Jesus identified himself with humanity’s bad karma at the cross. Now don’t turn me off, don’t get upset that I use that word. You just want me to use King James language but all bad karma means is all the guilt, all the sin, all the wrong deeds, all the bad things people did. And so when I’m in a Buddhist culture, I choose not to use King James language or even necessarily Old Testament language. I use language that relates to the people there. So what we call sin, they call bad karma. And I said “Jesus took your sin, he took your shame, he took your bad karma.”
1 Peter 2:24 says “who himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness, by whose stripes you were healed…”
And we’re going to get to that part about this “by his stripes you were healed” but just suffice to say right now that Jesus took our bad karma. I tell them how Christ’s merits are transferred to us. This is very important because a Buddhist would think “Okay that somebody else could kind of impart good merits to you but your bad merits are still there.” But we show them the total transaction that God, by an act of supernatural love, took our bad karma, everything negative and Jesus identified with that. So it was transferred to Jesus. But then, all the goodness, all the good karma – because Jesus was perfect, he was sinless and all his righteousness – that’s good karma, was translated onto us. 2 Corinthians 5:21 “For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”