Many Voices, One Savior

Many religions or spiritual paths have the story of at least one incarnation of God or a very enlightened human who is a messenger of God coming to help or teach humans. All these stories have one or more plots of battles between good and evil. It is not so much that all these religions or spiritual paths have a story of God in some format coming to earth to wage a battle, help and save; the truth is in HOW the helping and the saving is done. Reminds me of this story that I heard (author unknown) so I am going to borrow from its plot (italicized) but add on some more of my own to it.

A man fell into a pit and couldn’t get himself out. So deep and impassable was the pit, that no machine or person could venture to extract the man. A subjective person came along and said, “I feel for you down there.” An objective person came along and said, “It’s logical that someone would fall down there.” A Christian Scientist came along and said, “You only think that you’re in that pit.” A religious person said, “Only bad people fall into pits.” A mathematician calculated how the man fell into the pit. A news reporter wanted the exclusive story of his fall into the pit. A legalistic Christian said, “You deserve that pit.” Confucius said, “If you had listened to me, you wouldn’t be in that pit.” Buddha said, “Your pit is only a state of mind.” A realist said, “That is a pit.” An evolutionist said, “You are a rejected mutant destined to be removed from the evolutionary cycle – you’ll die in that pit so that you cannot produce any pit-falling offspring.” An inspector asked if he had a permit to dig a pit. A professor lectured on the elementary principles of the pit. An evasive person avoided the subject of the pit altogether. A self-pitying person said, “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen my pit.” A charismatic said, “Just confess it and you’ll not be in the pit any longer.” An optimist said, “Things could be worse.” A pessimist said, “Things will be worse.”
An atheist said, “This proves there is no God. Why would a loving God let you fall into the pit?”
A believer in karma said, “The pit is the consequence of either your present karma or your sanchit (accumulated) karmas or it could even be the ripened fruit of karmas from your past lives (prarabdha). You have to bear it until you have paid the debt of your bad karmas, no one can help you out of it.”
An astrologer came and drew charts and filled them in with numbers by consulting the position of the planets and his birth chart and sagely said “Hmm, a rogue planet is in this house of your chart that is why you are in the pit. This will last for seven years.”
A cleric came and said, “Your good deeds must outweigh your bad deeds otherwise you will be in the pit now and forever”.
A yogic sage stopped by and said, “Even in the pit, you can achieve perfection in any yoga you apply your mind to - bhakti yoga (devotional yoga), karma yoga (works based yoga) or gyana yoga (knowledge based yoga).”
A popular guru sent his messenger saying, "You need to re-wire your inner self. Download our app, sign up for our courses and we will walk you through all the fifteen levels of re-wiring after which you will reach union with the divine and die to your human life. The pit won’t matter anymore.”
A recruiter for a terrorist group said, “Let me throw you a bomb strapped jacket. When a very large crowd of infidels gathers to see you in the pit, just press the button. Your jihad will shoot you straight out from the pit into heaven.”
Another eastern sage said “Son, it is all maya (illusion) anyway. The pit or you do not really exist.”
Several other wise folk came by prescribing fasts, rituals, chants, tossed him amulets to wear and he did them all and felt better for a while, yet, he always found himself back in the pit - unable to rise or raise himself out.
Then one came along and out of love for the fallen man, paid the the price to extract the man from the pit although he owed the man nothing, waded the depths of the pit, offered his hand and lifted the man out of the pit.

The pit is just an allegory for the pits we fall into in life – depression, debt, addiction, oppression, injustice, grief, loss, betrayal, loneliness, sickness, being victims or victimizing others, indulging in one more things such as lies, slander, gossip, theft, perversions, greed, selfishness, malice, harming others, pride, idleness and so on. The pit is a state where we are distanced from God because of our sins where we lack permanent peace and rest and bear a void because we are not aligned with God. We may be observing any of the prescribed ways of escaping the pit but are not actually out of it, we do not have real peace, we have an emptiness inside, a yearning to fix an equation we cannot balance.
A pit does not escape anyone.

Saviors are not those who utter many things that sound good and wise. No mantras, no deeds, no meditations, no exercises, no imaginations, no pilgrimages, no rituals, no fasts can ever change you from the inside out completely and permanently. The real savior is the one who acts - who rolls up his sleeves, gets into the filth of the pit, lifts you out, pays the price to rescue you and restores your severed relation with God, once and for all, resulting in inexplicable peace.

God, in the form of Jesus, jumped into the pit for all humanity. He paid the debt of each human’s karmas, bad deeds, sins - even though the stack of bad deeds far outweighed the stack of good deeds. He took each human's death sentence on Himself. To anyone who wants, He gives an internal makeover. A new life within, with which, one can live in the right relation with God as an adopted child of God. Once a sinner separated from God, now saved for eternity from destruction, free from the cycle of sin and debt and illusions.

Who is your savior? It is not the one who utters impressive words or asks you to do many religious activities, not the one who in one way or another asks you to build your own ladder with your own effort to climb out of the pit, but the one who has done for you what you can never do for yourself. Jesus’ hand remains extended to lift you out of your pit.