The Only Way to God

The vast majority of people who call themselves evangelical Christians in our society do not embrace at the same time a Christian worldview. That is, they have a religious inclination towards this person Jesus, but their thinking is not informed by what Jesus taught or by what the Apostles taught—but rather their thinking, as well as their behavior, has been saturated in the tenets of secularism. There is no tenet more basic to the secular culture that we live in than that of religious tolerance.

Our country was based on the principle that people of all religious creeds and backgrounds were welcome on our shores and were to be accorded the freedom of the expressing of that religion, so that all religions were equally tolerated under the law. That’s what it used to be. Now, the assumption of the secularist is that all religions are not only equally tolerated under the law, but that they are equally valid or invalid.

You know the American truth, which is as American as apple pie, is that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere. There are many roads that go to heaven. Some go directly, some by a more circuitous route, but in the final analysis, all that God really is concerned about is that you be people of faith. You can have your faith in Buddha, in Mohammed, in Moses, in Jesus, in Tao, whoever.

Yet, I can’t think of any principle that’s more plainly and categorically opposed to the universal teaching of sacred Scripture, both Old and New Testament, than that idea. If I know anything about the nature of God from the Scriptures, it’s this: God hates religion. Let me say it again. He hates religion—if what we mean by “religion” are those systems and practices that we invent with our own hands. The primary sin of fallen humanity, as Paul tells us in the first chapter of his letter of the Romans, is that we universally take the plain, manifest revelation of God Himself and distort it, and twist it, and exchange that truth for a lie and turn our attention to idols. For that, we expose ourselves to God’s unmitigated and just wrath. Because to trade in His glory for an idol is the supreme insult to His holiness.

The only other insult that comes close is to mention the name of His only begotten Son in the same breath with that of Buddha or Confucius or Mohammed, who are idols and not sons of the living God. But again, there’s nothing that we find more intolerable than exclusivity, than the Christian assertion that there’s only one way to God—one way, one way only. I would say only a handful of professing Christians in our culture today will stand up publicly and say, “There’s only one way to God and that’s through Christ.” The rest of us, by denying that principle, are guilty of nothing less than treason to the Son of God.