Don't All Paths Lead to God?

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and welcome to our worship service. It’s good to see you all here. If you’re visiting us for the first time today, we’re happy to have you. You should find a visitor’s card in the back pocket of the chair right in front of you. Please fill that out and leave it in the offering plate to let us know you were here.

I have just a few announcements to cover this morning as we begin. First, thank you to everyone who helped out with Family Field Day last Saturday. By all accounts it was a fun time had by all, and we’re looking forward to turning this into a yearly event.

Our Sunday school curriculum has begun both for teens age 12-19 and 5-11, but we’re still looking for some volunteers to help with that. If you’d like to take part, please see Jesyka Rowzie.

Keep in mind that we’ll be having our next business meeting on September 8 at 6:30, and the men’s ministry will be meeting tonight at 6:30 down at the pavilion.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Heavenly Lord, your name is glorious and wonderful. Everyone on earth and heaven sing about your wondrous works. You are the king of all, and we worship you, our Lord. We gather in your presence in the unity of our faith to ask that you bless us. Without your power and grace, we can do nothing. We pray that your glory continues to fill and radiate within our lives so that we can be your ambassadors to the world. Let none of us leave here today empty-handed. Go with us into the world as we serve you.

Sermon

If you look around modern culture and listen to those who are willing to admit there at least might be a God, it won’t take you long to hear this: all religions are the same. Or better put, God is like the top of a mountain, and all the world’s religions are like different paths leading up that mountain. It doesn’t matter which path you follow, you’ll still reach the same top.

When we talk about how our society thinks about religion, that’s now rule number one, especially among the younger people — you can’t exclude anyone, and you definitely can’t say that some people have more of the truth than other people. Everybody has to be included.

If you have a religion that says only some people get paradise and the rest don’t, then your religion is a problem. Then you’re backward. You’re some sort of -ist — racist, sexist, whatever. Or you’re some sort of -phobic — homophobic, xenophobic, what have you.

So the best religions, the true religions, are the ones that don’t leave anyone out. The ones that say I’m okay, and you’re okay.

Eighty-three percent of the world’s population considers themselves religious, and there are about 4,300 religions in the world. Just about all of them claim to be the real one, the one that is the absolute truth and explains everything about the world, the universe, and ourselves.

So the question is, given all those different ways of thinking about God, how can Christians think our faith is the true one? Isn’t that a little arrogant? In fact, isn’t that extremely arrogant?

That’s what we’re going to talk about today, and we’re going to start first in the book of Isaiah, chapter 44, verses 6-11.

These verses are part of a larger passage where Isaiah is proclaiming that the Lord, Yahweh, is the one true God among all of the other false ones. He calls upon the Israelites to reject these false gods and return to the Lord who had forgiven them for their idolatry. Let’s take a look at what Isaiah says: chapter 44, beginning in verse 6:

Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel

and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts:

“I am the first and I am the last;

besides me there is no god.

Who is like me? Let him proclaim it.

Let him declare and set it before me,

since I appointed an ancient people.

Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen.

Fear not, nor be afraid;

have I not told you from of old and declared it?

And you are my witnesses!

Is there a God besides me?

There is no Rock; I know not any.”

All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his companions shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are only human. Let them all assemble, let them stand forth. They shall be terrified; they shall be put to shame together.

And this is God’s holy word.

We’re all built for worship. We’ve talked about this before. Every single one of us have a need in our hearts to worship something. If it’s not God, it’ll be your job, or your looks, or money, or your career.

False religions have always had an appeal to people. It’s as old as history. Not even the Israelites were immune to worshipping what they shouldn’t worship. Remember way back when Moses led the captives out of Egypt, and how God sent the plagues that finally secured their freedom and then parted the Red Sea. All those miracles, all those wondrous things, but the moment Moses went up on Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, the Israelites were busy building a golden calf.

Isaiah begins in verse 6 by stating who is doing the talking here — “The Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts.” All of these names have their own important significance that sets the God of the Bible apart from all others.

The term LORD is a substitution for the Hebrew word Yahweh, the name that God revealed when he began his covenant with the Israelites.

