Karma, Reincarnation and Christianity
3
Some of the clearest examples of returning karma in the Old Testament can be seen in the tests and trials of the Israelites during their forty years wandering in the wilderness. Time and again Moses, messenger of God and great guru of the Israelites, pleads with I AM THAT I AM on their behalf. Then again the Israelites so provoke Moses that he becomes angry and makes karma himself!
Only six weeks after the people make their covenant-pledge with God, they demand that Aaron fashion them a replica of the old gods of Egypt. When Moses returns from communing with God on Mount Sinai, he sees the people worshiping the golden calf and in his anger breaks the tablets of the law that he has received from God.
The LORD says, “I have seen this people and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people.” He says he will consume the Israelites as the penalty (which means the karma) for breaking the covenant-pledge with him. But through Moses’ intercession the nation is spared, Aaron is saved and only(!) three thousand people are punished with death. <1>
After they leave Sinai, the people complain about there being nothing to eat but manna. They say: “Our soul is dried away. There is nothing at all beside this manna before our eyes.” The LORD’s anger is kindled greatly and Moses is also displeased. So the LORD sends them a month’s worth of quail that they may satiate themselves in eating the flesh they have lusted after. Nevertheless, the Lord punishes their lust with a plague, causing the death of many. <2>
The way of the Old Testament has seemed harsh to us with its wars upon wars and judgments descending. And we say it was so because it was before the coming of Jesus Christ. As John wrote, “The law was given by Moses but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” <3>
The Old and New Testaments show two distinct dispensations. The first is the absolute law of the Mighty I AM Presence, which was delivered by Moses, the judges and the prophets. The second is the grace of the Son of God, which came through Jesus Christ. Most of us have lived through these dispensations and learned many lessons the hard way before we were brought to our knees by the law of the I AM THAT I AM and the grace of the only begotten Son of God.
Both the Old and New Testaments show the doings of a people whom God loves and wants to bring back to himself. The people learn that disobedience to God’s law brings about an untimely passing and the necessity to reembody again. And by and by, after numerous incarnations, they begin to fear the law and finally to love it.
Without reincarnation, it is impossible to understand why God would allow or bring about the death of so many people for seemingly not-so-bad crimes. We don’t see our past deeds from past lives, whose karma is coming due. But if we could see what is written in our karmic book of life by recording angels, we would realize that the karma of five, ten or twelve thousand years could descend upon any of us at any time. Yes, if we could see all of this, we would exclaim with the angel, “Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments!” <4>
When we understand karma and reincarnation, we see that God’s priority for us is not success, money and pleasure. God’s priority for us is that we get our souls back into alignment with him! And Jesus promised us that if we seek first the kingdom (i.e., the consciousness) of God and his righteousness (i.e., the right use of his law), he will add all these material things unto us. <5>
As Buddha taught us–and Moses as well–all of our suffering is caused by our inordinate desires, for our inordinate desires cause us to be out of alignment with God and our Real Self. God has told us: “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” <6> Whether it’s quail or a golden calf or a bright red Ferrari that we’re putting before God, God is going to wean us of that idolatry, no matter what it takes.
We may love someone so much that we don’t realize that we love that person more than we love God. And one day that person is taken from us and we realize that that is the reason–because we must first learn to love the LORD our God, who is our Mighty I AM Presence, “with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength,” and only after that “our neighbor as ourself,” as Mark worded the Great Commandment and the second, which follows it. <7> And when we do, then God is not jealous of our other loves.
Sometimes it takes a lifetime to sort out our idols, the idol of self or of other persons or things or businesses. We need to search our hearts to be certain that we have cast them all down, because when we put something before God we are making karma–with God! And that’s not a very smart thing to do. It is inordinate desire to want anything in this world or the next more than we want God.
Continuing our examination of the outworking of karma in the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings, we see that on one occasion Miriam challenges her brother Moses’ authority, “for he had married an Ethiopian woman.” As a result, Miriam is afflicted with leprosy. Although she is healed through Moses’ intercessory prayer, the LORD commands that she be “shut out from the camp seven days” that her karma might be fulfilled. <8>
On another occasion, God punishes the leaders of a rebellion led by Korah by causing the earth to open up and swallow them and their families. He then sends a fire to consume the supporters of the rebellion. The people nevertheless continue their grumbling and God sends a plague that kills 14,700 of them. The plague is stopped only when Aaron makes an atonement. <9>
Remember, this is a people whose karma had caused them to be enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years. God delivered them out of this slavery by the plagues that came upon Pharaoh and his house and upon all the Egyptians and by the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea, which swallowed up the hosts of Pharaoh after the Israelites had passed over. <10> All of these wonders and miracles God performed before this people and yet they still railed against him!
