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Life is difficult and painful, and it will only ever get worse. Everyone has to come to terms with this fact at some point in their lives, and ask the question: Why? Why is life so painful? Why is there more suffering than good things in life? Why does pain outlast happiness, and why is it more intense?

Most people have wrong answers for this, which is why I put the quote from Hebrews at the top of this page. When someone starts to get the right answer, it’s usually taken from them by bad people, and replaced with useless lies. This chapter will explain the truth very simply and clearly for you.

The Meaning of Life

Imagine you are living in a perfect paradise, where nothing ever goes wrong, and everything is beautiful and wonderful, and everyone is happy, and everyone loves one another. This paradise should never end, and it would be Heaven.

But imagine someone ruins it for just one other person, by doing something very wrong, something that can’t be undone. This is no longer a perfect paradise. That person’s happiness is ruined. Everyone loves that person, so their paradise is ruined too. The whole paradise is ruined, and it shouldn’t last forever.

This means we would need to have a test to figure out who gets to be in paradise. The test is: will you do the right thing, for the right reasons, at all costs, even if everything is going wrong? Whoever passes this test gets to be in paradise.

But this test can’t just be in words. People might lie to get in. Or they might think they would do the right thing, but when it actually comes down to it, maybe they wouldn’t. Actions speak louder than words. So everyone needs to be put to the test.

That’s why there’s two lives: this short life that ends and is full of problems; and eternal life, the perfect paradise that lasts forever. This life has to be full of problems. That’s part of the test. That’s why bad things happen, even when it’s nobody’s fault. That’s why things have to go wrong sometimes.

In other words, the point of this life is not to be happy, but to be good. We have to choose to do the right thing, for the right reasons, at all costs, even when everything is going wrong, even when it costs us everything. That’s the purpose of this life.

Salvation

Ever since Adam and Eve, people have always chosen to do things the wrong way, hoping for the right thing to happen. We have chosen to live in delusions, hoping that by sheer force of will, we can transform reality itself into the paradise we want. But it will never work. It always creates a living hell.

To escape the hell we find ourselves in, and to avoid falling deeper into hell, we each need to be rescued from two things: Sin and Delusion. The opposite of these are Grace and Truth. God brought Grace and Truth to earth, he entrusted Grace and Truth to his church to be preserved until the end of this world, and he leads all souls to Grace and Truth in his church.

This is why John says that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. This is why Paul says that God allows people to be tested with strong delusions to see who loves the truth, and who gets pleasure from doing things wrong. This is why Jesus says that the only soil that produces an abundant harvest is an honest and good heart.

God is the source of all Truth. Jesus is God in the flesh, and he told us the truth directly in person, over 2,000 years ago. If we understand his words the way he meant them, and if we obey his words and do what he commands, we will be freed from our delusions, and we will live in the truth.

God is the source of all grace. Grace is the ability to do the right thing. Sin is a failure to do the right thing. When we hope that doing the wrong thing might not have the bad effects that we know full well that it will have, we are living in a delusion.

When we start to do the wrong thing, it becomes harder to do the right thing, and easier to do the wrong thing. It almost becomes second nature or habit. It’s still possible to do the right thing, it just gets harder and more painful.

When we reject the truth, there’s no way to get back to it ourselves. When we decide that 1+2 is actually not 3, we will have to go through an infinite number of other possibilities, and will never land back on 3 until we’re ready to reconsider it.

The Crucifixion

Because Jesus is God, he was the only one who naturally has grace and always lives in the truth. This is why he was the only one who could live a perfect and sinless life. In other words, the only person ever guaranteed to be in paradise is God. And he always was in paradise, and he always will be.

In order for us to join him in paradise, we need to be saved from the delusions we have chosen to live in, and rescued from the habits of doing wrong that we have gotten addicted to in our love for the short-term results.

But God can’t just give us grace and truth. He had to earn it for us and share his reward for us. Paul says that we can’t be crowned unless we compete according to the rules. The rules of life are that you reap what you sow, and you get what you earn. These rules are part of God’s own nature.

Now the reward of living in the truth is continuing to believe the truth, and the reward of doing the right thing is being able to doing the right thing. In other words, by living a sinless and perfect life, the reward Jesus had is more Grace and Truth.

When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, God was not lying when he said they would die that day. They would have died. They began to starve, and they almost died.

But God sacrificed a lamb for them to die in their place. He gave them the wool as clothes, and the lamb’s meat as food. He saved Adam and Eve from dying that day.

We continue to need to eat every day, and this is a mystical reality that we take for granted, a little act of salvation that God is providing for us, that we barely ever think about. And every few hours, we get hungry again, and we need to eat again, or else we die, and the prophesy of God be fulfilled in us.

But animals aren’t like us, and their lives aren’t the same as ours. So when they die in our place, it only temporarily keeps our bodies alive, but it does nothing to save our souls from the death that comes from living in delusion and loving wrong.

Jesus died on the cross as the Lamb of God, the pure and holy sacrifice of true love. His life is given as the true food of both the body and the soul. The kind of death he died would be the natural consequence of living in delusion and doing wrong.

By dying on the cross, Jesus secured the rewards of truth and grace for everyone who believes that it’s there. He entrusted these two rewards to his church, to be preserved until the end of the world comes, and paradise begins.

The Church

Jesus founded his church on Twelve Apostles. These men were to preserve the truth and grace for all future generations. The truth was mostly taught through word of mouth for many years. Eventually the important parts were written down in the books we now call the New Testament, but word of mouth was still the main way that these things were explained.