He’s also described as “the King of Israel.” Remember, Israel was completely different from any other nation on earth until its people decided they wanted to be just like everyone else. They had no king. They had God. He was the one who gave the laws and ensured justice. He was the commander-in-chief of Israel’s armies. He judged right and wrong.

The word “Redeemer” in Hebrew carries the meaning of ransoming someone, of paying the price for another’s freedom. This is a reference to what we talked about a moment ago, Israel’s captivity in Egypt. God saved them, no one else. No idols, no men. It was God who delivered the Israelites from slavery and then made a covenant with them to be His people.

And that redeeming continues. It wasn’t just a one-shot deal, God saying, “I’ll deliver you this time, but now you’re on your own.” No, he continually delivered them. And in the death and resurrection of Christ, he delivers all of us now.

The Lord of Hosts, or Lord of Armies, is a phrase that appears throughout the Old Testament. And this term doesn’t just apply to something like a general leading his troops, it refers to God being ruler over all of creation.

There are levels to everything. Society is made up of classes, lower, middle, and upper. Our jobs are structured such that there are people below us and above us. There’s the food chain, the order of planets, the size of stars. Everything in creation has a specific structure to it that places some things below and some things above. And above it all at the very top is God, the Lord of Hosts.

Put all of that together, and you get the end of verse 6: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.”

God being both first and last emphasizes his eternal nature. He always was and always will be. There has never been a time when God wasn’t.

He’s first in the sense that he was present before time began, and he is last in that he will remain always, even after the end of time.

He is aware of everything before it happens. There is nothing that escapes his notice, nothing that is not governed by his will and his plan.

He is so far beyond us that we cannot even fathom him. Moses saw the hem of God’s garment and nearly died. Imagine the terror we would feel if we saw the face of God right now. And yet we will see his face someday, and in that state it will not be terrifying at all, it will be more beautiful than we can possibly imagine.

But as it stands right now, our tiny minds can’t hold something like that inside them. We can’t comprehend God’s eternal nature, his power, his wisdom, his love. And in all of those things, he is unique and without equal. That is exactly the meaning behind that last statement: there is no God but me.

Not only is God eternal, he is also omniscient, meaning he knows everything with perfect and complete knowledge. Look at verse 7: “Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen.”

God knows all things past, present, and future. Nothing catches him by surprise. He gives a challenge here to other so-called gods to declare what would happen in the future — “Let them declare what is to come,” he says, “and what will happen.” And of course they can’t.

And by this God doesn’t simply mean the other gods who were so common to the world during Isaiah’s time, those trinkets carved from wood or stone. He’s also talking about the false gods that we’re tempted to worship now. That money. Those things. That job. They can’t keep us safe from the future, either, because they could be gone tomorrow. Only he is always.

These wooden gods, these stone and metal gods, they can’t speak the truth. They can’t speak at all. And they can’t know the future, either. Do you see what God is doing through Isaiah here? He’s mocking these false gods. He’s calling them out, and he’s calling out the people who follow those false gods, too.

Isaiah later calls out the sheer stupidity of this, saying the goldsmith takes the people’s silver and gold to make a god, and then the people bow down and worship that god, but that god can’t even move. The people have to carry the god to its resting place so they can pray to it, but what are they praying to? Just a thing. A thing that can’t can’t hear the people’s cries, much less answer them.

That’s why God says in verse 8 that these false gods are nothing to be afraid of. They can’t hurt you, don’t have any influence over you, and most of all, they don’t have any power. And notice how God frames those words: Have I not told you from of old and declared it? That’s important. God doesn’t just pop into our lives and say, “Here I am, let me know if you need anything.” That’s not how he works. He is constantly proving himself to us by taking care of us, by prospering us, by showing us that all those things we are so afraid of are in reality tiny things that just cast long shadows.

He asks his people, Is there any God but me? And then God answers his own question. No. No, there is no God but him. He also describes himself as the only Rock there is, His people’s Rock. God does not change. And because of that, we as his people can have complete confidence in him, knowing that he is perfectly constant, all-knowing, all-powerful, and in control of history itself.

