Concise Karma

by Aaron

I was talking to a few people the other day and one for them said the strangest thing (well a lot of my friends say strange things), but this had to do with karma. Something about what goes around….

Karma is the concept that there are deeds that you have to work off in order to attain an enlightened state. Karma refers to the debt of one’s bad actions, which must be atoned for by your own actions.

In Hinduism, Prabhupada taught that even if you desire a sweet ball (this is a piece a candy) you have to come back to the material world to take another body (because the desire for something, in and of itself, is considered wrong); in other words, you have to work it off. Part of the problem is that true Buddhism and Hinduism do not even distinguish between desire and action.

The difference in Buddhism and Hinduism essentially comes down to the issue of karma. In true Hinduism there is no way to get out of the cycle rebirth. The Buddha didn't like this so he found a way to get off the wheel of samsara (the karmic cycle)…unfortunately you have to have the right vocation, right speech, right views, right aspirations, right mindfulness, right effort, and right concentration to make it…AND EVEN IF YOU HAVE ALL OF THOSE you then need to be born a male and into the right social caste.

It seems impossible because it is.

This is why as Christians we believe in Jesus, not karma. We are accountable for our actions to a Holy God, not an impersonal force of the universe. We have a personal God who became a person to save us from ourselves, because no matter how many lifetimes we ever lived through, we would never get it right.

Yes, our actions have consequences, but there really is a way out of the misery we find ourselves in: Jesus. He doesn't hold us to a cosmic karma wheel of reincarnation (you get 1 life Hebrews 9:27), we don't have to work off our sin, and we don't need to beg, scrape, or plead for forgiveness, we simply trust, by faith, that Jesus paid it all - once for all.

So let's stop throwing out stupid karmic ideals and lift up the greatness of Jesus and what His actions have done for us.