No condemnation

Recently I wrote the chapter about accepting Christ as my Savior for my book. I was in the hospital and bored to tears and was reading several books per week. I happened to notice that the Bible was the best-selling book worldwide and decided to read it. Not because I wanted to get religion mind you; I wanted to prove to myself that it was a big fairy tale and gain ammunition to convince others of the same thing.

I had always rebelled against any and all authority. I was getting in trouble in school with teachers beginning at a young age, and then later with the police. I entered the military and was subsequently kicked out as a diagnosed sociopath. Basically I did not want anyone telling me what to do and did not want to follow anyone’s rules and that included God and religion.

As it turned out when I read the New Testament I really liked Jesus Christ. He did not seem like the authoritarian figure that had been presented to me by organized religion.

The thing I admired the most about Jesus was that He didn’t look down on anyone and had the courage to stand up for those who were down on their luck. He saved a prostitute from getting stoned to death, healed some guys with leprosy, exorcized demons from possessed people, made a paralyzed guy walk, cured a young boy of epilepsy, made a deaf man hear, and a blind man see. He had compassion for anyone and everyone, and it was obvious to me that he genuinely cared about the poorest of the poor, (the wretches and outcasts of the world like me), which is contrary to what I had seen from the religious types that I had been around.

Jesus would eat dinner with the scums and sinners of the day and didn’t care what anyone thought about it. The Pharisees got bent out of shape about it and grilled Him about why a holy man like Him would eat with obvious sinners and scums, He merely said He came to heal the sick and in order to accomplish it; He had to go where the sick were.

I figured that I qualified for being sick, (and I wasn’t talking about my broken leg). I can’t imagine any of those preachers in those churches that I attended in my youth visiting that rat’s nest that I lived in, and sitting down with a dope-head alcoholic like me and eating a nice dinner with cockroaches slowly crawling down the wall. And yet that’s exactly what Jesus did time and again.

As I read it seemed logical to me that indeed Jesus was God. He undoubtedly had supernatural powers; He raised the dead, walked on water, stilled storms, healed people by merely touching them, and performed miracle after miracle. He predicted that He would arise from the grave in three days and that is what He did. Only God could do such things.

He was not some super pious dud like I always envisioned either. In fact when He first used His supernatural powers, He changed a vat of water into wine for a wedding party so the people could continue to enjoy their celebration. The preachers that I have known would have gone in there all wild eyed and fanatically begun chopping holes in those vats with an ax and condemning the party as being “evil and of the devil” just because alcohol was on the premises.

As an atheist, that always drove me crazy about religious types. They made a big deal about the slightest infraction of their rules and yet they don’t seem to give a hoot about people dying in the streets. It was no different in Jesus’ day. There is one story that Jesus told about a guy that got beaten to a pulp, robbed, and left to die, and all of those pious “holy Joes” of the day wouldn’t even stop to help him because he wasn’t one of “their kind”. Instead they just went to the other side of the street and left him to die.

Jesus condemned them for it. Guess what? Here it is a couple of thousand years later and many of the “religious” people haven’t learned a thing from this biblical lesson. They would walk across the street rather than help someone who looked homeless that was lying in the street beaten, bloodied and dying. I guarantee it.

Jesus is about loving kindness and compassion, but many of those claiming to represent Him don’t know the first thing about Him. I came to know the truth about Jesus by reading the Bible. I wish I could be more like Him. Reading the Bible straightened out my misconceptions about who Jesus is and how He feels about us and our weaknesses. His purpose was not to condemn those with weaknesses like the prostitute, and neither should that be the purpose of Christians. Read your Bible every day and it will become crystal clear.

John 3:17
For God did not send His Son
into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world through Him
might be saved.