At God's instruction, Moses raised up a bronze serpent in the desert so that anyone who suffered the judgment of the fiery serpents could look upon it and be saved. In the days of Hezekiah, one of the last kings of Judah, the same serpent had to be destroyed because Hebrews had started worshipping it like it was a god.
There are other examples of God's deeds being taken hold of by man and twisted out of their original purpose to become something essentially evil. I have given just one. But perhaps I should give two because as the Scriptures say, "in the mouths of two or three witnesses, every word shall be established". Here's the second one then.
The Lord God had a temple built to Him by Solomon the son of David, God's chosen king of Israel. He accepted completely the temple as His that He said He would cause His Name to dwell there and that He would receive worship there. In fact, in the prophet Daniel's day, we see that when Jews prayed, if they were not in the temple at Jerusalem, they turned their faces toward Jerusalem (because that was where the temple was) to pray. But a time came that God rejected the temple and all the "worship" offered in it because, as He said, it wasn't Him that was being worshipped in their hearts. The prophet Ezekiel was the one burdened with that heartache. To read his prophecies concerning the temple is to know the meaning of frustration. The temple took God's place, it became the site of all kinds of worship and none of those kinds was the worship of God Himself. In the days of the Romans, God finally tore that temple so far down that there wasn't one stone of it left upon another.
These two things are the parallel of Christianity. In Jesus Christ, God brought in Himself in the affairs of His Creation. He became PART of His Creation. He retains His Place as Overseer of it and is apart from it in His Own Nature, but in becoming man, He became as much a part of it as a grain of sand is part of the beach, possibly even moreso. He did not intend at any point to start a new system of worship per se. Jesus Himself said, "the hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers will NOT worship in Jerusalem or in the mountain...God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." It may provoke argument that that meant that He was going to start a new religion but it is not so. Religion, by definition, is man's way of understanding and relating to God. Jesus did not bring in anything like that. Rather did He release men from having to pursue God and try to find Him under every rock and inside every sea and above every mountain and within each cloud. He instead brought God to man and man to God.
Jesus brought in, NOT something, BUT SOMEONE. He brought God home to us and brought us home to God. If u must have a word to define it, call it a relationship. Jesus made it possible for us to call God Father again.
Jesus did not come to tell us that if we did not do such and such, we would go to hell and burn eternally, or to tell us that if we did such and such, we would go to heaven and float about on clouds blowing trumpets with angels. He came to wake us up to life and reality. To make it possible for us to really live and let others live. Wherever Jesus is, Life has a way of flourishing and becoming better. Life on earth takes on meaning and beautiful color when He has the preeminent place in a man's life. No man who has Christ and knows he has Christ is escapist by nature. Such a man takes joy in living life to the fullest, in tasking his powers to produce wonderful things whether in the farm, on paper, at a workshop, or on a computer. Such a man rejoices in people and never counts his enemies among them because even his neighbour's evil intent serves God's good desires for him. For this reason, you will not find him cantankerous or abusive in relationships. He is no fool either, so when he finds that another does not wish him well, he will not stick around such to encourage the evil in their hearts.
Jesus Christ came so that we can "have life", that means "so that we can really live", instead of exist fatalistically. When effort is made to capture the meaning of Jesus's coming into our situation, words just fail to bring the message through. I pray only that the meaning get through unhindered by the meagreness of language.
You may believe in Jesus Christ or you may not, it really is not my fight. He is enough of a reality to prove His own existence and vitality. If He fails of that, that is not my thing. But as a reality, He can be tested out. If you wish to know how, just get on your knees or stay standing or sit down or whatever posture suits you and ask Him to prove Himself to you.
Will you go to hell if you don't believe? I'm not interested. Will you go to heaven if you believe? I couldn't care less. WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW? WHAT DOES YOUR LIFE MEAN OR COUNT FOR RIGHT NOW? ARE you a waste of existence? ARE you at peace? ARE u at rest? Present tense!

Now, because men took hold of the "thing" Jesus brought in and turned it into a religion with tenets and laws and ceremony, they have created something quite like the temple God tore down and the bronze serpent He destroyed, the religion Christianity is going the same way. It must do so to give way for God to once again bring forth what He brought in in Jesus Christ. The religion Christianity has no mark of Jesus Christ on it. In fact, you'll find it only borrowed His Name and His Book. Even its use of both have turned them into despicable things. But God is out to salvage that now.
There is a Name given among men by which we must be saved. There is a Book given to men by which we must learn God. But we cannot know either by joining or rejecting the Christian religion. It is only by going out in our heart to God, by reaching for Him from within that we can let Him find us. The funny thing about the Life Jesus brought in is that it says it's God who's trying to find us not us trying to find Him. We're the kids that left home and got lost in the woods. We're the kids that tried to find our way back home and got more lost in the blizzard. We're the kids so blinded by the darkness that groping makes no sense. We're the kids who say we have no home because nothing anyone says or does will help us find it. If our Dad Himself doesn't come looking, there's no possibility of our surviving the night with the howls of the wolves and the laughing of the hyenas and the sniffing of the wild dogs all around us.
Feel free to take issue with all this.

makes for good reading.

Delafruita: makes for good reading.

ok. Thanks