necessary, told it was righteous. But underneath it all was the same distortion: war as business, life turned into currency, truth buried under illusion.
I spent hours with him, clearing heaviness, smoothing knotted energy. At first his body was rigid, locked in decades of shame and fear. Then, slowly, he melted. He relaxed. He received. He was worthy.
This is why distortion matters. Because it isn’t abstract. It lands in real lives, in real bodies, in real moments of despair. A man who gave his life in service was left believing he was a sinner, unworthy of God’s love — while the system that sent him there profited.
So this is not about dismantling faith. It is about remembering Jesus clearly, without the distortion the institution wrapped him in.
The Discovery
The Gospel of Judas was hidden for nearly 1,700 years. Discovered in the 1970s in Egypt, it wasn’t fully translated until 2006, when a team of scholars — including Bart Ehrman — worked with National Geographic to bring it to light.
What they uncovered shook the foundations of Christian history. It wasn’t just another gospel. It was a direct challenge to the version of the story the church had built its power on.
The Revelation
In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus speaks to Judas alone — not as a traitor, but as the disciple who truly understood him.
And here’s the bomb: the God who created this world — the God of violence, war, wrath, and illusion — is not the same God who sent Jesus.
Jesus came not to affirm the rulers of this world, but to expose them. Not to sanctify the counterfeit, but to reveal the real.
This flips everything.
If the God of this world is not the God of Jesus, then sin, sacrifice, and suffering are not the conditions of love — they are the illusions we’ve been sold. Judas’ “betrayal” becomes something else: participation in the revelation that the crucifixion was never the endgame.
At one point, Jesus even laughs at the other disciples for worshipping the wrong god. He tells Judas:
“You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”
In other words: Judas wasn’t betraying Jesus. He was the only one following the true instruction.
The Gnostics believed that the body was a prison built by the false god of this world — and that salvation meant liberation of the soul, not clinging to the flesh. In this view, Judas was not condemning Jesus to death. He was helping him shed the body so his true nature could be revealed.
This wasn’t just dangerous theology. It was dynamite under the foundation of the business of God.
And this isn’t conspiracy talk. When the Gospel of Judas was first authenticated and translated in 2006, Bart Ehrman — one of the most respected historians of early Christianity — was part of the National Geographic team that brought it forward.
Why It Matters Now
The distortion didn’t stop with the early church. It’s still here — in the systems that profit from war, in the institutions that thrive on fear, in the voices that tell you you’re separate from God and need them to close the gap.
The Gnostics saw the body and the material world as a prison built by a false god — a counterfeit creation that trapped the soul in suffering. In their eyes, Judas was not betraying Jesus but helping him shed the illusion. Liberation came not through clinging to the body, but through release into truth.
You don’t have to believe that to see why the church found it so threatening. If salvation doesn’t require priests, rituals, or transaction — if awakening can’t be bought or controlled — then the entire business of God collapses.
And here’s why it still matters: distortion lands in real lives. Like the Vietnam veteran I sat with, whose body carried decades of shame, who believed he was unworthy of heaven because of what he had done in war. He wasn’t born with that belief. It was given to him — by the same systems that profit from violence and preach separation from God.
This is the cost of distortion. People die believing they are unforgivable. People live believing they are cut off from the Divine.
The Gospel of Judas is not fringe. It’s history. It’s part of the record. And it reminds us: awakening is not heresy. Awakening is the very thing the institution feared most.
So the real question is this: Which vision of God sounds more like God to you?
The God of wrath, fear, and control — who thrives on profit and punishment?
Or the God of awakening, who was never for sale?