Yeah, what he said.
I’ve been saying this for years: Jesus didn’t die on the Cross to open the way to Heaven. People died and went to Heaven ever since leaving the Garden of Eden. It has always been a matter of divine election. Whatever we might do about it is impossible to put into words, and the ancient Hebrews never discussed it for that very reason.
Jesus died on the Cross to open the Covenant. In particular, He commanded His disciples to share the revelation that was part or the Covenant. Prior to His sacrifice, the only path to revelation and enlightenment was through the Covenant of Moses or of Noah. Jesus took down the boundaries of Moses; in essence, all of humanity is now under Noah. However, it’s Noah informed by Moses.
Noah used to be a mysterious thing, hit and miss because there was no authoritative revelation. In Moses, the whole thing was cleared up. We have God Himself editing the mass of literature and traditions to clarify. That was the true blessing of Moses. And that blessing was incarnated in the nation of Israel, the People of God.
They refused their role. They slowly turned it into a racist thing, a matter of ethnic privilege. Moses is anything but that; the national identity was always a matter of the Covenant, not DNA. Jesus came along and restored the original intent of Moses, and then He closed it up and moved it all under Noah. Whatever it was that made Moses different from Noah was wiped away. The difference was not in morals nor promises from God, but rituals. Jesus took away the ritual identity, and moved everything into the moral realm.
It’s not that you shouldn’t care about going to Heaven; it’s that you cannot understand it from a human level. All the talk about “how to go to Heaven” is inherently false, because you cannot talk about it without resorting to parables and symbols. It’s restricted to the language of the heart.
The only thing we can talk about is how to get inside, and stay inside, the boundaries of the Covenant. That’s what we preach and discuss and witness to others. That’s the thing that put Jesus on the Cross. Talk to people about how we can gain God’s favor in this life; talk about the Covenant boundaries. Talk about the terms and conditions of being welcomed into His household as adopted family.
This mortal existence is not what God made us for. This is a punitive accursed existence. We are supposed to escape it. The initial part of that escape is the Covenant revelation of how to mitigate this awful situation we are in. Whatever we might do to gain God’s favor and enter Heaven is bound up in the Covenant.
Everyone needs the Covenant. When the New Testament said, “to the Jew first, and to the Greek” it was the same as saying today, “to the church folks first and those outside the churches”. Do you realize that “Jews” did not mean necessarily that they were fully under the Covenant, but that they were simply under the jurisdiction of the Judean government? That’s what “Jew” means — it’s short for Judean. Well, our equivalent today would be “churchian”; it’s a reference to human jurisdictions.
The only thing Jesus ever talked about was restoring the Covenant to its original intent so that it could be fulfilled and closed. He was opening a new covenant in His blood, and that’s what He told us to teach in the Great Commission. The mental assumptions of church folks is today just as badly flawed as the mental assumptions of Jews in their day.
The Covenant of Christ is a covenant on this earth rooted in Heaven. In that sense, it’s part of a continuum with any previous covenants from God. That’s how God deals with fallen humanity. The issue is joining His household to the extent possible in our current situation. If the Apostles took their gospel message to Jews and Gentiles, then we take our gospel message of the Covenant to anyone outside that Covenant. And it’s for sure, most church folks are not observing the boundaries of the Covenant of Christ. They are under a church government for their religion, but that government is no more accurate and effective than the Jewish government of Jesus’ day.
To say “people need Jesus” does not refer to church, but to the Covenant. The Covenant is not church religion; it is not what institutional leaders say it is. The Covenant is Noah (as informed by Moses), delineated in all the various declarations in the New Testament as to what is good and righteous behavior. Just as Paul warned Timothy to discern what part of the Old Testament applies under Christ, and how it applies, so you and I these many centuries later must discern how the code of New Testament behavior applies to us.
People need Jesus; they need His Covenant.
This post emphasizes what a crucial matter it is to be clear about the assumptions we make about reading The Bible: different assumptions going-in – different conclusions coming-out.
My assumption is that – if we are satisfied by its internal claims to be written by an eyewitness who was the most beloved disciple, the Fourth Gospel has (By Far) the greatest authority of any Book in the Bible.
Having read the Fourth Gospel in this light, and been previously intuitively convinced of its (overall) authenticity; I arrived at an extremely different (and contradicting) conclusion than you, as to what Jesus primarily did.
In particular that he brought the possibility of everlasting resurrected life, which was not possible before his ministry. In other words, there was no real Heaven before Jesus, because there were no resurrected Men to inhabit it.
And resurrection was possible *before* Jesus died, as shown by his resurrection of Lazarus. And the IV Gospel is quite explicit that everlasting life is to be attained by recognizing and following Jesus Christ – with nothing like a covenant involved.
Obviously I don’t expect to change your mind, exactly because you read the Bible with very different assumptions concerning how it ought to be read! But it is interesting to see how extremely different our conclusions are – while both being Christian.
You are in good company. I’ve seldom encountered believers who thought much different from you.
I think there is a difference between Christians who are simple folk or children (and Mormons) who probably do focus on Jesus offering us resurrected and everlasting life…
And, on the other hand, most of the intellectual/ theological/ priest/ pastor Christians I have encountered (now and in history, in both Catholic and Protestant traditions), who focus on Jesus primarily providing us with redemption from *sin*…
With sin understood to be essentially moral transgressions.
In contrast, I understand Jesus – in the IV Gospel – to mean sin = [mostly] death = annihilation of the personal self and severance from the body, to become the demented/ depersonalized ghosts of Sheol (or Hades).