...from the desk of Rande Wayne Smith D.Min., Th.M., M.Div.

27 January 2008
#312

Faith Questions - 4

Do All Roads Lead to Heaven?

Philippians 2:7-11
Instead of this, of his own free will he gave up all he had, and took the nature of a servant. He became like a human being and appeared in human likeness. He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death— his death on the cross. For this reason God raised him to the highest place above and gave him the name that is greater than any other name. And so, in honor of the name of Jesus all beings in heaven, on earth, and in the world below will fall on their knees, and all will openly proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

May the Lord grant that we may engage in contemplating the mysteries of His Heavenly wisdom with really increasing devotion to His glory and our edification.  Amen.

3 years ago our mayor asked me to serve on a committee to plan the activities in celebration of Rolling Meadows’ 50th Anniversary. I appreciated the honor and enjoyed working with the other 7 members.

Now there are a couple of reasons why I like doing things like that. 1st of all, I believe that it’s important that I, representing Community Church, be involved with things in our community.

And 2ndly, it gives me an opportunity to be with non-churched people.
In that regard, I developed a relationship with one of the ladies on the committee, and we had several extended conversations about things of faith.

And in those discussions this lady made a couple of comments, which I think are typical of the general population out there. She said that she “liked” Jesus, and the things that He taught, and she wished that everyone could be as loving and tolerant as He was.

I believe a lot of people “like” Jesus. Jesus is popular today … but most people don’t take Him very seriously.

Her problem, she went on to say, was with evangelical Christians in general, and I suspect, me in particular, and our intolerance with those of other religions.
Well, this morning I want to talk to you about this “intolerance” issue that is leveled at Christians who do take Jesus seriously. And I want to clarify the radical claim that Jesus made about Himself that is causing this concern. And then I want to explain in very precise terms why Jesus is the only way of salvation … and why we must take that controversial claim seriously.

Let me say right here at the beginning, so there’s no question about it … I reject the idea that all religions are equally legitimate ways to God, that all religions are equally true, and that they all teach basically the same thing.

Now I know when I say that that there will be people who call me intolerant, narrow-minded, and bigoted.
But here’s my argument. I want you to think this through with me. Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. He either was the Messiah or He wasn’t the Messiah. (That’s pretty straight forward isn’t it? He was or He wasn’t.) Now if He wasn’t the Messiah the Jews are right, and Christians are wrong. If He was the Messiah Christians are right and the Jews are wrong. But under no circumstances can they both be right.

If God exists, (and I guess that’s open to debate), He’s either a personal God, or He’s an impersonal God. If He’s personal then the Muslims, Jews, and Christians are right and the Hindu’s are wrong. If He’s impersonal then the Hindu’s are right, and the Muslims, Jews, and Christians are wrong. But under no circumstances can they all be right.
When you die, you either go to Heaven or hell, you get reincarnated, or you lie in the grave forever and ever … but you can’t do them all at the same time!

This is obvious, right? You see the problem here. Religions have contradictory truth claims. We’re not arguing about how many angels can dance on the tip of a pin. These are issues that are foundational to what each believe. And they are completely different views.

And, no matter what anyone might say … they’re not all about love. That’s not even true about Christianity.

I remember having a conversation once with a man who “liked” Jesus, but he didn’t believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.
I pointed out to him that if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, if He wasn’t who He claimed to be, then what He said He came to do He didn’t do.

Jesus said that He came to forgive sins. “My blood poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” The forgiving of sins was secured on the cross, and finalized by the resurrection.

So much so that the Apostle Paul would say, “If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is a delusion and you are still lost in your sins. … If our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world.”

Paul said that people should pity us if we believe in Jesus contrary to fact.
If we just have these sweet emotional feelings about Jesus, if we simply envision the Jesus of love, but don’t talk about the Jesus who died on the cross, and walked out of the grave … then we’re wasting our time.

We need to take Him seriously … but there’s an obstacle to that on the issue of Jesus being the only way to get to Heaven.

Now when somebody tells me that I’m intolerant I always ask a question, and this should be your question as well. “What do you mean by that?” Now I know exactly what they mean, but I want them to say it.

Their response is, “well, you think you’re right, and everybody else is wrong.”

To which I respond, “Yes, I do.”
Now I could be mistaken. But the reason I think the things I do is because I think they’re right.

People believe the things they believe because they believe the things they believe are true. If they didn’t believe they were true they wouldn’t believe what they believe, they’d believe something else.

Now this is not just true about me; it’s true about them, too. So, here’s how the conversation goes. “You’re intolerant.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You think you’re right.”

“I do think I’m right, but let me ask you a question, do you think you’re right?”
“Yes.”

