Brief word on karma

I have heard professing Christians speak of karma as if it were not in opposition to faith in a sovereign God.  I want to shed some light on this.  Karma is a religious concept of several Eastern religions that claim moral cause-and-effect is the natural order of things.  Some of these religions incorporate a supreme being to administer karma; others see it as an entirely natural phenomenon. The point is karma assumes the visible change in circumstance in a person’s life is the direct result of some good or bad deed they performed earlier or in a past life.

Christians should immediately see the error of this belief.  In Exodus 33:19, God tells us “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”  In Ecclesiastes and Job, we see that sometimes the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer; both will come before God to give account.  Jesus also said, “He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Mat. 5:45). How does this square with the unreliable notion that “what goes around comes around”? It does not.  Karma is just a desecrated form of the spiritual law “you reap what you sow.”

Most disturbing is the spirit in which karma is usually discussed by Christians: the spirit of vengeful retribution—a decidedly unChristian attitude.  Looking back just one verse in Matthew 5:44, we are taught to “love [our] enemies and pray for those who persecute [us],” because ultimately, we are all created in God’s image.  The only difference between any of us is some of us know Him and some still do not. You cannot display the love of Christ while hoping for karma to drop a whammy on their unhappy soul.