We must learn from the examples of history that when God intercedes for us in our life, we must demonstrate our gratitude to him by being merciful and kind and gracious to others. We must set aside that backbiting and that stiff-neckedness that causes us to continue to rebel against his prophets and Christed ones when he has shown us such tender mercies lifetime after lifetime.
When the Israelites again complain about their poor food, the LORD sends fiery serpents to bite them. The people repent and ask Moses to intercede for them, whereupon God instructs Moses: “Make thee a fiery serpent and set it upon a pole. And it shall come to pass that everyone that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.” So Moses makes a serpent of brass and puts it upon a pole. Those who look upon the serpent are healed. <11>
The caduceus fashioned by Moses is the symbol of the medical profession today. It is the coiled serpent wound upon the spinal altar. And when the Israelites looked upon it, the sacred fire rose upon the altar of the spine from the base chakra to the point of the third eye. Through the activation of the third eye they were healed of their diseases because the raising of the sacred fire establishes the wholeness of the Father-Mother God within one’s being.
This is an example of the merciful mitigation of the law that takes place through Moses’ intercession before the Great I AM on behalf of the people.
All these judgments and miracles notwithstanding, at Meribah the people gather themselves together against Moses and Aaron because there is no water. Moses and Aaron leave the presence of the assembly and go to the door of the tabernacle, where they fall upon their faces and the glory of the Lord appears to them. Moses cries unto the Lord, saying, “What shall I do unto this people? They be almost ready to stone me!”
The Lord commands Moses and Aaron to gather the congregation. He tells Moses to take his rod and “speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water.” But Moses’ anger is kindled and by his familiarity with I AM THAT I AM he does not do exactly what the Lord commands. He says: “Hear now, ye rebels, must we fetch you water out of this rock?” He then smites the rock with his rod twice, instead of speaking to the rock, as the Lord had instructed. The water flows out in abundance and the congregation and their beasts drink of it.
But now, alas, the judgment of the LORD descends upon the two leaders and it is final and irrevocable. Their karma is instantaneous: “Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.” <12>
This is the Old Testament’s supreme example of the divine justice of the law: God is no respecter of persons <13>–not of his chosen people and not even of his anointed, the deliverers of his Israelites. Truly he has not spared the mantle of Moses nor the rod of Aaron, nor does he spare us the soul-saving lessons of our karma. Truly the reliability of the justice of the law is a comfort to all upon whom it is meted out daily.
In the Second Book of Samuel, Uzzah is struck down by God and dies because he touches the sacred ark of the covenant, which by law only a Levite of the priestly class can carry. As translated in the Jerusalem Bible, “Uzzah stretched his hand out to the ark of God and steadied it, as the oxen were making it tilt. Then the anger of Yahweh blazed out against Uzzah, and for this crime God struck him down on the spot.” <14>
The reality here is that the power of God resided in the ark and only the priests had the mantle to be in contact with that power. Uzzah’s unlawful touching of the ark resulted in God’s power being arced to his body and striking him dead. God made the law; man disobeyed it and suffered the consequences.
It was an act of the impersonal law–just as when lightning strikes a man and kills him. Although God is in the lightning, he does not personally decide that a man should be struck by lightning. Lightning kills because it is a power too great for the human body to withstand. The karma of one man may attract to him the lightning while another standing by is not touched. It is the impersonal law that acts–the law of karma that God himself set in motion yet which is operational without him, just as the laws of mathematics, physics and chemistry operate without favor or favoritism.
Another graphic example of the law of karma comes from the life of David. David falls in love with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and she conceives a child by him. David secretly assigns Uriah to the front lines of battle, where he knows he will be killed, and then marries Bathsheba.
The LORD sends the prophet Nathan to tell David that because he has slain Uriah and married his wife, he will be punished. The LORD tells David through Nathan that the sword will never be far from his house and that God will give his wives to his neighbor. Nathan says that God has forgiven David and will not take his life but the price of his sin will be the life of the child born to Bathsheba. Although David fasts and entreats God to spare the child, the child becomes sick and dies. <15>
Again we see that God, and God’s law, is no respecter of persons. David took another’s life, so the life of his child is taken. And yet we know that God loved David. No different from any of us, David had to learn his lesson, for had he not paid the price for his karma in that life, he would have had to pay it in a future life.
I believe God took his child rather than David himself because the pain one experiences in the death of one’s child is far greater than the pain experienced in one’s own death. David was burdened by that karma for the rest of his life. Pain administered by God in the form of karma is for one’s soul growth.
Not in every case does Jesus Christ take upon himself our sins, i.e., our karma. If it were true, none of us would ever suffer any calamity. But we do suffer calamities, we suffer great losses. We can interpret these calamities in two ways. Either we think our God is a whimsical God and that we are subject to his moods of vengeance or we see the law of karma as operational in every facet of our lives, with ourselves–we and we alone–setting causes in motion whose effects return to us by the mathematical precision of the law itself.