So then I ask, “Something about this bothers me,” (I sound like Lt. Columbo), “why is it when I think I’m right I’m intolerant. And when you think you’re right … you’re just right? What am I missing here?”

The fact is … I’m missing nothing.

Now I understand that when people hear Christians say that Jesus is “the only way” that this is deeply offensive. I’m very sympathetic to that. In fact I wish it wasn’t the case. My life, and I suspect yours, would be a lot easier. It’d be so much simpler to tell people, “Okay, if you want to believe in Jesus fine. If you want to believe in Buddha, whatever … just be loving and everybody will get there.”
The problem is, I am a follower of Jesus, and Jesus didn’t say that. And I take Jesus seriously. That means that I am obliged to tell others the same thing that Jesus said about this issue.

So, what does the historical record say? It says that it was the identity of Jesus that made all the difference.

It wasn’t Jesus’ teaching. In fact, much of what He taught came right out of the O.T. It wasn’t particularly profound, other than it came from Jesus. It wasn’t Jesus’ teachings … it was Jesus.

You can take Buddha out of Buddhism and you have the teachings of Buddha. You can take Mohammad out of Islam, and you have the teachings of Mohammad and the Koran. Their religion stays intact. You take Jesus out of Christianity and it’s gone. Please understand, Jesus was crucified, not for what He taught, but because of who He said He was.

He was on trial, and the Scriptures tell us that they “tried to find some false evidence against Jesus to put him to death; but they could not find any.”

Then “The High Priest spoke to him, ‘In the name of the living God I now put you under oath: tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God?’” (And to claim to be the Son of God is a claim to deity.

“Jesus answered him, ‘So you say.’ … At this the High Priest tore his clothes and said, ‘Blasphemy!’ … ‘He is guilty and must die.’” In other words, Jesus was put to death, not for anything that He taught. Not for anything that He did. Jesus was put to death for who He said He was. And that is the most critical question you will ever have to answer.

Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do you say I am?”

“Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’”

“‘Good for you, Simon son of John!’ answered Jesus.” You’re absolutely right!

You see, this puts the issue in an entirely different perspective. Because this idea of Jesus being “the only way” is not what a bunch of narrow-minded, arrogant Christians invented to annoy everyone. It is what Jesus said from the beginning.
And not only did Jesus say it, but He was being a good Jew. The 1st Commandment from Moses is what? “I am the LORD your God … worship no god but me.”

In other words, God was narrow then … and Jesus was following in the same tradition. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one goes to the Father except by me.”

Later Peter would announce to the Council, “Salvation is to be found through him alone.” By the way, the Council was a religious group. They had their own ideas. They were following God their own way. Yet they were challenged by Peter. “Salvation is to be found through him alone; in all the world there is no one else whom God has given who can save us.”
So, given the fact that Scripture is thick with these kinds of statements, and Jesus Himself was constantly making reference to such a thing, we have a very simple question to ask if we’re taking Jesus seriously … was He wrong, or was He right?

Now this has been debated over the years and some people say, “Well, I don’t know how we can really know.”

Well, there’re not too many options. He either was wrong or He was right. And if He was wrong, He either knew He was wrong or He didn’t know He was wrong. In other words, He was wrong and knew it. Or He was wrong and didn’t know it. Or He was right. I don’t know of any other options here, given His claims. So let’s look at each of them carefully.
Was Jesus wrong and He knew He was wrong? Well, if someone knows they are wrong about what they say and still say it, what do we call that person? … (a liar)

That’s kind of odd isn’t it? We look at the kinds of claims that Jesus made, and the way He lived His life, and the good things that He did, and the incredible respect that everybody seems to have for Him … and then we have to say in regards to the central claim of His life that He was actually lying, that He was asking for people’s complete devotion, that they should go to the death rather than deny His name. He was asking for that kind of commitment … and yet He was a liar.

Do you think that’s reasonable, based on what we know about Jesus, that He was actually lying about this?
Or maybe He was mistaken; maybe He really thought He was God. He really thought that He was the Savior of the world. He really thought that if you believed in Him you’d live, even if you died. He really thought that He was the resurrection and the life, and the living water, and the bread of life, and the Alpha and Omega.

Now what do you make of a man who says this kind of stuff, and really believes it. “Before Abraham was born, ‘I Am.’” Anybody who thinks they’re God, and isn’t, is not sane. Is that fair to say? He’s a lot nuts.

So, knowing what we know about the historical record, is it fair to say that Jesus was a few cards shy of a full deck, that He was crazy?
Here’s a man who was constantly moving toward reality, not away from it. This is the kind of person we look to as a model when things get tough for us.

And if this guy was nuts … where does that leave you and me? Does that sound reasonable? It doesn’t to me. And it certainly isn’t consistent with the idea that people think Jesus is a great man.

