Within all of us, whether we like it or not, there is a sort of half-conscious desire to stand in awe of something that we think of as being greater than ourselves. This something may be as transitory as a football hero or as exalted as God, but the urge seems to be a basic one.
At the root of this seems to be a sense of being alone; of being separated from whatever it is that would give our life the sort of purpose that could bring us happiness. We long to reach out to something ultimate, but if we cannot find this, then any substitute will do.
The great religious teachers of the world, Zarathustra, Moses, Buddha, the Hindu sages, Mohammed and the more recent figures, have all given the world systems of thought and behaviour that are designed to overcome this sense of being alone by directing our ‘reaching out’ to what the teachers consider to be ultimate truth.
All of these teachers agreed that we have this sense of being alone and, in a sense, lost. All of them knew that the only cure lay in a Reality beyond ourselves. But few of them could agree about just what this Reality was and how we could ‘reach’ It.
For some, it was a personal God.
For some, it was many gods.
For others, it was a Cosmic Unity expressed as many gods.
For yet others, it was a Cosmic Principle.
Then, there were the different ideas about how to ‘reach’ it.
Some taught that this was possible through a system of meditation.
Some taught that it was by following a moral code.
Others taught specific types of worship.
Yet others stressed the importance of sacrifice.
All of these schemes ‘worked’ to some degree in so far as they (at least temporarily) eased the sense of cosmic loneliness, but the more sensitive and serious followers of these religions often felt that something remained missing.
Think of it this way.
A person has been suffering from acute thirst. She visits a doctor who correctly diagnosis diabetes and prescribes a medication. It seems to work for a while, but then the thirst returns.
So she sees another doctor, and is prescribed a special diet. This too works to some degree, but not altogether satisfactorily.
Finally, she sees another doctor who looks for the cause, not just of the thirst, but of the diabetes. He finds that she has a tumour of the pancreas!
After he surgically removes the tumour, the diabetes and the thirst vanish.
No more medication and no more diet!
But had she not undergone surgery, the tumour would have killed her. Not all the diet and medication in the world could have saved her life, even though it might have offered a measure of temporary relief.
The religious systems of the great teachers are rather like the advice of the first doctors in this story. They can offer some relief, some measure of spiritual enlightenment, but they are not adequate to cure the underlying problem. In the end, they fail to bring spiritual salvation.
You may have noticed that I missed one name from the list of religious teachers. Actually, I missed several, as the list was not intended to be a complete one, but some may have been surprised that I did not make mention of the Jewish rabbi Yeshua bar-Joseph, also known as Isa or Jesus Christ. Millions of people regard this rabbi as the greatest of religious teachers. So why did I omit him from the list?
I omitted him because he is essentially different from the others. Sure, he was a religious teacher. He taught about God, about how to conduct life and about prayer. But what he said was far less radical than what he did. Indeed, most of what he taught on these subjects could be gleaned from many of the other teachers. Yet, he also taught things about himself which none of the other teachers would dare to have said. He taught that he lived before his birth and that, indeed, he was (in some sense) God. He also taught that he would actually become a sacrifice and that by doing so, he would free from sin all who believed in him.
What he was, in effect, saying was that he was to be the answer to religion. He was not just another ‘doctor’ prescribing some ‘medicine’ (ie not just another sage teaching yet another religion or religious exercise) as a ‘cure’ for the spiritual illness of mankind. He was the ‘surgeon’, the one (and only one) qualified to ‘cut out’ the spiritual tumour within our souls that is slowly killing all of us. Our feeling of being alone, our self-centred natures and the sin which binds and spiritually cripples us are all symptoms of this ‘tumour’. The name of this tumour is Sin. Not individual acts of wrong doing, but a spiritual rot which has infected our natures in all their aspects. As that great Chinese saint, Watchman Nee, said "we are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners".
Jesus (Yeshua or Isa) surgically removed the tumour of sin by taking it into himself in some mystical way which our minds cannot understand (any more than we can understand how, for instance, an electron can be both a particle and a wave. We accept such things, but we cannot really get our minds around them). But by taking the sin of all of us into himself, Jesus died on a cross that the full punishment for this sin be met. Met in him, not in us!
On the cross, Jesus felt our loneliness and our estrangement from God in the fullest sense possible. But by going to his death, he overcame this sin and by rising from death, he enables anyone who believes in him and promises to follow him to be cured of their sinful nature and to have access to God as if they had never sinned. He does this by letting us share his mind and spirit, by causing his own life to grow like a spiritual seed within us and transform us more and more into his way of thinking and living.
Jesus could do this because he alone is both God and human. He is, as it were, the one and only human window through whom God’s full light (His very being) shines. At the same time, he is the door through whom man can come into the full presence of God.
No religious practice can redeem us. Only the death of Jesus and his rising again could do this. We can be quite certain of this because, on the night before his crucifixion he prayed to God the Father that if it was at all possible, may the ‘cup’ (having to go through crucifixion) pass from him. He was in effect praying that if there was some other way of bringing about the redemption of humanity (some religious exercise perhaps?), let him escape the terrors, not just of physical crucifixion, but of the spiritual darkness of bearing the sin of the world that accompanied it. But no answer came. Jesus knew in his heart that there was no ‘Plan B’. Not even almighty God can break his own universal laws. And it is a universal law that nothing short of the death of the Incarnation of God himself can redeem humanity. Fallen angels cannot be redeemed, because they are not mortal. The Son of God cannot become an angel and take on their sin, because there is no ‘angelic death’ through which he can pass; and redemption comes only by passing through death.
But if neither angel nor even God himself, can provide another way of redemption, how can any merely human religious teacher provide it through a system of religious belief or spiritual exercises?
It is absurd to even suggest such a possibility!
So Jesus, or Yeshua, or Isa, is the answer to religion. All religion. Don’t fall into the trap of making his teachings into yet another religion, for this will take away their power. Come to Jesus himself. Admit that you need him and ask him to enter into you and grant you salvation and a real, living and experienced, relationship with God.
