Paying for Salvation

How terrible for you who are rich now: you have had your easy life. Jesus Christ While I prefer to confine my religious statements to my Coats from the Lost and Found blog where I advise people to skip them if they are uninterested, what I have to say on this topic this morning is relevant to non-believers. It concerns the fitness of the rich for eternal salvation with Jesus in Heaven. On the surface, their prospects do not look good. Since I may end up rich myself at some point, I have analyzed the words and deeds of the Lord, looking for some sort of hope that I might not end up damning myself by pursuing success with my lawsuits against wealthy corporations who owe me millions and millions of dollars. The first is obvious: I have not had an easy life. On the contrary, I have had an extremely difficult and troubling life and have spent most of it suffering from material want. I can picture my wife telling my five-year-old son about me after I have died of extreme old age: 'Your father had to eat canned turnips and smoke cigarette butts from the floors of public washrooms!' (To which my boy would likely reply: 'He sounds like a loser. Why did you marry him?') So I might end up rich, but I have certainly not had an easy life. On that basis, I might still be saved. It sounds to me like Jesus was warning more about the perils of adopting a lazy lifestyle, such as the one favored by all these wealthy superstars who stole my things because they didn't want to do their own work, than he was condemning the rich. The other exemption for the rich may lie in the example of the wealthy Zachaeus [sp?]. Zachaeus was a rich tax collector whose heart was transformed by the experience of hosting a dinner party for Jesus. He suddenly got up and announced that he was going to pay back every debt he owed and to pay those he had cheated four times the amount he owed them. Here again we have an example of a rich man who may be saved. By this example, I would say that simply being rich is not enough to close the gates of Heaven in your face, but only if your riches consume your heart. The key to eternal salvation, as I read it in these accounts, is to keep your heart open to God's saving grace. Jesus simply noted the detrimental impact of riches on the human heart in this respect. Riches make us selfish - if we are not careful. So it might be okay to be rich, as long as our heart stays generous. Certainly we have a number of examples of wealthy stars who have or had extremely generous hearts and they do not appear to be in any trouble with the Lord from where I am standing. Besides all that, it takes a certain kind of acquisitive, money conscious character to manage money responsibly enough for all of our good, in order to keep the overall standard of living comfortably high. If such people are actually helping us all by this kind of behavior, then we must be careful not to condemn them for it. I don't necessarily think Trump is a bad choice for president based on his wealth either. Maybe he'll turn out great. My problem with elections is that they are 'hit and miss', not that they are altogether bad. The way we judge success in our world is by measuring bank accounts. As such, we must look to our wealthiest citizens as our best choices for leadership. That's just the way it is. And it has been that way since Jesus' time, so that is likely how things will stay here in this often disappointing flesh kingdom.
Arguments Copyright Issues Comedy Sketches Cartoons Lyrics Poems
More Statements Scripts Songs
© 2016. Statements by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved.