Have they not heard the gospel? Is that why they continue to think they are safe with their religious teachings and practices, their meditations, their good works? It's possible they haven't heard it. Perhaps it was given them but was so inexact it wasn't really the gospel. Perhaps I have been guilty of that myself. I blurt things out hoping it to be saving truth but maybe I'm sticking to a general warning about coming earthly judgment and leaving out the eternal judgment? I think I may be doing that. Then I am guilty of the blood of anyone who dies not having heard the true gospel of salvation.
Jesus died to pay for your sins so that you could have eternal life, and if you refuse His sacrifice you will die in your sins, and dying in your sins means going to Hell. We are all born destined to Hell, because we are all born in the sin of Adam, meaning born inheriting the original sin of our first father, born into the fallen world which resulted from that sin.. The world around us is broken just as we are broken, but we take it for normal because it is all we've ever known. The only way we can know about it is through revelation by the God who made it all, and that's what we have in the Bible. Christianity isn't a "religion" the way other religions are, it's the actual speaking of the Creator God to us. He made us in His own image, with the ability to know Him, but that's what was lost when Adam fell. He lost his connection to God. So we all inherit Adam's inability to know God. That's why He sent Jesus, to restore that ability to us. That is what it means to be born again, to have a new life given to us, the lif3e of the spirit by which we recognize the God who made us. Without the new birth, the regeneration of the spirit that died at the Fall, we remain in darkness, unable to know God.
Buddhists and Hindus can meditate forever and never find God because they are fallen as is the whole human race. The best they can do is explore the Creation itself, the Cosmos and their own nature in which their spirit is fallen, even dead. They can bring some of their nature under control. They can to some extent learn to control their own destiny, but it's very limited because they are fallen and they will never discover their fallenness or God Himself. God can't be recognized until the spirit is "quickened" as the King James Bible puts it, brought to life, reborn or regenerated. That new birth is given when we believe in the sacrifice of Christ to pay for our sins. And it isn't just the recovery of our own lost spirit, because the Spirit of God Himself comes to indwell us and be our strength.
Buddhism and other religions teach that we are subject to a unversal moral law which punishes us when we transgress it. They intuit in an inexact way what the Bible reveals exactly, and they aim much of their religious practice at trying to prevent and/or undo the consequences of that law, which in Buddhism is called Karma. I don't understand a lot about it but apparently they believe that they can ultimately free themselves from the consequences of Karma and no longer be subject to the punishment it brings about. Most religions have some version of Hell or Hells, it's a pretty universal concept though its nature varies due to distortions brought about by our fallenness. There is also the idea of reincarnation which is itself a form of punishment. The Bible says, by contrast, that we have only one life, no others, and after we die we face the Judgment of God. If, as we believe, the Bible is the actual revelation given by God Himself, then this is the truth and all the other religions are struggling along under the limitations of their own fallen minds and their fallen minds are their only guidance, not much to which to entrust your eternal fate.
The Moral Law, or Law of God, is spelled out in the Bible in the first five books, principally in Leviticus but also in Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Ten Commandments are the foundational categories of the Law on which all the others are based. How we treat God is the subject of the first three, followed by the command to remember the Sabbath Day (which actually applies to the ultimate Rest in Christ as well as a literal day of rest in this life), then we are commanded to honor father and mother (which is usually extended to all legitimate authority) then we get a list of sins against neighbor after that: Thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, commit adultery or covet. Buddhism has a version of the first four of those so they are pretty universal. Their idea of not killing means you can't kill anything at all even a cockroach, but the Biblical understanding is that it means murder of a human being and nothing else. In any case this is how you find out what sin is in God's eyes, through His commandments..
The Bible reveals that we cannot be freed from the Law of God by anything we ourselves are capable of. We can turn from wickedness to righteousness and thereby stop bringing on new punishments, at least to some extent though not perfectly because being fallen we will always be committing sins though not aware of it in many cases, but we can't eradicate those we've already earned. God Himself had to come to earth to pay for our sins against the Moral Law. That's what His death was all about. He died in our place, in the place of every human being who believes in Him. That is what salvation is. You can't be freed from the Moral Law, or the Karma version of it, in any other way. The Law of God is exacting beyond anyone's ability to know it, and every human being has sin in our lives that we will ultimately pay for ourselves in Hell if we do not accept Christ's death on our behalf.
We all suffer the consequences of our sins in this life too, and that continues until death. Christians who fail to mortify sin, that is, who fail to stop sinning at least in obvious ways, continue to earn such consequences and continue to suffer them in this life. We often don't appreciate how the Law continues to operate as long as we are in this life. All sin earns death. Adam and Eve had eternal life until they disobeyed God, but their disobedeince brought death into the world and all their offspring inherit it.
That is what fallennness means, the world being fallen and ourselves being fallen. The world has become a hostile place because of our sins beginning with the original sin of our first parents. We ourselves continue to suffer the consequences from the sins of our ancestors as well as our own in this life, and we will die with all those sins on our souls which will take us to Hell if we don't throw ourselves on the mercy of God through the death of Jesus Christ which paid for those sins.
"The wages of sin is death" says the Bible. Some sins may bring about literal physical death very soon, but there are stages and phases of "death" in the form of diseases and injuries and misfortunes and every kind of unhappiness in this world short of the death of the physical body. We are by nature "sinners" so we can't help bringing all this misery upon ourselves. The breakdown of the body as we age is a form of it. If some people suffer less it is becauase they have accumulated less sin either from their ancestors or by their own doings, but there is nobody who is sinliess in this world. Only Jesus Christ was sinless, the only sinless human being who ever lived. Only an "unblemished" sacrifice could pay for our sins and He is the only one who qualified.
He died that you might live happily forever. He had all our sins in His own body when He died so that His death paid for them. Believe that and you will be saved from your sins. Repent and believe.
