ELI5: If you're a Christian, why do you have to be good if Jesus will forgive you no matter what?
I grew up going to church but I'm not religious now and I never really understood this part.
Please, no answers along the lines of "aha, that's why Christianity is a sham" or "religions aren't logical". I don't want to debate whether it's right or wrong, I just want to understand the logic and reasoning that Christians use to explain this.
The “be a good person” and “you’ll be forgiven” are two separate ideas. Digging into it requires digging into a lot of different religions and their beliefs. Churches and people disagree on how those go together.
I don’t feel your request of “understanding the reasoning that Christians use” relates well to the question in your title. Much of religion now is repeating dogma rather than spiritual awareness and bettering yourself.
In Jesus’s time, there were three different sects of Judaism.
One of them, the Sadducees, allegedly believed there was no life after death and that God didn’t care at all about what people did or didn’t do.
Their answer to your question of following the law is perhaps the most interesting.
They believed that what was put forth as laws were a gift to humanity and that following them inherently led to a better life in the here and now.
While I don’t personally see all of the laws put forward as beneficial, there are certainly instances where that makes a lot of sense.
For example, look at the full version of one of the commandments:
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12
Would following a commandment to take care of your parents in their old age (‘honor’ here comes from the word for https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3513.htm) benefit you by setting an example such that when you are old that you too would be taken care of?
This was almost like social security in antiquity, much like the Sabbath was one of the first labor laws preventing working anyone more than 6 days in a row.
There’s something called the overjustification effect, where when you introduce external reward systems for something intrinsically rewarding people over focus on the external and forget the internal benefits. I think a number of religions have serious issues with that.
There’s even a certain irony in Job, named ‘persecuted’ in Hebrew because even though he lived a good life he experienced suffering which it explains by the intervention of Satan, today in the most common language among believers being the exact same word as “to do a task with the expectation of a reward.”
I’m catholic, and to me it’s because behaving in a good way will simply make you live better;
the idea is that sin is something that turns you away from God, but being close to God is what makes you truly happy
So even in this life, behaving in a good way would make you live better and happier
How odd, that one should be good not for the sake of goodness, but out of fear of damnation.
Jesus is an example of an ideal person. Being literally divine Jesus is capable of setting a perfect example of love, forgiveness, and compassion. We humans are not. We have flaws, but should still strive to be good people, just as Jesus was a good human.
If you are “being good” or “not being bad” for selfish reasons, you aren’t acting out of love or goodness. Heaven, hell, reward, punishment, these shouldn’t matter when it comes to virtue or vice.
So ELI5, if you are a little baby sheep and your Shepard was out caring for the flock. He provides a vast world for you to live in but there are bad things in the world and your little sheep brain can fall easily to these bad things. Your Shepard realises there is a way he can show you to live well without him around all the time, but it takes a big sacrifice on his part. He takes a look and goes you know what, I'll be a symbol, I'll give up my Shepard life and hopefully you will see, there is a bigger picture and a greater good. So little sheep, you can live in a bad world where people do bad things and I guess everyone suffers from it. Or you too can be like your Shepard and make sacrifices to be a good sheep, and if enough other sheep do the same the flock will be a pretty good place to be. PS. I'm not Christian but I figure that's the gist of the whole thing
You won't be forgiven no matter what. If you carry on sinning, there is no more forgiveness. The only thing you can expect is to be thrown into outer darkness forever where you will be mourning and regretting your decision.
Put it this way: you drove drunk and killed someone. You've been given the death penalty by the judge. But a person called Jesus steps in and says "I'll take his place. Let him go free".
Would you ever drink drive again after someone died in your place to give you a second chance? Surely not! You would be sober, very grateful and even yet to help other people not make the same mistake.
It's the same with sin. Jesus paid a HEAVY price to redeem you. Don't spit in his face by carrying on with the same sins. Instead be grateful and find out how you should live instead.
Read the 10 commandments in Exodus 20. And also read the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) to see how Jesus further explains and practices these.
Good ELI5 answer. The “push” to do good comes from the feeling of thankfulness that you don’t have to take a death penalty from a wrongdoing, someone else is taking it instead.
Another take: Imagine when a friend takes you for a dinner treat, you’d be thankful for them that they paid for your food (and the food is not necessarily free, someone actually paid for the food). You’d at least try to be nice to him, as a gesture of thankfulness, and you wouldn’t want hurt their feeling after they took you for a treat. Deliberately or not.
Hey I'm not trying to be an ass as everyone has a right to contribute but you really didn't answer the ELI5 question. You just slandered some groups or something
You see, there are these things called eigenvalues. They dimentionalize the vector space. We can contruct a personality vector space and assign a set of orthogonal personality vectors. (Sees that this is elif). Erm, think of a "which Harry Potter character are you" quiz. We can add and subtract weighted , erm, Harry Potter characters, to get to you. You are half Harry plus two Rons minus 1.5 Malfos.
Now those numbers might change over time. That is you at that moment. If you, erm, took a DeLorean back to 1955, but still had those same numbers, you would still be you. If you wiped your memory but still had those numbers, you would still be you. Stands to reason if you went back in time and got your memory wiped, you would still be you. What if someone in the past (or future) had the exact same numbers? That would be you, even though no time travel occurred.
Now (erm, how do I explain vector projection to a five year old), ummm, if your numbers are close, you are mostly you? Now Jesus, ahh, scored a particular score on the sigh Harry Potter quiz. Remeber how I said your numbers change? Well, if your numbers are close enough, you could say that he is you, or Jesus is living Through you. And as long as more people in the future get numbers close to both yours and Jesus's, you could say you are living on, or having eternal life. And in order to change those number to Jesus's, you have to be good.
