What's the Difference?
03/03/2002 - Hinduism
A few weeks ago I was in the locker room at the YMCA getting dressed after a swim and I couldn't help over hear a man who was talking to two boys in my row. At one point he asked one of the boys how old he was. The boy said proudly, "I'm 11 and 3/5's!" The man said, "So you're 11?" The boy said with a bit of an attitude, "No, I'm not 11. I'm 11 and 3/5's and I'll be 12 in June." I mean he had it all figured out. He was already counting the days till his 12th birthday. Remember those days when you couldn't wait for your next birthday? Now a lot of us are stuck at 29 and holding.
Then the man turned to the other boy and asked him how old he was. And he said, "I'm 12." "Are you just 12 or are you 12 and 3/5's?" He said, "No, I just turned 12 on Christmas." At that point I chimed in and said, "Oh, so you share the same birthday as Jesus." He said, "I guess so, but I don't believe in Jesus. My family is from India and I'm Hindi." "Oh," I said, "so you don't celebrate Christmas?" "Oh no," he said, "we celebrate Christmas we just don't believe in Jesus." "So you must get a lot of presents," I said. He said, "Oh yeah, I get presents for my birthday and for Christmas too."
By then I was dressed and on my way. But after I left the locker room I couldn't stop thinking about that Hindi boy. Our conversation was brief. It just lasted a minute or so. But in that time I was reminded that we live in a religiously diverse culture. I was reminded again when our 7th grade daughter, Chelsea, told me that she was studying Hinduism and Buddhism and Islam in one of her classes at school. And I was reminded yet again when I spent a delightful time yesterday with a Hindu couple who live in our neighborhood asking them questions about their faith.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the religious map was neatly divided into carefully separated blocks. And people pretty much knew what those blocks were. Most Americans called themselves Christians. And people living in India were Hindus. And the Chinese were Buddhists. And Israelis were Jewish and Indonesians were Muslims. But it's not that way anymore.
The world has shrunk in the last hundred years or so. We live in global village now and those neatly defined blocks have blended together. And in our country religious freedom and the diversity of expression that it brings is something we all celebrate. Thank God that people in America are free to be Hindus and free to be Muslims, free to be Buddhists and free to be Jews, because that means we're free to be Christ followers. The freedom of religion is still guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution that reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …"
And in a culture like ours where freedom is something we die for and diversity is something we celebrate, tolerance ranks among America's highest values. And tolerance, rightly understood, is a wonderful value. The dictionary defines tolerance as "the act of allowing something, a sympathy for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own."
Tolerance is a sympathy for other belief systems, not an endorsement of or an agreement with, but an allowance of beliefs that differ or even conflict with our own. And in that sense I think God is the most tolerant person in the universe. I'm amazed at what he tolerates and what he puts up with in our world. Which is why, more than once he describes himself this way. The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Psalm 103:8
God goes beyond tolerance and loves people whose belief systems differ and conflict with his own. And as imitators of God, Christ followers are to love them to. In fact, as Christians we are uniquely positioned to be the most tolerant people on the planet. Because we understand that all men and all women are created in the image and likeness of God and every person has the right to freely believe as he or she chooses.
Yet that doesn't mean that every belief system is correct. That doesn't mean that every religion is true. Jesus boldly claimed, I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. That's a pretty exclusive statement. What are we to make of that claim in our pluralistic, relativistic culture?
Today we begin a brand new series called What's the Difference? It's a series that's going to give us all a chance to get better acquainted with the belief systems that exist not only in our world, but also in our neighborhoods and in our schools and among the people that we live with and work with. Each week we're going to examine one of the major world religions or one of the high profile cults and see what they teach. And then we're going to compare their teachings to what the Bible says. We're going to do it with a great deal of respect and civility. We're not going to bash anybody.
Which is why this is a wonderful series to invite a friend to who may not attend church. Because not only will it help us better understand other faiths, but it will help us understand the Christian faith better and show us all what really is the difference. Feel free to take notes, but if you'd just like listen you can always get the teaching off our website.
So today we begin with Hinduism, which is one of the world's oldest religions dating back to 1,800 B.C. According to current statistics over 800 million people in the world claim to be Hindus, making it the third largest religion behind Christianity and Islam.
Hinduism is unique in that it has no founder. Siddhartha Gautama is the founder of Buddhism and Abraham is the father of Judaism and Muhammad is the founder of Islam and Jesus is the founder of Christianity, but Hinduism has no leader attached to it.
Unlike other religions Hinduism has no Sabbath, no special day set aside for worship. It has temples, but no corporate worship. You can't attend a Hindu worship service. There are none. Hindus worship their gods at home, some in the form of wood and stone idols.
Hinduism has its roots in India and remains the dominant religion of that country. The word Hindu comes from the Sanskrit word meaning "people of the land of Indus," which refers to those who live in the Indus Valley, which today we call India, a country of over 1 billion people.
Just like Christians have the Bible as their sacred writings, Hindus have their own sacred writings called the Vedas, meaning "wise sayings." In addition to the 4 Vedas is the Bhagavad-Gita, "the song of the Lord," written about A.D. 100. It's the Hindu Bible.
