I've had the urge to write about this again for the last few days, but couldn't get my head on straight enough to do it. In particular, I want to talk about the Law of Moses, or the Torah.
There's this idea in the world, and among Christians in particular, that, at some point, Jews and others believed and taught you could go to heaven if you kept the ten commandments and the larger Law in general. Some "Christian" churches still maintain this misunderstanding.
Nothing in the Torah talks about this. Nothing in the Torah really even talks about an afterlife. "Going to heaven" simply wasn't in view where the Law was concerned. It just wasn't a thing.
The Torah was and is the ancient nation of Israel's constitution and penal code. It was a contract between Yahweh and the descendants of Jacob framed as what was known as a "suzerainty treaty" between a king and the people he had conquered. It laid out the history between them, the agreed expectations placed on both parties, and the consequences for either party breaking those expectations. All of those penalties, consequences, and "blessings" were very much about this life, and the here and now. They said nothing about a soul's consequences after death. Thus, the penalty for murder is death, not eternal torment. Thus the penalty for theft is repayment. Thus you have "an eye for an eye" in the case of a pregnant woman being injured in a fight.
This is also the reason why there are sacrifices prescribed for mistakes and unintentional wrongs, but no sacrifices available for intentional wrongdoing. Eternity is not in view where the Torah is concerned, but criminal justice in this life both for the individual and the nation as a whole.
The people of ancient Israel understood this, as I'm pretty sure the Pharisees and Sadducees of the first century understood this as well. Their view of the afterlife wasn't terribly different from the mythological Greco-Roman view, and by the first century was likely influenced by it.
No one in the first century believed that if they kept the Torah they would "go to heaven," because that was the dwelling of God alone. They did eventually believe that if they were Jewish and kept the Torah they would enter paradise (as opposed to torment) as a "righteous" person, and if you made a mistake then there were the appropriate sacrifices prescribed by the Law. But it was never about doing enough good works to go to heaven, and they expected all of the blessings and benefits from the Torah to be applied in this life.
The problem which Jesus and His Apostles were addressing was that the Torah, while it could prescribe penalties for doing the right thing, it couldn't fix the problem that made human beings incapable of doing the right thing in the first place. While it could prescribe not desiring what your neighbor had, it couldn't keep you from doing it. It was a legal document. It was a penal code. It had no ability to enforce itself or change the very real human disorder which results in harm no matter what the good intentions. It could mandate love for one's neighbor and for God, but it could not enable anyone to do it.
This is what human beings needed and still need saving from in this life. Jesus and His Apostles understood that you can't legislate people into doing the right thing. You can prescribe penalties for the wrong thing, but that's all you can do. In order to do the right thing, in order to practice the love mandated, there must be a solution found for the inherent human disorder that doesn't impact free will; to bypass it in this life until the body dies and the soul is free from it ("the one who died is made right from hamartia").
And this is the salvation which Jesus and His apostles preached, that by becoming human, as a "second Adam" Jesus included all human beings into His death, burial, and resurrection, joining them to Himself, becoming one with them (activated by trust in Him as displayed in public baptism), and giving them the option of enslaving themselves to His Spirit for the source of their behaviors as opposed to being enslaved to their own malfunctioning neurology, therefore bypassing the inherent problem altogether. And because they are realized as one with Him, wherever He is they are, and wherever they are, He is. Thus, if He is "in heaven," then so are they. And once the body is left behind, then of course they are immediately in His presence, because they are one.
We need to leave this nonsense about being good enough, or keeping rules and laws, behind. It has never been, nor will ever be, about that.
Why is this salvation "by faith," or why does it need to be activated by trusting in Him if all human beings have been joined to Him through His incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection? How can you make use of a thing if you don't know about it, or don't believe that it will work? A man may be in possession of a bank account worth billions of dollars, but unless he knows about it, or believes that it is true, how can he access it? Why would he? It might as well not exist for him for all the good it will do him. This is the reason why belief is required. Not a certain amount of belief, not belief to move mountains, just belief that it exists and can be accessed. After this, there has to be a motivation and willingness to make use of it.
God will not violate the free will of a sentient creation. He will cajole. He will put things in one's path to guide and direct, but He will not override your conscious mind and free will without your permission, and once it is given, it is a cooperation which He respects. He does not want automatons, but individual minds in cooperation with Him. There is no point in Him having automatons, and it would totally work cross-purposes to the reason why He created sentient creations in the first place, be they of a spiritual/energetic or physical/material nature.
No amount of "good works" will change this common human neurological disorder, because all such "good works" are produced by it. It must, absolutely must, be bypassed, and this union with God through Jesus Christ which enables this bypass can only be activated and made use of if one knows about it, believes it to be real and usable by them, and is willing to make use of it.
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