Exploring the notion “Jesus Died for our Sins”

Reader Question:

Hey Ariel, how’s everything?

For a long time I pondered the meaning of the phrase “Jesus died for our sins”. In the past you made some very good interpretations of bible quotes, but if I remember correctly, you never talked about the christian concept of Jesus dying for our sins.

Do you have any explanation of this phrase?

Thanks a lot, and have a nice weekend,

F.

My Response:

Good question. You’re right that it’s not something I’ve ever talked about here.

So what’s the story taught in Christianity? Someone please correct me if I’m wrong because I really haven’t studied the Bible much, but from what I understand it seems that the idea was that basically the God of the Bible wanted to wipe out all of humanity as a result of them being such sinners. I’m not sure who thought up this plan, but Jesus came down to take the karmic burden upon himself. Instead of humans rising up beyond their egos to get into heaven (become enlightened/reach nirvana), humans now only have to believe in Jesus as being their lord and savior and they’re magically free of all that they have created, karmically speaking… It’s a much easier task, but people should still strive to be good people and live like Jesus did. They’ll never be able to fully do it though. After all, Jesus is more holy than they are. Jesus is perfect. Humans are mere mortals. They are “just human.” The Divine and the human are separate in this respect. We can only be one and not the other. (Oooh, separation.) Jesus must have been Divine. Afterall, he wasn’t born like a regular human. His mom was a virgin. The Divine doesn’t typically take the form of a human.

I dunno about you, but a bunch of pieces to this story feel way off. Let’s explore…

Karmic Debt

With respect to Jesus dying for our sins, maybe there was some agreement made for Jesus to take upon himself the karmic burden of humanity for a while, either temporarily or permanently, as a way to make it easier for people to go through their spiritual process. I honestly don’t know what agreements were made on that level. Either way, people are eventually going to have to take responsibility for the energy they created and rise above it. Since there is ultimately only One of us here, whatever YOU create and cause another to experience, YOU will experience yourself, even if it happens after the death of this particular incarnation.

There’s a wonderful metaphor about karmic debt I once heard. How does repaying financial debt work? Let’s say you borrow $100. Well then someday you’ll have to repay that $100. (Let’s assume there’s no interest.) If you have only $100, then paying back that $100 now is going to significantly affect your net worth. Now let’s say that the debtor allows you to repay that $100 5 years from now. In the meantime you take that $100, invest it, and turn it into $1,000,000. 5 years later when it’s time to repay that loan, paying back the $100 will be a snap. No problem at all. Your bank account will hardly notice the difference.

So perhaps Jesus dying for our sins was a way for us to delay the karmic effects of our actions so that we have a chance to raise our level of consciousness to a point where the results of our actions don’t impact us as deeply as they once would have, allowing us to consciously grow without getting overwhelmed with too much too soon.

To give a silly and overly-simplistic example, let’s say you insult someone by calling them a dummy. Such an action arises out of a particular level of consciousness that has a judgment around the word dummy. If someone was to call you a dummy back, you’d probably get really pissed off about it and fume about it for who knows how long. If, on the other hand, the return of your action is delayed so that you have the chance to heal your energies surrounding the word dummy, then when you get insulted back, it won’t be an issue for you any longer and you’ll just shrug it off. You will have demonstrated to yourself that you have grown. If Jesus really helped us out in this way, what a tremendous gift this was, and if so, thank you man!

Things may have been set up that way, but if so it would only be a temporary thing. What you put out is what you get back. Everything is here and now. There is nowhere else for what you create to go! There is no escaping your karma. There is only the rising above it (or not).

Getting In To Heaven

The idea is that Jesus died for our sins to help us get into heaven. Well what is heaven anyways? I basically define it as living in unity with God, in a state of oneness. It is living in a state of wholeness, living in a state of non-separation with the Divine. Heaven is not so much a literal location but more a level of consciousness. People talk about going “up to heaven” as if heaven was literally “up” in the clouds somewhere. The word “up” is a pointer more towards vibrational frequency and level of consciousness. You raise your vibration and raise your level of consciousness. It’s an internal transformation, not a trip that’s literally taken through space, as if we literally travel from earth to heaven. From this perspective, the concept of “bringing heaven down to earth” makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?

To do this we have to die to our limited moral identities (egoic separate self) and wake up to our true selves (which is already one), but the thing is that our physical bodies don’t have to actually die to go through this process! In the east this process is referred to as enlightenment. In Christianity it is taught that you can only get to heaven after you die, and while this is true, this mistakenly assumes that the “you” that dies must be the physical incarnate you. This is a mistake in understanding.

“The Kingdom of God is at hand.” You don’t have to physically die to wake up. Who you think you are does, yes, but who you really are wakes up from who you think you are. Every person who has ever become enlightened has demonstrated this. Jesus was simply one man of many to live this and teach this.

This moment already is the promised land. We only see it otherwise when we believe in thought as if it was literally “the truth” (the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon), when we fill our consciousness with the energy of fear and separation and thus misperceive reality.

No One Can Do It For You

One thing I’ve learned about spiritual teachers is that they can’t do it for you. You have to do the work, whatever that entails. You have to raise your consciousness. You need to stop resisting what is. You need to start loving what is. You have to wake up. Ultimately the point is about who YOU really are, not about the guru who gets you there. Respect and appreciation for the teacher, but it’s about realizing YOURSELF to be the One and the All. YOU are the greatest gift you could give yourself.

To say that someone else can do it for you is fantasy. It’s delusional. Can an enlightened teacher help you out? YES. Can meditating on their energy or being in their presence or following their advice benefit you? Certainly. Can they do the work of surrendering your ego for you or receiving the grace of God? NOPE.

To suggest otherwise is a copout, IMHO. That’s choosing to not take responsibility for your own life which is incredibly disempowering. There is tremendous value and wisdom in surrendering to a higher power, yes, but this is not that.

The ego would love if it you could just accept someone as your lord and savior and have that be enough. Man that’d make enlightenment, awakening to infinite love, getting into heaven, and all the other spiritual prizes so easy, wouldn’t it? Sure, just adopt this belief system, do these particular actions, pay enough money, apply this strategy, or whatever else and you’ll get what you want, but in my experience, it just doesn’t work that way. It just really doesn’t.

It’s basically about surrendering the ego, not accomplishing something with it. You can’t force yourself there.

So is the story about Jesus dying for our sins true? Perhaps there’s something to it. I don’t know. Someone build a time machine and let’s go back in time and ask him. Either way, whatever happened, what’s done is done. It’s history. Here we are in this day and age. Now what?

If we assume there is something to the story, does that absolve us of karmic responsibility to rise above the egoic level of consciousness and give us a sort of get out of jail free card with respect to retuning back home to a state of oneness and getting into heaven?

Nope. Not so much.

Surrender and Letting Go

Edit: This last part here has been added after the original posting of this post. It is a story about Ramana pulling a Jesus and having someone who came to him feeling really guilty about being a sinner give all his sins to Ramana. It’s a cool story on surrender and letting go. Click here to read. Reading this, it shines a whole new light on being released from sin.