About the Gita, Mahatma Gandhi said, "In the spiritual field truth is the sovereign principle, and the Bhagavad-Gita is the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth." That's how he felt about it.
When Robert Oppenheimer, the man in charge of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II, watched the detonation of that first bomb deep in the desert of New Mexico he had two lines from the Bhagavad-Gita flash through his mind, "I am become, the shatterer of worlds. Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom."
The Gita is written in the form of a battlefield dialogue between Hare Krishna, who is an avatar or a divine manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Arjuna, a solider who becomes his friend and disciple. And throughout the Gita, Krishna instructs him on how to get disentangled from the affairs of this world and how to purify his consciousness through the science of self-realization.
Hare Krishna is the most popular form of Hinduism found in the United States. In 1965, "His Divine Grace," Swami Prabhupada, Krishna's representative, founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in New York City. Today Hare Krishna followers are all given new names and often cut family ties. They live together in highly structured communities and don't eat meat, fish, eggs, or drink alcohol. They practice celibacy and a rigid devotional life chanting mantras on a string of 108 prayer beads as many as sixteen times a day. They do all that hoping that one day they'll be released from the spinning wheel of death and rebirth and finally be absorbed into the one universal spirit called Brahma.
Hinduism is a polytheistic religion. Hindus believe in one universal spirit that manifests itself in many gods. In fact, God is in everything. Each god has a different function in Hindu belief. There are gods for villages and gods for families. One source I read said that there are as many as 330 million gods in some sects of Hinduism. Hindus have no problem saying that Jesus is god. He's literally one in a million! But they don't believe that he's the only God or the Son of God anymore than we all are sons and daughters of God. Jesus is a teacher, a guru, another avatar or divine manifestation of the god Vishnu.
There are three major gods in Hinduism, sometimes referred to as the Hindu Trinity. Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. Often when we see Hindu gods portrayed they have many arms and many faces, not because they're deformed, but to symbolize their might and power. Hindu art is extremely important. In India art is religion and religion is art, because many Indians down through the ages couldn't read and so their understanding of their faith came mostly through art. Their sacred texts were not so much words, but paintings and sculptures, music and dance. Art was their spiritual technology and Indian art is almost completely devoted to religious themes.
Now let's talk about four core beliefs of Hinduism. First, Hindus belief in the concept of dharma, which is the ultimate moral balance of all things. There is a divine order in the universe and in the individual as well. The universe isn't chaos. There is a moral law that operates. There is a standard of right and wrong that we all live by. If you make a promise, for instance, it's important that you keep it. As a Hindu it's important that you practice the Hindu rituals because your destiny depends on it. And your destiny is determined by your karma.
Karma is the belief that we get what we deserve in life. It's the idea of "what goes around comes around." Or as the Bible puts it in Galatians 6:7, "You reap what you sow." Living in a balanced universe means that if you upset that balance, you're going to suffer for it. Karma means that your actions have consequences. If you live a good, moral life you have good karma and you'll be rewarded. If you live a bad life you have bad karma and you'll be punished.
Which leads to the third concept of samsara. Samsara is the concept of reincarnation that sees life as an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Hindus believe that a person's status in life depends on his or her actions in a previous life. Good karma leads to reincarnation of a higher order and bad karma leads to reincarnation of a lower order. It's possible to come back in the next life as animal, a plant or an insect. Hindus have a great respect for all forms of life. One reason many Hindus are vegetarians is because they believe that their ancestors could be in the animals they eat. The elephant and the cow are especially sacred.
This process of samsara can occur over and over again in a person's life and is the explanation for the caste system in India. Hindus believe that the caste system is part of the cosmic law of cause and effect. The way you lived your previous life determines what caste you're a part of in this life and you stay in the caste all your life. What you want to be in life is not the issue. The issue is learning to be content with what you are, because what you are was determined by your karma in your last life.
There are four primary castes and thousands of sub-castes in India. Brahmins make up the highest caste of priests, scholars and teachers. Nobles, rulers and soldiers make up the next caste. Merchants, craftsmen, and farmers make up the third caste. And peasants, servants and manual laborers make up the fourth caste. Your caste determines whom you socialize with and whom you marry. And a person who isn't born into a caste is called an "outcast" or an "untouchable." And there are about 100 million outcasts in India today. They are the beggars and those who live on the streets. And while Gandhi was successful in the outlawing of "untouchables" in 1949, the caste the distinctions are still practiced in parts of India.
But your caste is determined by your karma. So people accept what they are as payment for their past life. It's very fatalistic that way. But the goal of life for the Hindu is to finally be released from the cycles of reincarnation and to be absorbed into Brahma, like a drop of water falling into the ocean. It's to achieve Krishna consciousness. That's when your soul enters into a state of complete rest. And that's called moksha.
