HOW IS A JEW SAVED―HOW DOES A JEW ATTAIN SALVATION? 1
Christianity maintains that all men are doomed to
sin, and everyone will go to everlasting hell unless they accept Jesus as their
savior. Hell and damnation―another fear tactic.
Judaism has always held that you do not need that sort of salvation, for we are
not doomed or damned at birth. We are not doomed or fated to sin―quite
the contrary. The Torah says: "If you do good, won't there be special
privilege? And if you do not do good, sin waits at the door. It lusts after
you, but you can dominate it." (Genesis 4:7) In other words, you can do
good, and if you do, things will be better for you. If you do not do good, sin
wants to be partners with you.
But you can control sin, you can control your evil
desires, and you can be good. In other words, we all have free will, and that
is what Judaism has always believed, because that is what the Torah teaches.
The Torah does not teach, or even mention, that people are "born in
sin," or that we are fated to sin. Torah teaches just the opposite. We all
have the ability to choose, which means that we can be good, or we can be evil.
It is clearly up to us. And if we can be good, that means we can be righteous.
I cannot understand how or why Christians like to say that no one can be
righteous in the eyes of God. The Torah says otherwise.
Christians say that all people, including Jews, are sinful and cannot be
righteous. But the Torah says quite the opposite: "All your nation is righteous; they will inherit the earth
eternally; the shoot that I have planted, the work of My hands, something to be
proud of" (Isaiah 60:21). So we are righteous, and God is proud of us.
And it says, "Open the gates, so
that the righteous nation that keeps the faith may enter" (Isaiah
26:2). We, the Children of Israel are righteous, for the Torah says so. Of
course, we must uphold the Torah, or otherwise we might cease to be righteous.
But as long as we keep the Torah, we are righteous.
The Prophets of the Torah warned us about this many
times. They often called us wicked, when?―when we did not obey the
Commandments of the Torah.
Yet never once in all of the Hebrew
Bible did the Prophets chastise the Children of Israel for not believing in the
messiah! Not once! Christians claim no one can be righteous in the
eyes of God. Then how can the Torah call Noah righteous (Genesis 6:9, 7:1), as
just one example? "Noah walked with God," the Torah says. Obviously
you can be righteous and you can walk with God.
Was Moses righteous? Didn’t he kill an Egyptian? However God called
Moses His trusted servant, and was closer to Him than any other prophet. Moses
spoke directly to God, and God spoke directly to Moses (Numbers 12:6-8). Moses
was God’s right hand man on earth. The problem is that Christians do not
understand the meaning of the concept "righteousness." Christians
think righteousness means that one has never sinned. Never sinning is almost
impossible. The Torah says, "There
is no person on earth so righteous that he does only good and never sins"
(Eccl.
Being righteous does not mean that one never sins. It means that after you sin
you get back up again, repent, and try again. You keep on trying. That is being
righteous. Not only that, but even if you keep on trying, and you don't succeed
very well, and you have many sins, you can still be forgiven and go to Heaven.
In the Book of Job (33:23) it says that if someone has even only one merit and
1,000 sins, he is rescued from hell. So we are not doomed to hell.
That's what Judaism teaches, as we see from the Torah.
The Christian bible, on the other hand, teaches
that there is no repentance after sinning.
Here is what it says in the Christian bible: “For if after they have escaped the
pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse
with them than the beginning .For it would have been better for them not to
have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn
from the holy commandment delivered unto them.” (2 Peter 2:20-21)
In other words, if anyone accepted Jesus as savior,
and then sins, they are in worse trouble than they were before they accepted
Jesus. So what then is the advantage of accepting Jesus? It seems better to
stay with God! God accepts repentance, and loves all those who turn away from
sin, no matter how many times they have sinned and repent "For
the righteous stumble even seven times, but they get up again!" And they are still
called righteous! And the wicked who repent are no longer called wicked. “Even when I have told the wicked that he
will die, but then he repents, and he does justice and righteousness; he
returns the collateral when he is supposed to, he repays what he stole, he
begins to live by the Laws of Life, and does not do evil, he will live, and he
will not die. All the sins that he committed will not be held against him, for
he has begun to do judgment and righteousness; he shall surely live.” (Ezekiel
33:14-16)
We see, therefore another fallacy of the Christians, who argue that "sin
has separated us from a perfectly holy God." We are not separated from God
at all. The Torah teaches that all we need to do is repent. But no, say the
Christians. Repentance won't work, for some reason that we cannot understand.
They claim "no one can be close to God without Jesus." This is
completely wrong. The righteous live by their faith. (Habbakuk 2:4) We do not
gain life or atonement by the faith or righteousness of Jesus. We are masters
of our own fate, because the choice to do good or bad is our own.
Was King David separated from God? The Torah says that he did one thing wrong
(1 Kings 15:5) and yet he was considered righteous and God was with him (1
Kings
If you examine the Christian belief in this matter, you will even find denominations
that believe God only chooses those that He has previously decided to choose.
In other words, God will accept into Heaven only on those whom He has decided
to accept into Heaven, and we have no free will or choice! That means that we
cannot even be good people if we try! It's all up to God! "Many are called, but few are chosen." How is this merciful? What
about all those people who are not chosen? How do they attain
"salvation?" Why can they not attain salvation, when it isn't even
their fault? That is possibly the cruelest doctrine I have ever heard! No
matter what a person does, he will get Heaven only if God had previously chosen
him to get Heaven! Everyone else goes to eternal hell!
In Judaism, it is entirely up to you. If you do good, you will get good.
Nowhere in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) would you connect salvation with sin. On
the few occasions where salvation is mentioned, it is on a national scale
rather than an individual one. In these cases the Tanakh talks about
The question “are you saved?” is foreign to
the Hebrew Bible. The weird Christian concept of sin, sacrifice and instant
salvation obtained by belief in a man dying on a cross, is in no way a
fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures.
In Judaism, it is entirely up to you. If you do good, you will get good
in return.
Sources:
1.
Mordechai Housman and Shmuel Golding