Copyright 1998-2011 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.

Many people today have a very poor understanding of Christianity. Many of you reading this think you already know about Christianity but there is a really good chance that you don't. There are a number of reasons for this. First if you got your ideas from the mass media or ordinary people around you then you need to know that they simply don't understand it either. Many of them have their own informal religious beliefs that are at odds with Christianity so some of them really don't want to tell you the truth anyway. Atheists in particular don't have any clue as to what is going on. Some of you will have a poor understanding because of the particular church you once attended. For instance Catholic doctrine is not really the same as Christian doctrine even though you might expect it to be. Many Protestant churches have essentially abandoned Christianity and maybe worst of all many individual fundamentalist or evangelical Christian churches can become something resembling a cult. A few are filled with hypocrites. Plus sometimes Christians are so loaded with jargon you never quite manage to figure out what is really going on. For a nuts and bolts person like myself figuring out what the heck is really going on wasn't easy. To me it was clear that Science made sense but Religion didn't.

But I eventually cracked the code and found out that Christianity does make sense. One way to put it is this: God is a nice guy, he will give us anything we want but the first question on the wish list is this one:

There are only two choices. First, you can take the attitude: "I want what I want and I'm going to get what I want no matter who gets hurt". (This brings to mind the famous words of Daffy Duck: "Consequences, schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich!") This is selfishness and in Biblical jargon selfishness is called sin. If the Biblical side would say "selfishness" most of the time instead of "sin" outsiders would have a better chance of understanding but they don't and this is one little way that a communications gap develops between believers and unbelievers. Another way to describe selfishness is that it is the worship of yourself, you put yourself and what you want before everyone else and especially before what God wants.

The second choice is that you can take the attitude that you are going to love everyone and put them first not yourself. In particular you should put God first and do what He wants and then everything will work out well for yourself and for everyone else. Everyone on Earth takes the first choice first, everyone is selfish at least part of the time and even doing so just part of the time makes you guilty of being selfish period. The good news is that if you get sick and tired of being selfish and you REALLY REALLY WANT to give it up then God will gradually make you over into a better person here on Earth and when you reach Heaven you will be made completely perfect. By the time you get to Heaven all of your selfish nature will have been stripped away. You get what you want: you will spend eternity in a place filled with people who REALLY WANT to put everyone else first. You'll be with people who want to be with God and do what He wants. Likewise, everyone who wants to be selfish will spend eternity in a place filled with people who believe in being selfish. So everyone gets what they WANT and this choice you have to make is the issue to be faced here on Earth. Another short way to put it is this:

Life on Earth is your chance to try out selfishness to see if you like it. If you like it you can keep it and if you don't like it you can ask God to take it away and He will.

There is a lot of good sense in God's plan. First, just think, here on Earth we have prisons that keep the worst offenders from hurting other people and ruining their lives. It is pretty obvious that letting really nasty people run around loose will only result in tragedy after tragedy. The same applies to the Universe as a whole, God is not letting anyone into Heaven who is going to mess things up for anyone else. For instance let Hitler and his associates into Heaven and they would spend their time persecuting Jews. Let in unrepentant members of the Klu Klux Klan and they will persecute blacks. Let in unrepentant Catholic and Protestant militants from Northern Ireland and they will want to settle scores that go back hundreds of years. Let in unrepentant Islamists and they will go around crashing planes into buildings. At the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks many people were saying how upset they were that God let the hijackers crash the planes into buildings. Why did he let this happen? Why didn't he stop it? Maybe this proves there is no God! Well, the time is coming when God will stop such things from happening and he'll do it by not letting into Heaven anyone who would even so much as just think (!) about doing such a thing. Now your sins are probably not as dramatic as any of the above but any sort of unkindness, rudeness, self-centeredness, pride or arrogance is just not allowed. Even these "little" sins are symptoms of an underlying selfishness. Heaven would not be heavenly if there were people there causing problems, it would be Earth all over again so they have to be kept out.