If you don’t have the understanding of karma, then when you suffer loss you say, “It’s the will of God.” But it’s not the will of God, you see. The law of karma is his will, but it was you who exercised your free will outside of his law, and sometime, somewhere the fruits of your misuses of God’s law must come upon you. The purpose of karma is to teach us, not to punish us, but sometimes we identify more with the punishment than with the teaching.
I remember the San Francisco earthquake that occurred in October 1989. One of the officials said, “This is not our earthquake. This is God’s earthquake.” He was dead wrong. It is our earthquake. The earthquakes in the earth are a sudden release of the karma of millions of people, all not necessarily being in the area of the quake.
Karma descends when there is no day-to-day accountability, person to person, and no admission of guilt in breaking God’s laws; therefore there is no intercessory prayer offered by the people for their sins and no good works offered on the altar of community as an atonement. When karma unmitigated comes upon a people, they think it is an act of God and they become angry with God. They clench their fists and they defy God because God has supposedly done this thing to them personally.
Among the Old Testament examples of karma returning upon an entire group of people are the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions. Jeremiah, preaching in Judah (the Southern Kingdom of the Hebrews) in the seventh century B.C., said that the people of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) had been taken into exile by the Assyrians because of their faithlessness and worship of idols.
The prophet warned the people of Judah that if they did not turn wholeheartedly to God and repent of their idolatry, corruption and moral degeneracy, including their pagan practice of child sacrifice, they would meet the same fate. The people didn’t change their ways and their karma descended. They were deported to Babylonia and Jerusalem was destroyed. <16>
Because we don’t so much think in terms of past lives, we think of “those people way back then” that this happened to. We have to consider that we ourselves might have been “those people way back then.” We might have been the very ones who ignored the prophet Jeremiah. So we don’t want to ignore the voice of God that is speaking to us in our hearts today. No, we want to learn from our past mistakes, and not only learn from them but atone for them.
The book of the prophet Jonah teaches that I AM THAT I AM will even intercede on behalf of pagan nations when they heed his prophet’s warning of the imminent descent of their karma. When Jonah prophesies to the Ninevites that they will be destroyed in forty days because of their wicked ways, they renounce their evil behavior and pray to the Hebrew God to spare them. They proclaim a fast for themselves and their animals and put on sackcloth “from the greatest of them even to the least of them.”
The king of Nineveh proclaims: “Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing. Let them not feed, nor drink water. But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto God. Yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?” The Book of Jonah records that “God relented: he did not inflict on them the disaster which he had threatened.” <17>
God is always seeking to give us opportunity. In fact, he gives every one of us thousands of opportunities to forsake some nasty habit we have or some pain we may be inflicting on another. And over and over again we scrape our knee on the same situation, the same problem, the same argument with the same person.
Unless we finally come around and decide we’re going to stop it here and now in the name of Jesus Christ and call to God for help, one of these fine days that continuous harangue with this or that person, that continuous problem where we refuse to bend, is going to bring about a major descent of karma that will be a burden to us perhaps for the rest of our life–and even on into the next.
So this is the day to look ourselves over, the entire 360 degrees, to look around at our lives and see how we act toward one another and to our neighbors. And if we don’t like what we see, we need to turn over a new leaf and determine that from now on we will make only good karma.
The Hebrew patriarch Abraham is an example of one who was obedient to God throughout his life. Abraham follows God’s call to leave his native land and his father’s house to go to the land of Canaan. <18> He is obedient even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac.
I don’t think any one of us here today could have gone through what Abraham went through–laying the wood upon the altar, tying Isaac to that altar, and making the necessary preparations right up to the moment of raising the knife, when the angel intercedes and stops him. <19>
God rewards Abraham’s one-pointed obedience with land and wealth and by establishing his covenant with him. God tests Abraham again and again, and he promises him that he will be the progenitor of a great nation. His seed will be “as the stars of the heaven and as the sand upon the seashore.” <20>
Through his faithfulness to the one God, his obedience and good works, Abraham makes continuous good karma, which he reaps in many lifetimes to come. When we see such fortunate people, we say they are blessed. But it is they who have blessed God and God has blessed them in return by his unfailing law of karma–this time good karma.
Another example from the Old Testament of one whom God rewarded for virtue is Solomon. When the Lord asks Solomon in a dream what he would ask of him, Solomon says, “Give thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad.”
God is testing Solomon and he is pleased with his humble request. Because Solomon is pure in heart and asks for something that will make him a better servant of God, God blesses him abundantly. He grants the king not only “a wise and an understanding heart” but “largeness of heart,” “riches and honor.” God also says he will give Solomon a long life if he will keep the commandments of God. <21>
You know, it is a fact that you can lengthen your life by making commitments to God and keeping them, by serving him and obeying his laws–including his dietary laws.