Put that up against these false gods, who are useless and not fit for worship. Verse 9: “All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame.”

Not only are idols nothing, since they can’t speak or know the future, those who make them are nothing, too. Why? Because the idol makers knew they were working with plain wood, plain metal, plain stone, and yet still thought they were creating a god that they would present to the people. In a way, the ones who made the idols were worse than the people who followed those idols. They had more guilt.

That Hebrew word for “nothing” in verse 9 is used about ten times in the book of Isaiah. It mans vanity, futility, or emptiness. It’s a term that’s unique to the Hebrew language. It can refer to a wasteland, a destroyed city, or utter spiritual and moral bankruptcy. In other words, there is absolutely nothing of value to be found.

Every day our hearts are pulled in a thousand different directions, everything vying not just for our attention, but for our worship. And it’s so easy to fall into that trap. It’s important to always keep in mind that these idols, no matter how shiny they are or how much they seem to offer on the surface, are nothing in the end. They’re wastelands that will trap our souls forever.

Let’s look at verses 10 and 11. How do you make a god? Is such a thing possible? Because if you can make a god, then by definition that god is weaker than the maker of it is.

Unlike the true God of creation, these craftsmen who made their living making false gods were just making lifeless idols that couldn’t help anyone. They were driven by what we’re all driven by — profit. Money. But they would only find shame in the end. Idol makers and idol worshippers will all face the real God in the end, and face that real God’s judgment. As will we. But those who place their faith in Christ will find a judgment that leads to rewards for the good that they’ve done for Christ, while those who reject Christ will face judgment.

And speaking of Jesus, let’s turn to him next. Because that’s where the real controversy lays when it comes to the Christian faith.

People will gripe and complain and call us bigoted because we say that out of all the gods in the world, we worship the one true God. But they tend to go nuts when we say that not only do we worship the one true God, the only way to find peace in this world and the next world is to believe in what we believe — in his son. That’s the key, that faith in Jesus. Living well won’t get you to heaven. Doing good deeds won’t get you to heaven. Being a good person won’t get you to heaven. Only faith in Christ will.

Turn over to John chapter 14. We’re going to be looking at verses 5-7 here, when Jesus has a conversation with one of his disciples named Thomas. Now you might know Thomas. He is the doubter. The one who said he wouldn’t believe that Jesus was really raised from the dead unless he put his hands into Jesus’s wounds and saw it for himself. Thomas, who by the way in the Catholic faith is the Patron saint of what? Lawyers. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Let’s see what verses 5-7 say:

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

This passage in John is taken during the Last Supper. Jesus and his disciples are gathered in an upper room. It’s the night of Jesus’s arrest, just before his crucifixion. Time’s running out. These men, these plain uneducated fishermen and a tax collector, have been with Jesus for only about three years. They’ve seen him perform miracles. They’ve been beside him as he’s given them teaching. And now there are only a few hours left. Jesus wants to pass along what’s most important. He’s not going to waste a single minute, a single word. So what does he do and say?

He washes the disciples’ feet to show them that if you really want to be great in the kingdom of heaven, then you have to be a servant here on earth.

He gives a new commandment that we are to love others just as he loves us.

He warns Peter that by the time morning comes, Peter will deny Christ three times.

He says don’t worry about what’s going to happen. Don’t worry that you won’t understand it, and that it’s going to look like the end. It’s not. It’s just the beginning. Let not your hearts be troubled, he says. Believe in God; believe also in me.

He says he’s going away to prepare a place for us, and he’ll come back and take us with him so we can be where he is.

And then Thomas chimes in. Poor Thomas, who is so filled with doubts, who is always kind of the pessimist, just like us.

He says in verse 5, How in the world can we know the way if we don’t understand any of this? If we don’t even know where you’re going?

Here’s the problem with Thomas. And it’s the same problem that all the disciples have and one we have, too: he put God in a box. He limited himself by what he could conceive, what he could think was possible. Like I said, these men had been with Jesus for three years. The idea of Jesus’s death and resurrection didn’t just come out of the blue. Jesus had told them and told them what was going to happen.