Now when you realize that people are selfish you can see why they're not going to get into Heaven, they'd ruin things for everyone else. But selfishness also involves rejecting God's plans. God has plans for everyone that are good plans as for instance as He says here in Jeremiah 29:11:

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Also with God hiding behind the scenes people will go ahead and do all sorts of sinful, selfish things they would not do if God was plainly visible. You get to see how low people without God can go. God sets things up so that everyone can go and do at least some of the evil things that want to do just so that after a while people can stop and think about what they've done and notice how evil THEY are. Many clever people are proud of the fact that when they did something wrong they didn't get caught but the reality is that they're not getting away with anything, God is simply showing them how evil they are. He actually set them up so that they could do what they want so they can get a close up view of what they are really like.

Now critics might object and say "OK, so I don't want to have anything to do with God, but why does he have to stick me into Hell for that? Why can't he just leave me alone and leave it at that?" The answer is that if there was some other way in which people could be happy without God I do think God would let those people live that way without Him if that's what they really wanted. But as it stands that doesn't work, only a relationship with God is fulfilling enough to keep a person going and the absence of this relationship with God will result in spiritual death and the crazy sinful behavior you see in the news every day. Now there are quite a few Biblical rules about how people should behave and quite often many of these Biblical rules about behavior appear to be almost arbitrary but they are all founded on the concept of what really works. God's plan really works and none of the others can possibly work. The Ten Commandments are some of the most well-known rules and the very first of the Ten Commandments says that people need to worship God. Critics look at this commandment and say the God of the Bible is a megalomaniac who demands that you go through the motions of worshiping him or He will zap you with a lightning bolt. Except that's not what's going on. God is very happy to have people around Him who are happy to be around Him but God also knows that only a relationship with Him will fill people up and give them joy, peace, love and meaning. Ultimately worshiping God (having that relationship with Him) is good for people. Don't think of worship as anything dull or dry, the sort of thing you find in many, many churches today where people simply go through the motions of worship. Think of worship as more like what teen-agers do for rock stars, movie stars and sports heroes. They spend large amounts of time learning about and thinking about and watching their idol. They go to events where they can worship their idol. It's fair to say that they are in love with their idol. In one translation of Luke 9:23-24 from The Book we have Jesus telling a crowd:

..."If any of you wants to be my follower, you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross daily, and follow me. If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for me, you will find true life."

That takes care of the spiritual aspect to it, you can't be happy without God. But then there is also the nuts of bolts of the physical world to look at. Again a sinner might think, "OK, God, I don't want to spend time with you so why don't you just let me go off on my own so I can do my own thing, why stick me into Hell?" This kind of thinking comes from the perspective of presentism where it looks like what's going on in the world is that particles of matter are moving around automatically all by themselves according to the laws of physics. It then looks like if you know the rules about how matter moves around (including how people behave) you can go on to produce any sort of future you can think of. It looks as if God is not needed to run the world. So then for instance a lot of modern, rational, scientific thinkers figure that if they had the chance to make the kind of world they want they could do it and it would be much better than the world we have now. The first point here is that if you put sinners into a physical world to do whatever they think is best they're just going to end up destroying each other and the world. Just look at what sinners are doing to this world! Plus, second, the physical world comes from God. In reality everything in the physical world has to be designed and built by God in advance and people just aren't able to do this. The idea that you can go off on your own to make the world into whatever you want is just ignoring the physics of the world. It's asking for something that is logically impossible. It's asking to do something only God can do and since you don't want anything to do with Him He's not going to do it for you.

Of course a common attitude people have today is that God is so nice that he could never throw anyone into Hell. I had this idea too. One source of this idea is that quite often people think people are generally pretty good so no one, except for maybe a few extreme cases like Hitler, bin Laden and some other mass murderers would deserve Hell. The problem with this is that people are nowhere near as nice as they should be. God's standard is extremely high, you need to be perfect. Exactly how perfect will come up in the chapter, Advanced Sin. Another source of this idea is the common belief that people only mis-behave because of their circumstances. Their bad behavior is due to poverty, a broken home, racism, the place where they were born and so on. So they think life is not fair and if life was fair everyone would behave themselves and be nice. God knows this isn't true. This idea that it is the environment or chance that makes people mis-behave will be examined in more detail in later chapters.

