"Religion" can kill your soul. In my area most "church" is all about beating people with the old testament,...
Jesus came to establish a brand new covenant with the world, and this New Covenant was given to replace the Old Covenant. The ‘religious’ leaders had Jesus crucified because they saw His New Covenant as a threat to their ‘religion’...and they had no problem leveraging violence for their ‘religion’. There was an incompatibility with the Old and New Covenants. It had nothing to do with faith or works, Jewish people thought they were saved by birth, based on what God’s covenant with Israel stated all those years ago. Peter, James (Jesus’ brother), and Paul saw that the Old Covenant and the New Covenant are incompatible as they relate to just about everything. They saw the difference and the conflict between the Old Covenant that they had grown up obeying (and trying to obey) their whole lives, and the New Covenant that had been launched by Jesus. They let go of God’s temporary and conditional covenant with Israel to embrace God’s permanent and unconditional covenant with all of the people in the world. They saw what some of their contemporaries failed to see, and they saw what some people still have a hard time seeing even today.
