Thank you.
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Why is Jesus the only way to God?
As we approach Christmas to celebrate the birth of our Lord and saviour we understand as Christians that Jesus was born to us because God wanted a way to bring his fallen people back to him. Jesus was sent to earth to bring us back to God.
A question that often gets asked by atheists, non-believers and people who are genuinely seeking is “Is Jesus the only way to God”. Atheists in particular would accuse Christians of supreme arrogance to suggest such a thing, never mind that exclusivity seems to be a common trait to most religions. The world would be a much more peaceful place if all beliefs were just seen as pieces of the same puzzle and all led to salvation. Why do Christians get in the way of that by claiming that their Messiah is the only way to heaven? Although there are some more liberal Christians who hold to the doctrine of Universalism that would state that God redeems everyone anyway so it does not matter what you believe.
What I have found in my study of this important question is that Jesus has to be the only way to God because any other method simply does not work and makes no logical sense.
To illustrate, here is a little thought experiment for you. If you could pick your god – what attributes would you look for in him/her/it?
Would you want your God to be powerful? In order for a being to create all that exists out of nothing, this would take an incredible amount of power. This would have to be a being that transcends matter in order to create matter, transcends space, to create space and transcends time, to create time. And he has to do this without any pre-existing material. He has to be very powerful to do that. So I want my God to be all-powerful. A God that can do anything that is logically possible.
Would you want your God to be a tyrant or a nice god? Personally I would like my God to be a kind and loving God. In fact completely omnibenevolent. If he was not then woe betide us when God wakes up and has a bad day. I have had bad days. Days when I am probably not the most approachable person. My wife can testify to that. But what if God had a bad day? I really feel sorry for the poor person that God picks on just because he woke up on the wrong side of his celestial bed. I would like my God to have some consistency about him, a standard that is completely set. Objective moral absolutes can only come from an all-loving God. “Good” is then derived from who God is and we can take comfort in the fact that that standard does not shift depending on the current mood God happens to be in. Plus if he was not omnibenevolent, he would have done away with most of us a long time ago.
What’s next? Do we want God to be perfectly holy? Or just one of the lads? If he is just like us then that opens up a huge problem. We all have different tastes and degrees of tolerance to certain misdemeanours. In this secular society certain traits or interests are tolerated as a matter of taste and preference. For instance, in this country, viewing certain forms of pornographic material is fine. Going on a major alcoholic binge session is fine, as long as no damage is done. The taking of certain drugs, although frowned upon is accepted as part of the social scene in certain places. Different sexual preferences and promiscuity is now seen as the norm and it is getting more the case that you are seen as a deviant if you want to pursue a normal heterosexual relationship in a marriage. Do we want a God so fickle that his attitudes change with the latest social trends or do we want a God with high morals that never change. A God of perfect standards. Concrete holy standards that do not change allow for fair judgement and we need those standards to be high to be judged against. So I would like my God to be perfectly holy.
What other attribute would you like God to have? As well as being perfectly holy I would like my God to be perfectly just. These attributes are inexorably linked. If God is omnibenevolent and perfectly holy then he has to be perfectly fair as well. All matters of misdemeanours need to be judged fairly so as no miscarriage of justice is evident. If God is not fair in these matters then he would be a tyrant and this is not a God I would like to worship. If there was no justice in this lifetime for crimes against yourself through some act of corruption or the fact that the perpetrator was never apprehended then you may take solace in the fact that justice will be meted out in the after-life by a perfectly just God. All sin is a crime against God himself so he will be the one that ultimately seeks retribution for those crimes. One thing we can be sure, an omnibenevolent, perfectly holy and perfectly just God will judge more fairly than any human judge and in that we can find peace.
So the attributes I would like God to have are omnipotence, omnibenevolence, be perfectly holy and therefore perfectly just. Now by definition in any religion, God must be the maximum of any positive attributes otherwise he would not be God. This is the same of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity. So there is no real arguments here. The problem is that if we left it there, nobody would be saved. Absolutely no one.
It order to get into Heaven you need to meet a certain standard. Now if God has all the attributes that we have described before, then his standards are going to be exceedingly high. The question we have to ask is can we meet those standards. The answer is clearly “no” as we fail to meet our own standards on a daily basis.
Psalm 143
Hear my prayer, O LORD;
give ear to my pleas for mercy!
In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness!
2 Enter not into judgment with your servant,
for no one living is righteous before you.
Romans 3
What then? Are we Jews[a] any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, 10 as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 in their paths are ruin and misery,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being[c] will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
Now we have a problem. Other religions will say that as long as the books are balanced and that you have more good works in account than bad then you will be ok. However that leads to a contradiction. That means that God is not perfectly Just or Holy, because for one he will not judge all sins fairly and they will remain unpunished and secondly he will have to allow impure sinners into heaven. Once you go into eternity if you are still clothed in sin then they will fester and eat away at you as you continue to exist through the eons.
We are in trouble. Because God created us as free-willed beings we are damned from the offset, because of the very nature of God, nothing with sin can come into his presence. All have sinned and therefore everybody needs to be removed from his presence. There is a name for a place like that. It is called Hell.
This hardly seems fair. If we have a God with the attributes that are logically consistent to what a supreme being should have then it would be better for us if God never existed in the first place or that he never created us. But here we are.
For me it come down to this. For God to exist, and for him to be all-loving in creating us, not to just damn us to hell, then God himself needs to solve the problem of his conflicting nature. He needs to cross the divide between his perfect holiness and perfect justice, while maintaining his omnibenevolence. There is no other logical solution to this problem as no one on earth can fix this conundrum. Allah certainly can’t as he keeps his distance. All other religions offer the illogical and contradictory solution of works based salvation.
God is the only one that can have his cake and eat it. In order to solve this problem, God himself solved it for us. He did it in his son Jesus.
By transferring all our transgressions onto his son on the cross he meted out his perfect justice. Satisfied his perfect holiness and demonstrated absolutely his omnibenevolence by dying for each one of us. Our sins are forgiven, forgotten. We can now enter into his almighty presence for all eternity. The cross of Christ literally becomes the cross of the great divide presented by God’s nature.
This is why Christianity makes sense. If you want a God to exist then by definition and by nature of his attributes the standards of entry into heaven are going to be too high. Only a God can solve the problem of God. And that is exactly what he does.
We all know the story of Jesus here and what he did for us, but sometimes it pays to just look at it again and be humbled by the story anew. God wanted us to exist, he wanted a relationship with us, and he want us to spend an eternity of joy in companionship with him. But because of who he is, he could not coexist with freewill sinners. So instead of just leaving it there and being happy with the existence of his triune nature (which he was) he decided to make the ultimate sacrifice by choosing to die for us on a cross so we can know him better. There is no other religion on earth that offers us that true and logical hope of salvation. We are saved because of Jesus and there is no other person in existence that can make that payment to God, so he truly is the only way, the only truth and the only life worth pursuing.