But it seems like none of the disciples ever understood exactly what he meant, or at least they didn’t fully comprehend it until after Christ’s resurrection.

They still had their minds set on an earthly kingdom, that Jesus was an earthly prince and leader. They simply could not fathom the reason why he had to die. And all of this goes to show how hard it is to believe and to know the truth when the mind is so filled with prejudice and opinions that we’re so hesitant to change.

Thomas, at least, was honest about this. If Thomas confessed his ignorance, not just to Jesus, but to himself, then he would have been willing to receive what Jesus said on its own terms. I’m dying. I’m going away. But I’ll be back.

But Thomas couldn’t. His mind was so full of his own opinions of who Jesus should be that he couldn’t see who Jesus was. And this was a guy who’d been with Jesus from the very start.

So listen to what Jesus answers in verses 6 & 7: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Thomas had misunderstood Jesus’s words. His own prejudices got in the way. He was thinking in terms of a map that leads to a final destination in this life. Jesus, though, is a lot bigger than that. He’s talking in terms of eternity. Not this little whisper of breath that we call life, but real life, the kind that lasts forever.

God the Father gives eternal life. What Jesus said, what he still says, is that the only way to the father, the only way to receiving this eternal life, is through a relationship with the Christ. In fact, Jesus is the only way for us to get to God. He is the truth — Jesus is the Word made flesh. He is the embodiment of the father, the ultimate revelation of God. And he’s also the life — he has life in Himself, and all who come to Jesus by faith receive eternal life.

But it’s even more than that. Jesus says that if we know him, then we know God Himself. Jesus said he didn’t just have a relationship with God, he had a oneness with God. He is God. To know Jesus is to know God, and to see Jesus is to see God. “I and the Father are one,” he says in John 10.

All of that pretty well flies in the face of people who say that one religion is like any other, doesn’t it? The Bible makes it clear: You can’t be saved except through faith in Christ.

Acts 4:11-12: “This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Does every religion have some truth in it? Of course, because every religion has at its foundation observations taken from the natural world, and God has written himself into the natural world. But is every religion the complete truth? No. Just one.

Sounds a little exclusive, doesn’t it? A little unfair.

The problem that people have with hearing that the Christian faith is the only religion that offers the truth of God is that it’s too narrow-minded. We should be more open. We should see our faith as just one of many possible faiths, no better and no worse. It’s just another path up that mountain. It’s subjective rather than objective truth: what’s true for me and what’s true for you don’t have to be the same, but they’re both true.

But that doesn’t make much sense, does it? Sure, there are values of all the world’s major religions that are the same. Every major religion has their own version of the golden rule, for instance. But questions about how we should live, what we should believe, what the afterlife is, and how to get there are very different if you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or a Buddhist.

What’s true for us as Christians and what’s true for a Muslim or a Buddhist are very different things, and so by definition they can’t all be true. So this idea of all faiths leading to the same God is really a lie. It’s built on the desire of everyone being able to get to heaven no matter what you believe, and the Bible is clear on that issue. Not everyone gets to go.

But what about really good people who don’t believe in God and who aren’t Christians? Shouldn’t they be saved? Gandhi wasn’t a Christian. Gandhi said he loved Jesus but not so much the people who follow him, because those people don’t seem to be any different than anyone else in how they live. Few people have ever done as much good for the world as Gandhi. So shouldn’t he be saved?

The problem with that is Christians don’t believe people can be saved by being good. Good won’t get you there, because you’ll never be good enough to be able to live alongside a completely holy God. There’s only one way to get there, and that’s through a completely holy savior who died for us.

But that’s still too narrow-minded, isn’t it? Where do we get off saying that the only people who will ever get to heaven are those who believe that a man was born who wasn’t really a man but was both man and God, and that man died on a cross but somehow came back to life, and because of that anyone who believes in him will find heaven at death?

What these critics of Christianity don’t understand, though, is that the Christian faith is universal. It’s far more universal than any other faith. Because it says salvation is yours for the asking. You don’t have to be born into the right family or have the right amount of money or have a certain standing. You can be any color, any sex, from anywhere. It’s for everyone, regardless of who they are or where they live. If access to God is found through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly.