No, I don’t think He was crazy. I don’t think He was lying. Well, if He wasn’t lying and He wasn’t crazy, guess what? We have one alternative left. Jesus was telling the truth about everything … including this issue. And He proved it by predicting His own death, and His own resurrection … raising Himself from the grave, overcoming death, and appearing to over 500 people.
Now this was a man with credibility, which is precisely why people like Him. And it is for those reasons that we should take everything He says seriously.

Jesus said, “All others who came before me are thieves and robbers.” He said, “The gate to hell is wide and the road that leads to it is easy, and there are many who travel it. But the gate to life is narrow and the way that leads to it is hard, and there are few people who find it.”

If Jesus was right then all other religions are false simply by the process of logical elimination. But why? Why is Jesus the only way?

And this is where many Christians are deeply confused.
I want to take you back to the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. Crucifixion was a very cruel form of execution. It was reserved for rebels and slaves. Death was agonizingly slow, the result of shock and exposure and eventually affixation. People just died for lack of air.

But for Jesus, the pain of the cross paled in the face of a greater anguish, a deeper torment that could not be seen. Something more excruciating than the nails that held His body on the cross, and more dreadful than all those lashes that ripped the flesh from His body.

It was a dark, terrible agony and infinite misery as God the Father unleashed His fury upon His sinless Son, as if His Son were guilty of all sin. Now why punish the innocent one?
Nailed to the top of Jesus’ cross was a piece of parchment. It was called the certificate of debt. It told of the crimes that Jesus committed that He was being punished for. It was His “rap sheet.” And what did it say on that piece of paper?

“Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” That was His crime. Now obviously He was guilty of that, (by the way, the cross was payment for that crime) … but there was another certificate that was nailed there.

And when a person paid for their particular crime their certificate was “rendered.” And the Greek word for that is Τετέλεσται, which means “cancelled” or “paid in full.” And it means that no one can be charged for that crime that they paid for ever again.
Being the King of the Jews was not the crime that Jesus paid for because hidden to all but the Father was another certificate that Paul talks about. “God forgave us all our sins; he canceled the unfavorable record of our debts with its binding rules and did away with it completely by nailing it to the cross.”

There was a certificate of debt that represented our crimes against God, our complete “rap sheet”, nailed to that cross, which only the Father and Jesus could see.

And in the darkness that shrouded Calvary from the 6th to 9th hour a Divine transaction took place that is the foundation of why Jesus is the only way of salvation.

Jesus made a trade with the Father.
The crimes of all humanity, every murder, every theft, every lustful glance, every hidden act of vice, every moment of pride, every monstrous act of evil … every crime of every man and woman that was ever committed was poured out upon Jesus as if He was guilty of all.

And as it turns out in the end, it was not the cross that took Jesus’ life. He does not die of exposure, or loss of blood, or affixation. When the full payment is made, when the last of the debt melted away, when the justice of God was finally satisfied … Jesus simply dismissed His spirit. He just let it go.

But just before He did that, what did He say? He said, “It is finished!” Now He wasn’t saying, “I’m glad this is finally over with.”
In the Greek what He said was a single word. And the word was Τετέλεσται … paid in full.

You see, the reason that Jesus is the only way of salvation is that He is the only one who solved the problem. Buddha didn’t do that. Zarathustra didn’t do that. Krishna didn’t do that. Muhammad didn’t do that. No other person on earth did that because they all had their own crimes stuck on that cross.

It was only the magnificent sinless one, the one that we deservedly, “Crown Him With Many Crowns.” In His sacrifice upon the cross … a trade was made. “Christ was without sin, but for our sake God made him share our sin in order that in union with him we might share the righteousness of God.”
And it all comes down to that simple transaction.

It doesn’t really matter if you worship God your own way, what matters is, that you worship God God’s way. And God’s way is the Lord Jesus Christ, because He accomplished for you what nobody else could ever do. He secured forgiveness, through His own pain, suffering, and blood.

So, what about you? Everybody in this world needs that. You’ve had the privilege today at least of hearing how it all fits together. And if you’ve already come to faith, I hope your understanding of what Jesus did for you has deepened significantly this morning.

But if you haven’t yet come to faith … this is for you.
I hope that what I’ve said has caused you to think about your own sin, your own rap sheet, your own certificate of debt, those crimes that are mounting day after day after day after day against you.

Today you can take care of that. It’s a simple act, but utterly profound. You can just bow your head before God and say Jesus “help me. Jesus rescue me. I have broken your law, I am guilty, and I deserve to be punished for what I did. You know that. But I turn to you now and ask you to please forgive me. Make my life new.”

And Jesus is the one, the only one who can do that. That’s the significance of the cross.
 

        MARANA THA.