Now for the world news. With Earth over-run with empty, miserable, sinful, selfish people you just naturally get politicians, dictators, gangs, taxes, crooked governments, slavery, human sacrifice, mass murderers and whole countries going nuts and killing "those other people" for some flimsy reason. Without God around it leaves us to try and fix these problems. Of course you can minimize these problems if many people will follow God's plans. But if you study history you will find that most people are not that interested in following God's plans, they are more interested in having their own way plus nothing else people have ever come up with on their own has ever solved these problems. There are other problems around too and human attempts to solve them often create new problems. Food shortages for instance have always been a serious problem. Food shortages are sometimes due to bugs eating food that is intended for people. People discovered that chemicals like DDT will kill the bugs and that seems good but DDT and these other chemicals harm people and animals in addition to killing the bad bugs so now you have some new problems to solve that came about from your solution! Then there is the problem of disease. With disease God is saying, "Well, hey, if you want to go off on your own without me YOU figure out how these diseases work and then YOU try to fix the problem." From time to time you hear about a new miracle drug that will solve some problem but years later you find out the drug causes other health problems. Sometimes science finds a cure for some disease but it turns out to be too expensive for most people. Even with the forces of nature God is saying "Oh, so you don't want me around? OK, fine, I'll just let nature take its course and we'll see if you can fix things. Stop the hurricanes, stop the earthquakes, stop the floods and the fires and droughts and oh, yes, see if you can prevent a comet or asteroid from hitting the Earth and destroying ALL life on Earth".

Now there are many, many misconceptions about Christianity going around. First of all you quite often have Bible believers tell you that you are going to Hell because of all the sins you've committed here on Earth. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Whatever you've done CAN, and WILL BE, completely IGNORED if in the future you're going to be perfect. Anyone who wants to be perfect is not going to cause any problems in Heaven, so why not let them in? It really doesn't matter in the eternal scheme of things what you've done here on the Earth as a sinner as long as you want to change. The most sensational sins can all be forgiven. On the other hand people who want to keep on doing the bad things they've been doing on Earth will go to Hell not really because of what they've already done but because of what they will be doing in the future.

The second important misconception has to do with rules. I've stated the situation here in terms of "How do you want to relate to everyone else?" and that there are two choices for everyone, which could be summed up as either "be selfish" or "be unselfish". Or another way to put it is, do you want a relationship with God or not? A lot of rules follow this, the most famous of these are the Ten Commandments. Rules have a couple of good uses. First you can take a look at yourself and look at all the rules you break so that the rules point out to you how bad you are. Second, having a list of rules handy is useful because when a situation comes up you don't have to bother thinking about what to do. Is what you're thinking of doing selfish or unselfish? Will it cause happiness or unhappiness now and in the long run? You only have to consult the rule book. But people can put too much emphasis on rules. Sometimes it looks like Christianity is just rules. Sometimes even Christians lose sight of the fact that rules come from the general principle that unselfish is best. The very heart of Christianity is NOT about rules. In the end your goal is NOT to be a rule-follower, your goal is to love everyone to the point where you would not want to do them any harm, you should only want to do them good and you should only do what God wants you to do, you should be trusting God that He knows what's best for you and for everyone else.

Third, once in a while you will run into a Christian who says you OUGHT to believe the Bible just in case it is true. If it is true you "win" but if it isn't true you don't lose anything because ultimately nothing we do will make any difference anyway. Don't believe it. This doesn't work. In James 2:19 we have this:

You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror.

