Category: Religion

 

A couple of months ago I was speaking to a friend of mine here. The man has a very interesting history. He joined Idi Amin’s forces when he was 17 years old and was involved in the fighting that took place between the Tanzanian and Ugandan militaries. He has witnessed a lot of change in his country in the past 40 years. We were discussing the challenges facing Uganda and I asked him, what do you think the solution is to our problems? He shook his head and said, education has failed, government has failed, and religion has failed. We didn’t have much time to continue the conversation, but his comment reflects on many people’s perspective about the purpose of religion.

To be considered religious means a person has a belief in the supernatural. There are a broad variety of views, but religious people all agree there is a spiritual reality even though it can’t be observed like the material world. But do all religious worldviews agree on the point of religious belief?

Religion has been a tool used by governments for millennia. I actually had one African tell me he believed the Bible was invented by the Europeans to try and curb African behavior like cannibalism and polygamy, which the Europeans found offensive. If you study the history of the Roman Catholic church, you will find many “church policies” that had more to do with economic gain and political influence than they did with religious belief. It’s also easy to see a system’s motives when it is willing to shift its statements of belief to agree with a shifting cultural perspective. For example, by the Middle Ages, the church of Rome actively hunted down those they referred to as sodomites, for the practice of homosexuality. Some of those accused were executed. Neither of those things agrees with the Bible, but they were in step with popular opinion at the time. In 2016, Pope Francis was quoted as saying this on the topic, “”If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”  This sentiment is also not Biblical, but it does fit with popular opinion.

My concern is that the real church of God is also guilty of losing the purpose of religious belief in our efforts to promote religious belief. How has this happened? We began shifting the emphasis of our ministry to avenues that would make us more appealing to the world and give us results that were more measurable than something like spiritual transformation. We’re very busy with good works like orphanages, schools, clinics, etc. But good works are a product of the purpose of religious belief, not the purpose itself. If good works were the purpose, then evangelicals are so far behind the Catholic church and Muslims that it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning the aid that we give. We’d be counted complete failures, but that isn’t religion’s primary concern. The purpose of religious belief is about your standing with the higher power you believe in. If I believe I have a creator, who has authority over me, then the most important thing for me to know is that I am in a right place with him. What does he demand from me? Do I owe him an accountability for the life that he’s given me? What is his purpose in making me? These are some questions religious thought must answer. The purpose of the gospel is salvation. That’s the point. Romans 5:9-10 “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” Salvation means to be delivered from harm or ruin. I was debating with a friend of mine once who was saying that there are many ways a person can improve themselves in this life. You can meditate, study different philosophers and religious thinkers and apply the principles you agree with. Richard Dawkins said something similar in a debate with various religious leaders. He said that you don’t need Jesus to have a thought like “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” He said you can find that in Shakespeare, Dickens, Buddhism and so on. You may make a case that we could have arrived at do unto others as you’d have them do to you on our own, but what you can’t have without Jesus is salvation. Micah spoke in this way about a man saving himself from sin – Micah 6:6-7 “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” We are willing to make sacrifices of money, time, community-service, but do those things save you? Paul said in Galatians 2:16 “yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.”

The gospel of Jesus is distinct from all religious worldviews in one major way.
The gospel worldview is this: faith = salvation + works
All other religious worldviews can be lumped into this category: faith + works = salvation
The Bible tells us that we are saved by grace through faith and this is not of our own doing, it is the gift of God. It has nothing to do with works, lest any man should be able to boast. The gospel is the only worldview that makes true love possible in our relationship with God. Think about it. If I believe that my good deeds must outweigh my bad deeds for me to enter heaven (whatever I view heaven to be) then every good deed I do has some self-interest and therefore can’t qualify as love. Real love is not motivated towards oneself. It is completely motivated towards the interest of another. Consider this example: a couple of decades ago, the Rwandan government announced a program where it would give financial aid to families who agreed to foster orphaned children. The lines to register for the program stretched for miles with thousands of applicants eager to take responsibility of the orphaned children. Many claimed to be doing it out of a genuine concern for Rwandese children. A few months later, the government announced that it had ran out of funding to continue the monthly assistance it had committed to. The people lined up once again by the thousands, this time to return the orphaned children to the government. When the benefit was taken away, the motivation was revealed. You can’t truly do what is good while you are seeking to benefit yourself. And that’s why financial aid or self-reforms don’t have the effect the gospel does, because they can’t bring a change to a person’s heart. This also demonstrates the difference between the gods of various worldviews and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Allah says to his people, if you do this, then I will love you. Jesus says to us, I have loved you, so that you too can love. I loved you even when you were an enemy. Jesus has already given us our salary. We will receive our salary whether we work or not. So, everything we do can truly be motivated by pure love. The man who is working to earn his salary can’t truly say he’s serving his master, because when the master takes his salary away, the man will no longer work.

The gospel brought us salvation and salvation always produces good works, but good works will not save anyone. And if you are trusting in good works to save you, you are not really doing any good at all. And if you think good works is what religion is all about, you have missed the point entirely.