Seems to me this is a protestant thing, i grew up Catholic and repentance was a major part of it. You don't change and become a better person? Then no absolution for you.
Depends on the protestant branch, I'd heard repentance defined as "turning away from sin 100% and leaving it behind" but that kind of theology gets mixed up in "faith not works" and the idea that if you haven't immediately asked forgiveness for every little time you mess up you're going to hell until you do. Swear while falling down the stairs, then die in your living room? Hell.
Of course there's also the opposite which is "once you accept Jesus there's no possible way you can ever not be saved" which doesn't match up with free will in my opinion.
I come from a protestant tradition that says you can't ever be good enough to be saved. Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life and acted as a substitutionary sacrifice on our behalf to make us righteous before God. All the work of salvation is done through Christ. If salvation required anything other than faith to save ourselves (e.g. being good), then his death and resurrection would be meaningless. So once we are made righteous by God through faith, God begins the work of sanctification (being made holy and more Christlike). We don't believe this will fully happen in this life but is a process that we go through as we walk with God.
TLDR: It isn't about doing good things to be saved but rather we're saved and slowly begin to orient our lives around doing good things.
I am no longer a Christian, I came from a super fundamentalist bent of Christianity. The idea of choosing to not sin even if you know your sins are forgiven has to do with love.
"For God so loved the world he gave his only son for our sins" etc
So the pastor tells us that we know we are a real Christian who is really saved by our "good fruits", that is, the good things we choose to do and the bad things we choose not to do. So by choosing not to sin, you're proving to yourself that God is real and that God really saved you, because, as everyone knows, it's impossible to be for even a moment anything but absolutely selfish without God's help.
Most Christians aren't that Calvinist though. That was the church I grew up in.
Catholic here. Despite God's forgiveness, Jesus never said salvation is guaranteed. As he said, "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven". And that's just for the rich. There are other passages that emphasize the difficulty of gaining eternal life in Heaven, " the way is narrow", "you must take up your cross", and so on. Christ's death and resurrection made salvation possible in the first place. We couldn't even have a hope of it without His help. He also gave us the way that we must follow to gain salvation now that it's possible: belief in God and Christ, and following His commandments, given through the Church.
To put it in another way, we all have a relationship with God. That relationship was damaged through original sin in a way we could not repair on our own. God still has always loved us, but without Christ's sacrifice, He could not forgive our betrayal through sin and therefore we remained separated from Him. Once Christ bore the burden of our sin and overcame it, that repaired humanity's relationship with God overall and God is willing to forgive any sin, past or present, that we commit against Him. As long as we do not commit a serious sin, that relationship will stay intact. Two people in a relationship may do little things that annoy or lightly anger the other person, but we've all got stuff that aren't "deal-breakers" with each other. But a serious sin done with full knowledge and of one's own free will, which in the Catholic Church we call a mortal sin, is a "deal-breaker" that once again severs our own personal relationship with God and threatens our salvation. It's basically a betrayal of God's love. God has these rules and morality and such because He loves us so much He wants the absolute best for humanity and the world. Sin does damage to that, and mortal sin does damage to that in a big way. God is always willing to forgive, but in order for that to happen we have to show that we are sorry for breaking that relationship and promise/resolve that we will do our best to try not to do it again. We have to reconcile with God just as two people in a strained or broken relationship have to reconcile with each other. In the Catholic Church, we believe that reconciliation happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we confess what we did to a priest, who is in the person of Jesus at that time, and make that resolution to not sin again. The priest then offers a penance as a way to basically "make it up" to God, or as a theologian I heard once say, "clean up the glass and repair the window we broke", and the good relationship with God is restored. Basically, yeah, God is always willing to forgive if we ask for it... But that doesn't mean we still can't break that relationship. I'd always be willing to forgive a best friend if they were to betray me, but if they actually did that, I'd still be mad, and if they don't respond to my calls offering that forgiveness, well, there's not much more I can do to fix the relationship with my friend at that point if they don't want to be forgiven.
You have to be truly sorry for your sins and make an honest attempt at not doing them again. That being said if you sneak in a really sincere confession right before death, then by the book, you should go to heaven. This is a loooot like Christians last rights, the sacraments they use on the dying.
Fun fact anyone can preform last rights for a Christian should they request it. Reason being that people don't always get to choose when they need their last rights so holy men may or may not be around.
Christians aren't a monolith. There isn't a single right answer here. Everyone practices religion in their own way. You'd have to ask this to Christians on a personal level.
Answer according to anyone christian: (note- not me) You don't. You have have to "Be sorry" and "ask forgiveness". You can still be an enormous piece of sh*t if you say you're sorry that you were bad.
The Catholic viewpoint on Confession is that its a holy sacrament where you're truly sorry for the sin and are effectively promising not to do it again. That's why it requires a priest and a visit to the church, its not just some thing you decide during a night-time prayer, you have to go out of your way and invoke the sacrament.
There's too many Christian faiths out there for me to know how it works in every faith. I can tell you that Protestants in general didn't like Confession because of the old practice of indulgances (ie: 1500s-era Catholic Priests saying "If you're truly sorry, you'd give a $1000 donation to the Church"). My understanding of the "Faith alone" argument from Protestant groups is more of a anti-Catholic / anti-Confession perspective, rather than a "God just lets everyone into Heaven" kind of viewpoint.
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