What did Jesus ask people to believe?

[Guest guest]

What did Jesus ask people to " believe " ?

 

....Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and

saying, " The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and

believe the gospel. " (Mark 1:14-15)

 

(p.378) Jesus' exhortation to " believe the gospel " does not refer to study of or

belief in scriptural writings per se.[1] In the original Greek in which the New

Testament was written, the word used for gospel is 'euangelion', " good news " or

" good message. " As used by Jesus it expressed the " good message, " the

revelations of truth, he was bringing to man from God.

 

When Jesus said to " believe the gospel, " he meant more than a casual mental

acceptance of his message. Belief in general is that conditional receptive

attitude of mind that must precede an experience in order to cognize it. One

must have sufficient belief in a concept in order to put it to the test, without

which one cannot possibly verify its validity. (p.379) If a man is thirsty and

is advised to quench his thirst with the water from a nearby good well, he must

believe in that advice sufficiently to make the effort to go to the well and

drink from it.

 

Similarly, Jesus emphasizes that truth-seeking souls must not only repent of the

foolishness of following unsatisfying material ways of living, and believe in

the truths experienced by him through God; they must also act accordingly that

they might realize those truths for themselves.

 

To be an orthodox unquestioning believer in any spiritual doctrine, without the

scrutiny of experimentation to prove it to oneself, is to be ossified with

dogmatism. Jesus did not ask the people merely to believe in his message, but to

keep faith in his divine revelations with the assurance that by believing in,

and hence concentrating upon, the gospel, they would surely and ultimately

experience within themselves the truths in those revelations. Belief is wasted

on false doctrines; but truth poured out to man through the authority of

God-realized saints is worthy of belief and sure to produce divine realization.

 

Even on the authority of the fame of scriptural text, one cannot judge what it

teaches, for various are the meanings and consequent distortions drawn from holy

writ, some of which defy the laws of both reason and wisdom. Also, who can deny

what errors might have come down through the centuries in the form of

mistranslations or mistakes made by scribes? The Bible and the Vedas may well be

inspired texts that came from heaven, but the ultimate test of truth is one's

own realization, direct experience received through the medium of the soul's

omniscient intuition.

 

The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within

You) Volume 1, Discourse 22, pg. 378-379

Paramahansa Yogananda

Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

ISBN-13:978-0-87612-557-1

ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7

 

Notes:

 

[1] " While two of the New Testament gospels use the word 'gospel' (it is missing

in Luke and John), they use it to indicate not the written works themselves, but

rather the message preached either by Jesus (in Matthew) or about him (in Mark).

Not until the middle of the second century are documents about the words and

deeds of Jesus called gospels. " - Robert J. Miller, ed., 'The Complete Gospels:

Annotated Scholars Version' (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

 

" The English word 'gospel' is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon word 'godspel' or

'good news'. 'Godspel' was an accurate equivalent of the original Greek word

'euangelion', literally a 'good message' or 'good tidings'. And the oldest

surviving Greek manuscript copies of the four canonical gospels bear only the

headings According to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (the four books together

comprise the whole of the single 'gospel'; and the word 'canonical' derives from

the Greek 'kanon' or 'measuring rod' and indicates, in this case, those few

gospels that were approved as holy scriptures by the orthodox church of the late

second century). " - Reynolds Price, 'Three Gospels' (New York: Simon and

Shuster, 1997). ('Publisher's Note')