Ben Poole
So our question this morning is: "With all the religions in the world, how do you know that Christianity is the only true religion?" Excellent question. Gary, why don't you start us off.
Gary Schick
You know, this is an important one. I guess, in a sense, all of them are if somebody's asking it, but we have nailed our claim to Jesus in Christ alone, so you don't want to be wrong about that, right? You don't want to be sitting there on the Jesus plane when everybody's heading into heaven on something else and you're not right. So this is a great question. And of course, there's people with a lot of views out there, there's people who are going to say, you know, there's all kinds of ways to get there. And yet what really is stark about the Christian claim is actually Jesus said, "No, I am the way ,the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me." So Christians really do need to make sure that what they believe is not only true, but the one and only way into heaven because it claims to be. So unlike other religions that maybe are a little lax and say, "Well, you can follow us for a while if you want, or try this or try that." And many do in the world, many have kind of patched together a patchwork of religions. We Christians, are we making a unique claim and how do we know it's true?
So I have three thoughts on this, and the first one I've actually just mentioned - Christianity's unique claims. Jesus himself makes some claims that others don't make. It's been a long time since my college years when I read a few other religious texts, I think I read the sayings of Confucius, the sayings of Buddha, and others. And there is some overlap there, there's some 'love your neighbor' type stuff. It makes sense that God has a moral law and that even people outside the faith can see the rightness of certain things, but only our God says "I am God and there is no other." The Canaanite gods were one of a zillion gods. Similarly Jesus says, "I am the Son of God. If you have seen the Father, you have seen me." Buddha doesn't say that about himself. He is kind of deified by his followers, but I don't even know that he claimed to be a deity. Confucius definitely didn't, he was kind of a philosopher. Mohammed claimed to be a prophet, Joseph Smith didn't claim to be God either. So just because Jesus says "I am God", our God saying "I am God and there is no other" isn't necessarily indicative of that, but you would expect if there is a true God and He has represented Himself in the flesh, in his Son, that you would get these kinds of statements. And so then you have to look at the statements and say, are they verifiable?
I think CS Lewis put it really well when he said, "You can't just accept Jesus as a good moral teacher," like you can with some of these other guys. He made some claims that either he is who he claims to be, and if so we'd better put our trust in him, or he's an incredible liar. And those who knew him said, "No, this guy is genuine," or "He's sincere, (which he clearly was) but he's insane." Jesus doesn't fit that, he is as rational and as coherent as the sun is bright in the morning, you know?So Christianity claims to be the only way, and then you have the verifiability question. We talked last week about the Greek myths, for example. And they are some fabulous stories, but they're not things you see happening in the real world. It's kind of like reading Harry Potter - it all makes sense within the fiction, but it doesn't translate into our life. We don't see these things happening in our world. Whereas the Christian faith, the faith of the Old and New Testament, it happened in our world. And so where history examines it, we find people outside of Christianity saying Jesus lived and he was crucified. His followers say he rose - of course the non-Christian writer isn't going to say for sure that he rose, but they're going to identify that, yes, those who follow him say that this happened.
You also have the archeological evidence. I mean, for a long time people would say this didn't happen. And then somebody started digging and guess what? There it was. And over and over again, archeology has verified the times and the places, and you even have cultural things. There's things that go on in Genesis that people ask "Well, why did they do that?" And then you find out that culturally that was going on in the world around them in that time period. So we can not only know that Abraham lived, but we can see that he was definitely a man of faith who believed in the One True God in his time with everything else that was going on. So you have archeology, you have anthropology, you have history, sociology, all these sciences can look at it. Some may say, "Well, what about the miracles? We don't see that in our everyday world." And that also is proof of Christianity, because when a miracle happens in the Bible people see it as a miracle. They don't say, "Oh, you know, there's a half man half horse wandering across the field. That's normal." They don't say, "Oh, Jesus touched him and his eyes are well, that's normal." That's what happens in fiction in fiction - the person with the magical powers does what they do, and nobody bats an eye because everybody with magical power does that. In Scripture, they respond the way you and I would. If somebody was healed, we'd say "Whoa, what is this? Has God just stepped in and done what only God can do in God's universe?"
We also have within the Scripture verifiability - the Scripture claims to be the Word of God, and it's such a unique book. You have these other books that are written by single authors. I mean, the claims aside of maybe where they were getting their inspiration from, Muhammad writes the Quran from start to finish. Joseph Smith writes the Book of Mormon from start to finish. With the Bible, you have a book that is written over a period of 1,600 years, 40 different writers, speaking three different languages, living on three different continents, over a period of one and a half millennia. And from start to finish, they tell a single cohesive story with a single viewpoint about God. And by the way, it is contrary to every other story out there. Because as we mentioned last week, if you read the Greek narratives where they're dealing with their gods, the Greeks themselves are the heroes and the gods are kind of the bad guys, we tricked them out of fire this time, and we got out of this that time - we win, because man is at the center of it. In the Bible, you've got to ask yourself what was wrong with the Jews that they wrote what they wrote, because they are not the heroes. Only God is the hero from start to finish. He is the hero - you can take the very best they had to offer, King David, and everybody knows about his blunders. Take strong Sampson, everybody knows about his blunders. Only God from page one to the end of revelation is the hero. Then you have something else that I don't think any other scripture has because it was written over such a long time.
