Will Christians who accept Jesus as their saviour but don’t live purely attain God’s kingdom?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So it is said that in Christianity they say that if you just repent for your sins and then accept Jesus as saviour then they will go attain God no matter what they do now. So how is this to be understood in the light of our philosophy? Two things. First is originally if you look at the teachings of Jesus they are given in what is called the gospels.
Gospels are four books which describe the activities of Jesus as recorded by four of his prominent disciples. In a major part of the Bible is the epistles of Paul. Paul was a subsequent apostate.
He actually never met Jesus but he was transformed at a particular time and he spread Christianity a lot. So the epistles means the letters that he wrote to people in different parts of Europe and Middle East where he guided them how they should follow Jesus’ teachings. So there is a significant shift whereas Jesus focused on ethical and spiritual living.
Paul focused much more on the saving by Jesus. So what happened for Christians, they had the idea that Jesus was the messenger of God the messiah, the prophet of God who had come to save us. And when Jesus was killed and apparently helplessly died, they thought how to understand this that the messenger of God couldn’t protect himself.
How is he going to protect us if he couldn’t protect himself from being crucified? So they reinterpreted that event as that actually he died for our sins. And thus he could have avoided death but by atoning for our sins he has saved us. He has protected us.
So Paul focused not so much on how we live as on the fact that we accept Jesus as our saviour. So now thereafter somehow Christianity has focused much more on being saved by Jesus than on living ethically in this world. Now of course there are many Christians who do live very principled lives.
They may not follow the four regulatory principles but within their level they are quite strict about certain principles. So for example no premarital sex, no extramarital sex. Like that I think they are quite strict about these things.
But overall because their focus is more on being saved by Jesus, there are many denominations of Christianity, so they don’t focus so much on how they live. So this is actually a distortion of Jesus’ teachings. And there are sections in the Bible where they say that your faith is known by your works.
Works means not the work, the karma as they say, but work means how you live, your actions basically. So their idea is that if you have faith then you should be able to live, to be seen in moral living. So those who have faith in Jesus and those who live morally, they will definitely be elevated.
And how far they will go depends on how much they have evolved in their consciousness. Those who have faith in Jesus but they don’t have properly moral lives. So then it will depend on where their consciousness is.
It’s not that they can be saved of all sins and they will automatically attain the kingdom of God. That may be their belief but we understand that ultimately only those who will go to the kingdom of God, those who want to go there. If people are doing sinful activities and they are not even striving really to give it up, then that means if they go to the kingdom of God, what will they do there? Ultimately their consciousness is going to be the same here or there.
So unless one loves God more than the world, one cannot enter the kingdom of God. So these Christians who nominally have faith but they are not really following principles, depending on the way they are living, depending on the mode that they are living in, depending on their consciousness, they will be at the next destination. It may be higher, it may be lower.
Their faith will definitely help them to stay on the spiritual path. Wherever they are, they may again meet some spiritual minded people like the Christians or others and they will move on. But unless one develops love for God, one loves God more than this world, one cannot attain the kingdom of God.