Moksha is heaven for the Hindu. But it is not a place, instead it's a state of changeless bliss. It happens when your soul is finally liberated from the temporal and becomes one with the eternal. And there are many ways to get there. So in that sense there are many roads to heaven for the Hindu. You can achieve moksha through knowledge and studying with gurus. You can achieve it through contemplation, like yoga and meditation. You can find it through devotion, singing hymns and offering sacrifices and making pilgrimages to sacred sights and bathing in the Ganges for spiritual cleansing. You can achieve moksha by doing good deeds and fulfilling your duty to society. But it's all up to you. There's no help from the gods. It all works based. There is no concept of grace.
That's the essence of Hinduism. What makes a person a Hindu? That question was officially answered by India's Supreme Court on July 2, 1995 when they gave an "adequate and satisfactory formula" that declared, "Acceptance of the Vedas with reverence; recognition of the fact that the means or ways to salvation are diverse; and the realization of the truth that the number of gods to be worshiped is large, that indeed is the distinguishing feature of the Hindu religion."
What's the difference between Hinduism and Christianity? A lot. It's a whole different way of looking at the world. Let me just highlight a few differences for you. Hindu's believe in one universal spirit that expresses itself in many different gods, in some cases millions of gods. It's polytheistic. Christians believe in one God. It's monotheistic. And that God is all-powerful and all knowing, yet personal and loving. And He exists in three different persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Not three gods, but three persons in one God called the Trinity.
The apostle Paul put it this way in 1 Timothy 2:5, For there is one God and one mediator between God and human beings, Christ Jesus, himself human.
Hindus believe that our basic problem is that we're out of touch with the spark of God that lives inside of each one of us. There's a Hindu Proverb that says, "There are realms of gold hidden in the depths of our hearts." According to Hinduism, all of us have this universal spirit living inside us. But just like the shade of light can be covered with dust and soot and mud to the point where the light doesn't shine through it all, so that divine spark in each of us is covered over by bad karma. But through yoga and meditation and study and good works and a lot of self-effort along the wheel of rebirths we can shed that bad karma so the light can shine through us. The focus of Hinduism is inward.
Christianity says, "No. Our basic problem is sin. We have thought things and said things and done things that have hurt people and have offended a holy God. We have a moral problem. And while it's true that we're created in God's image, God is still a person who lives outside of us and wants to have a relationship with us. But our sin keeps getting in the way. And no amount of good works is going to remove that problem. We can't work our way into a relationship with God through yoga or meditation, study or God works."
And God knows that, so he provided a solution for our problem. He came to us. He sent his Son, Jesus, who lived a perfect life, to be our sacrifice for sin. And when Jesus nailed to a cross, he died for our sin, in our place. And if we believe in Jesus, God says we have eternal life. We have a relationship with the God of the universe whom we will one day live with forever and ever. But it's by God's grace and not by our good works.
John 3:16 says, For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Hinduism is about our attempts to reach God. Christianity is about God's efforts to reach us. That's grace!
A major difference between Hinduism and Christianity has to do with life and death. For the Hindu, life is a wheel that continues in endless cycles of birth and death and rebirth. Reincarnation is a major component of Hinduism and, by the way, gaining popularity in our country. The result of one CNN poll I read indicated that 35% of all adult Americans believe in reincarnation.
Christianity, on the other hand, says you only go around once in life. There is no second chance. Hebrews 9:27, People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment. And you know what, I'm glad. Once is enough in this world of suffering and pain and injustice. But there's an urgency to get right with God, because there is no second chance. You're not coming back as a cow or plant or an insect. You only live once, so you better get it right and trust Christ as Savior. That's the Christian message.
I want to close by telling you a story that I think nails the difference between Hinduism and Christianity. There was a missionary in India who had been sharing Jesus with a man named Rhambau for many years. Rhambau was a pearl diver and was getting very old and knew that he would die soon. One day he came to the missionary and said, "I'm going to make a pilgrimage to Calcutta on my knees. I know if I do the gods will reward me. The suffering will be sweet, because it will purchase heaven for me."
The missionary said, "Oh no, Rhambau. Don't do that. The trip will kill you. Jesus died to purchase heaven for you and offers it to you as a gift if you just believe in him."
Rhambau said, "No! No, it's not that easy. I must work for a place in heaven." Then he took out a beautiful pearl and with a lump in his throat said, "Before I go, I give you this pearl. My son was a pearl diver too and he found this pearl but he stayed under the water too long and soon after he died. But I give it you my friend."
The missionary said, "Oh I'm so sorry to hear of your son's death. I can't take the pearl from you. I'll buy it from you instead."
Rhambau shook his head, "No one has enough money to pay for what they pearl is worth to me. You may only have it as a gift."
"But that's too easy!" the missionary said. "I must pay you for it or I must work for it."
Rhambau said, "I would never sell this pearl. Its value is in the lifeblood of my only son. Just accept it as a token of the love I have for you."
"Rhambau," the missionary said, "don't you see that's what God has done for you. It cost God the lifeblood of his only Son to purchase a place for you in heaven. In a million years or in a hundred pilgrimages, you could never earn entrance to heaven! It is so priceless that no one could pay for it. God offers you salvation as a free gift. Accept it as a token of God's love for you, a sinner."
With that, the light went on and Rhambau said, "Now I see! Some things are too priceless to be bought or earn. Heaven is one of them. Tell me more! Tell me more!"