There is another misconception similar to the one above. Christians often go around trying to scare you about Hell. You can't escape Hell and end up in Heaven just because you're scared of Hell. You only end up in Heaven because you WANT to love everyone and love God. It is only this positive reason that can get you into Heaven.

Finally one of the worst misconceptions is this. There is a widespread belief that Christianity is all about doing good deeds and if you do enough good deeds you will get into Heaven. This is absolutely NOT true! To get in you need to be PERFECT. There is absolutely NOTHING you can do to fix yourself up to become PERFECT. Only God is big enough to do this. You might say God has to do surgery on your soul to get rid of your selfish nature. There is no way YOU can do that. In particular you can't fix yourself up by doing good deeds. Helping the poor, sitting in a church building on Sundays or giving money to a church won't get rid of your selfish nature. The apostle Paul said this in Ephesians 2:8-9:

God saved you by his special favor when you believed. And you can't take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.

6 We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. ...

The earn your way into Heaven rule also causes problems. What do you do with someone who has been bad all their life and then just as they are about to die they decide they were wrong all along and want to change and follow God? If good deeds were the answer these people would never make it into Heaven because they don't have time to do any good deeds. For instance there is this absolutely wonderful case from Luke 23:39-43 where there were two criminals who were being crucified along with Jesus:

One of the criminals hanging beside him scoffed, "So you're the Messiah, are you? Prove it by saving yourself - and us too, while you're at it!"

But the other criminal protested, "Don't you fear God even when you are dying? We deserve to die for our evil deeds, but this man hasn't done anything wrong." Then he said, "Jesus remember me when you come into your Kingdom." And Jesus replied, "I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise."

Besides your ordinary good deeds there are the formal religious ceremonies that Christianity has. These formal ceremonies are meant to be symbolic not magical. So in Christianity baptism or communion or any other formal ceremony won't help you one bit. Why would you expect them to? For instance in the Catholic Church they say that you need to be baptized as a baby. Just what good would that do? If in the future the child becomes a sinner and never wants to give up on being selfish isn't that going to be the determining factor as to whether or not the person goes to Heaven or Hell? How would being sprinkled with water as a baby have any effect whatsoever? The same applies to adults. Being baptized as an adult is a nice way to make the statement that you want to follow Christ but the ceremony itself does not change you in the sense that it makes you fit for Heaven, only your earnest desire to be rid of your sinful nature can do that. People can be baptized and still not be serious about the whole thing. The only thing that matters is whether or not you honestly want to get rid of your sinful nature. Again the above example from Luke is striking. The sinner merely wanted to change. He didn't even have to get baptized! So the idea that doing good deeds including performing formal religious ceremonies will do the trick is clearly out based on the Bible as well as on common sense.

In Protestant denominations you will frequently find people who say that if you recite the "sinner's prayer", asking Jesus into your life then at that point you are "saved". That is, saved from Hell and on your way to Heaven. People then wonder if you can lose your "saved" status. The thing is anyone can say the sinner's prayer but that doesn't make them saved any more than being baptized or sitting in a church will make them saved. To actually be saved you really need to be serious about the whole thing. The proof as to whether a person is serious will show up in the future in the form of a changed life as God makes changes in their behavior. Anyone who isn't serious about having that relationship with God won't get it even if for a little while they thought they wanted it.

This little explanation of Christianity doesn't really cover every last aspect of the subject but it is enough to start with. Sin has a number of subtle aspects that need to be explained but those can be left to another chapter, Advanced Sin. But to sum up the very basics of Christianity, God is a really nice guy and he will give you whatever you want. If you want to have things your own way - IF THAT IS YOUR HIGHEST PRIORITY - God will put you as far away from Him as you can get. And on the other side, everyone who wants to love God and love their neighbor will get that too. Nothing could be more fair. If you don't think giving people exactly what they want isn't fair I want to hear about it! Another important point is that life on Earth gives people a chance to try out sin to see if they like it as well as give them a sample of what a world filled with sinners is like. As we'll see in the next chapter the world has been designed to be an educational experience.