Did you know that before you came into this life you stood before the Lords of Karma (I’ll talk to you more about the Lords of Karma a little later) and received your assignment, where you would go and what you would do? You were told what your life span would be. You were shown the rewards of good karma that were falling due. But you were also shown whether your karma dictated calamity, untimely death, terminal illness or the facing of difficult challenges and why. You were told that if you would be zealous in your service to God and his people and balance that karma in the joy of the Lord before it would fall due, you could be spared the brunt of its “sudden destruction” <22> and you could also lengthen your life.
I’ve seen people who, according to the karmic record, have lengthened their lives by a decade, by fifteen or twenty years because they so loved God and so served him with all their hearts. This shows that nothing is final until we make it final and nothing is predestined until we make it our destiny. It also shows that God is a merciful God and that he relents his judgments when we invoke his mercy and make atonement for our sins.
Someone dies and people say, “It was his time” or “It was the will of God.” But we don’t believe in predestination. We believe in free will. God has free will and he gave us free will. We can change things. Yes, we can do that. We can lengthen our lives but we must begin early, not late, for by and by it will be too late and the harvest of our indiscretions will already be upon us.
And we can surely shorten our lives by eating a bad diet. We can destroy our bodies with sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and other drugs, so that we no longer have a fitting temple for our souls to dwell in, let alone for the Father and Son to take up their abode in! <23> For sure we need reincarnation at that point, for we have shortened our days; the body clock has run out but we have not worked the works of him that sent us. <24>
No matter who you are or what you have done or how terrible you think you are or how bad you think your karma is, you can start right now today to buy time. Every extra day is one more day to serve your God and “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” <25>
I found in the apocryphal book called the Wisdom of Solomon an interesting passage which, according to many scholars, alludes to the concept of karma and the preexistence of souls. The Wisdom of Solomon is accepted as scripture by Roman Catholics but not by Protestants.
Let me first say that preexistence, which is the belief that the soul has existed before the earthly conception of the body that will house it for a lifetime, does not necessarily establish the doctrine of reincarnation. For the preexistence of the soul in God or in heaven does not determine that the soul will incarnate at all or, if she does, that she will reincarnate. Yet the thirteenth-century Church theologian Thomas Aquinas observed that all who have affirmed the preexistence of the soul have also implicitly affirmed reincarnation. <26> Today most scholars concur.
The unknown author of the Wisdom of Solomon, who presents himself as Solomon, writes: “I was, indeed, a child well-endowed. I had received a good soul as my lot; or rather, being noble, I entered an undefiled body.” <27> This clearly reflects the concept that the soul preexists the body. Because the soul was a good soul, a soul being nobly endowed, the soul entered an undefiled body. Now, if the soul had never been born before in an earthly body, when and where did she become a “good soul”–a soul “nobly endowed”?
The teaching of God is that good and bad souls are not born but made. Let me explain. God creates the soul as a clean white page. He endows the soul with a divine spark, the sacred essence of himself, and gives to the soul free will. From there on, she is on her own.
From the moment she takes incarnation in an earthly body, she begins to make choices. Hopefully, if she has wise parents and teachers, these choices are enlightened, loving and in fulfillment of God’s will. Since the gift of free will allows for good or evil as thought, as desire, as act or as conviction of conscience, then we must conclude that good souls have become good by choice and bad souls have become bad by choice.
On the basis of this understanding, we then conclude that the quote from the Wisdom of Solomon does establish the preexistence as well as the prior incarnation of the soul of Solomon. It also establishes the principle that good karma made in past lives follows the soul in future lives and that the momentums of personality, ego and character are cumulative.
”Karma, Reincarnation and Christianity” is based on a lecture given by Elizabeth Clare Prophet on Friday, October 11, 1991, during the four-day Class of the Golden Cycle held at the New Orleans Airport Hilton.
3. John 1:17.
4. Rev. 16:7.
8. Num. 12.
9. Num. 16.
12. Num. 20:1-13, 23, 24; 27:12-14; Deut. 32:48-52; Exod. 17:4.
13. Acts 10:34; Deut. 10:17; II Sam. 14:14; Rom. 2:11; Eph. 6:9; Col. 3:25; I Pet. 1:17.
14. II Sam. 6:1-7; I Chron. 13:1-10; Deut. 10:8; 31:9, 25.
16. Jer. 4:5-10:25; 39:1-10; 52:1-30.
20. Gen. 12:1, 2; 15:1-5; 17:1-8; 22:16-18.
21. I Kings 3:5-14; 4:29; II Chron. 1:7-12.
27. Wisd. of Sol. 8:19, 20 (JB, Anchor Bible).
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