But then you have people who say, “Well, why can’t God just accept everybody? If God is love, then why can’t everybody go to heaven?”

And that’s when you get to the real core of all these objections about Christianity standing above every other religion. When people gripe about that, that’s what they’re really griping about. Heaven. Who gets in and who gets left out. Because it’s not fair for God to pick and choose, is it?

But if God says, Yes, I’m a God of love, and so everybody will be able to enjoy an eternity of peace and joy, then that creates a different problem with fairness, doesn’t it? Because that means God wouldn’t really care about things like injustice and evil. Should Adolf Hitler be in heaven alongside Peter and James and John? Should Stalin enjoy eternity beside Billy Graham? We bristle at that, don’t we? Because deep down, we all want justice. And God is a God of justice. He is love, yes. But he is also holy, and he will judge everyone.

For God to simply pardon all sin would mean that God isn’t bothered by moral evil. So then how could he be God? If God pardoned the sins of people who showed no remorse for their sins at all, his holiness would be compromised. He wouldn’t be just.

Fine, then. Okay. But what about those people who go through life never hearing about Jesus? Or what about those people who are exposed to teachings about Jesus, but those teachings are twisted and wrong? What about all the people who were alive before Jesus was born? And what about all the people now in places like North Korea and China and in the most remote lands on earth?

The answer to that — or at least my answer to that — is simple: I don’t know. I have no idea. But that’s okay, because I do know this: The Bible is clear on two things. One is that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ. The other is that God is always fair and just in his dealings.

What the Bible doesn’t tell us is how both of those things can be true together, but does that matter? Just because we can’t see a way around those two statements doesn’t mean there isn’t a way around those two statements. He’s God after all, isn’t He?

And so shouldn’t it be up to him to decide where everybody goes when they die? I don’t think that’s something we should decide. I don’t think that’s something we should be going around and saying — “You’re going to hell.” Because in the end, only God knows that.

God doesn’t judge those who haven’t clearly heard of Christ in the same way that he judges those who have. Paul says in Romans 1-2 that God judges people who haven’t heard the gospel on the basis of how they respond to the parts of Him found in nature and in their own conscience.

In theology that’s called general revelation. It’s God written into a sunset, and in the stars, and a baby’s laugh. It’s God written into that hole you have in your heart that only He can fill. In that way, everyone has their chance to get to heaven. Everybody, no matter who they are or where they are or when they are.

But here’s the thing: scripture and our own daily experience shows us that in general, people can’t even live up to the demands that general revelation shows. We can go out and look up at the stars and think there has to be something greater out there, but then we just turn around and live like there isn’t. We can know in our hearts that we have to act a certain way, but then we don’t. God gives everyone the opportunity to seek him out, and scripture says that everyone who seeks him will find him. But the problem is that so many just don’t want the bother of seeking him.

If all of this is true, and I think it is, then no one will be able to stand before God on judgment day and say, “It’s not my fault, because I never heard the Gospel’., If I had, I would have believed.” God will instead say to them, “No, I put enough of me into your heart and into creation, and I know your heart much better than you. So my judgment isn’t unloving nor unfair.”

God says there is only one way to him, and he’s made that way as wide as he possibly can. It’s through a Christ who doesn’t care who you are or where you come from. It’s written in a world that’s overflowing with signs of his presence. What we do with those things is completely up to us.

God is love, yes. And God is holy. How those two things work together in the eternal futures of people is a mystery we can’t know. Which is maybe a good thing, because in the end it’s none of our business. Our duty in the end is to take care of our own souls, to be a light for Him, and to trust the truth that God is always just and fair in everything that he does.

Let’s pray:

Father we are so thankful that your Spirit moved in us to answer Your call on our lives. And we’re thankful as well that of all the paths people take to fill that God-shaped hole in their lives, we have found the perfect one. The true one. The holy one. In You we have that light in the darkness. Help us, Father, not to hide that light. Help us to shine it outward with love, with compassion, with kindness, and with understanding so that others can be drawn to it as well. For we ask this in your precious son Jesus’s name, Amen.