No, Christianity is not about right and wrong. God never intended life to become a battle between good and evil, or forever having to struggle to do what’s right all the time, and fight against wrong thoughts and actions. That’s an awful life, because you never know if you’re being good enough, and what happens to us if we’re still thinking bad thoughts on the day we die? Do we lose out on heaven and go to hell because our thoughts weren’t absolutely perfect to our dying breath?
And yet most of what drives religion is the fear and guilt of doing wrong. I caught a glimpse of that when buying a car off a religious person. I wanted to know if he was telling me the truth about the car. His reply was, “Well, our Creator is watching us and he’ll curse me if I don’t tell the truth.”
But that’s awful, because the only reason he’s telling the truth is fear for his own skin. It’s not out of love for me, or love for God. His life is based on, “I’d better do what’s right or I’ll be got by God.”
And isn’t most religion based on that? It’s about knowing what’s good and what’s evil, and being scared enough of what might happen to you to do the good and avoid the evil. And what, then, do those religions teach to others as the purpose of a human life? It’s to make sure you’re being a good person until your last breath, and hope it’s enough to get you a good reward in the afterlife.
What those religions are pushing, therefore, is a knowledge of good and evil. You’d better know what’s right and wrong, because it’s only those who do good and live right who get to live forever in a paradise setting.
It’s interesting, then, that right from the beginning in Genesis, God told the man in the Garden of Eden not to eat off the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, don’t go there, that’s not what life is all about. It’s not about knowing what’s right or wrong.
So what is it about instead?
Well, what made Adam and Eve do what they did? It was being given a wrong picture of God. They were told God was a liar and a fraud, and he was only telling them to avoid knowing good and evil because it would make humans as all knowing as him. It turned them right off God.
And it’s a wrong picture of God being pushed by most religions, including Christianity, that turns people off God today as well. God isn’t about nailing people for doing wrong and thinking evil thoughts. God isn’t about making people suffer now and forever as punishment for doing wrong, either. He’s about rescuing us from our disbelief in who he really is.
So he revealed who he really is through his Son, the human Jesus as we know him. That’s God, and all he wants for us humans is to see that and believe it. And we see in Jesus that he was dead against those who were pushing right and wrong as the be all and end all of life, because they weren’t exactly being perfect examples in their own lives of being upright, honest people. And who is? No one is. We all fall short.
What God said through Jesus was, “Let love for me and love for each other be the driving force in your life, not fear for your own skin. I’ve got your skin safe and sound already anyway, thanks to my Son dying for you, so use that lovely freedom you have to love as I love you, and all that right and wrong stuff will no longer be an issue for you.”
It was never meant to be an issue in the first place, but we made it an issue by believing a lie about God, that made us want to figure out life without him. And what we created was an entire system – of justice and religion – that’s based on right and wrong and threatening bad people with punishment to make them behave. It’s an awful way to live, but that’s what we’re stuck with until that true picture of God seeps into our heads, which is what Christianity should be concentrating on, not on what’s right and wrong.
Buck To Basics 