AUGUST 31

Salvation

What is the greatest issue facing man in this world? It is how to secure salvation in the life after death so that he may find his true abode and have a share in God’s eternal blessings.

Every man who is born in this present world has to enter another world after death. In this world man was granted life’s opportunities as a matter of being tested by them. Whatever man receives in the next world will be purely on the basis of his deeds in this world. This means that in the world before death, man has been given a great number of things and opportunities, whether or not he deserved them. But after death, the criterion of receiving will only be a matter of his just deeds; nothing will be given to him to try him.

This means that those who are held to be deserving will be granted not out of God’s blessings but more that they actually merited. But those who have done nothing to deserve God’s blessings will have nothing whatsoever in store for them. They will be compelled to live in a state of utter deprivation.

This is man’s greatest problem. To what should he give the greatest attention so that he may not be held undeserving in the life to come? Everyone has to himself exert to the utmost in the consciousness that in the next stage of his life he may by default be considered without merit. Then there would be no further scope for him to earn God’s blessings, salvation would elude him completely.

The next world is the most perfect and eternal world. There, all kinds of pleasures and happiness have been stored up for mankind. It is that world which man should cherish most, and it should be the place to which he most earnestly aspires. But the time for action to secure a place in that blessing-filled world is not the world after death, but the world before death. The present world is the place for action, while the next world is the place for reaping the reward for one’s deeds.

Salvation in the life Hereafter is only for those who prove themselves deserving of it.