True Essence of Christianity

THE TRUE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

INTRODUCTION

Almost everybody has the wrong idea about Christianity. It was never intended as a religion: The mission of Jesus was to introduce the existing Hebrew religion and the people who followed it to the concept and the reality of the Holy Spirit. From the prophets Abraham and Moses down through time, there had been no concept or understanding of the qualities of love or compassion. The commandments of Moses may have been sound in their basic principles, and uncompromising they certainly were, but they could be interpreted in different ways. Moses himself may have received these principles which were "carved into stone" – that is, they were not to be altered – but his understanding of them was brutal and merciless, like his own heart, as befitted the hearts and minds of those Bronze Age tribes-people whom he led through the ghastly slaughtering fields of the Middle East to their promised land.

Jesus was a man filled with the Holy Spirit, and thus filled equally with compassion for his fellows and love for God, and these were the qualities he strove to graft onto the laws and customs of his religion and of the times in which he lived. His teachings and indeed his own nature have been misunderstood by Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. Most Christians think of Jesus in a completely unrealistic, sentimental way: a magic god-like figure, perhaps, whose birth and final resurrection have been turned into a kind of fairytale based on a general misunderstanding of the symbols of Christianity. The Holy Spirit is real, but it is not something that can be seen or studied or analysed. The Holy Trinity is equally real and true, but the principle of it must be understood as symbolic of spiritual possibilities for mankind. To follow the Holy Spirit is to follow the soul, which alone can survive death. "Religion" – any religion – is for the heart: and as Jeremiah pointed out, "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked".