Counter-Cultural Belief in One True God

While sitting in his freshman English class in college, a new Christian named R. C. Sproul was asked by a hostile professor in front of the entire class, “Mr. Sproul, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to God?” Sproul gulped and muttered quietly, “Yes I do.” The teacher responded with unmitigated fury. In front of the class with a voice as loud as a rocket launcher, she yelled at Sproul, “That is the most narrow-minded, bigoted, and arrogant statement I have ever heard in my life! You must be a supreme egotist to believe that your way of religion is the only way” (D. James Kennedy, Sceptics Answered).

In today’s culture, where tolerance is seen as the highest of moral values, the exclusivity of Christianity provokes great hostility. Jesus, however, was crystal clear in his claim, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He repeated this same truth in his intimate prayer to the Father, And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent (Jn 17:3). This episode examines this exclusivity, how we can teach our loved ones to winsomely respond to this accusation, and what are the implications of Jesus’ description of the Father as the only true God.

The late Tim Keller spent thirty years asking New Yorkers, “What is your biggest problem with Christianity? What troubles you most about its beliefs or the way it is practiced.” One of the most frequent answers he heard was, “its exclusivity.” To insist that one faith has a better grasp of the truth than others is seen as “intolerant.” Keller also heard the frequent refrain, “We will never come to know peace on earth if religious leaders keep making such exclusive truth claims.” Followers of every religion believe their religion right and other religions wrong. So, by its very nature religion causes divisiveness. Keller points out that civic and cultural leaders around the world have taken three approaches to solving this problem: outlawing religion, condemning religion, and privatizing religion.

Outlawing Religion. There have been several massive efforts to do this in the 20th century. Soviet Russia, Communist China, the Khmer Rouge were all determined to tightly control religious practice in an effort to destroy it, lest it divide society and erode the power of the state. The result, however, was not more peace and harmony but more oppression. As Alister McGrath points out. “The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed religion caused intolerance and violence (The Twilight of Atheism).  

Condemn Religion. This approach creates a cultural environment in which it is considered unenlightened and outrageous to make exclusive truth claims. Denigrating religion is accomplished by stating and restating certain axioms that eventually become common-sense assumptions. Here is a sample of those axioms:

• All major religions are equally valid and teach essentially the same thing.
• Each religion sees part of the truth, but none can see the whole truth.
• Religious belief is too culturally and historically conditioned to be truth.
• It is arrogant to insist your religion is right and to convert others to it. (Tim Keller, The Reason for God.)

Keep Religion Private. Another common approach to overcoming the divisiveness of religion is to allow people to privately believe their faith, and even evangelize for it—but demanding that religious values be kept out of the public sphere. This ideology is called secularism—dividing life into various slices of a pie but keeping religion in its own slice. It is telling you to keep your religion in your closet. The above two approaches to overcoming the potential divisiveness of religion are shaping the worldview of the culture into which we are launching our children.

RESPONDING TO THE ARGUMENT CHRISTIANITY IS TOO NARROW TO BE TRUE

When we address this claim, we find three possibilities. Christianity is not narrow. Christianity is narrow but not true. Christianity is narrow but is true. Let’s evaluate.

A. Christianity is not narrow. There is perhaps no more mistaken view about religion in America than the often-repeated idea that all religions teach the same thing; so, Christianity is just like all religions. From the idea of tolerance has sprung the notion that to be tolerant we must agree that all truth claims are equally valid. So, it is ignorantly assumed that all religions teach fundamentally the same thing. Years after college, a mature R. C. Sproul was in a public forum with a Bahai priest. Bahais believe in just about everyone. Jesus Christ is placed as a peer with all the rest—Budha, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Mohamed, Zoroaster, etc. Sproul asks the priest,

“How can you believe that all religions are essentially the same when so many religions contradict each other? For example, Christianity says that Christ came so people could have life, have it more abundantly, and have it eternally. Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other hand, teach that life is a great evil. What we should seek after is the ending of all personal life in nirvana, where the individual, like an individual drop of water as an individual life, falls back into the ocean and all conscious life ceases…Islam vigorously teaches that there is one god. Hinduism, on the other hand, teaches that there at least 300 million gods. Confucianism recognizes no god.”

The Bahai priest’s response to Sproul was astonishing, “I don’t know anything about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism. I just believe all religions are the same.” Anyone who says Christianity is like all religions is sadly, ignorant. 

B. Christianity is narrow but can’t be true. The reasons for this rejection can be summarized in three objections.

Objection #1: There are millions of sincere worshippers who are not Christian believers. While Christians must admit that this reality poses significant challenges to understanding why God creates so many who never hear the faith, we cannot solve them by denying Jesus’ claim to being the only way to God. The assumption of this argument is that because these worshippers are sincere, they can’t be wrong. Sincerity or lack of it, however, has nothing to do with the accuracy of what is believed. We can be sincere and right or sincere and wrong. A nurse in a large hospital changed an oxygen tank in an oxygen tent for one of her patients. On the next set of rounds she found her patient dead. The tank she had affixed to the tent was filled with nitrogen, not oxygen. It had been labeled improperly at the warehouse. The nurse sincerely thought she was attaching oxygen to the tent. But her belief was not true, i.e. it did not correspond to reality.

Objection #2: Even though it may be right for us it might not be right for everyone. This assumes that truth is determined by your belief or unbelief, not by external reality. But we all realize that whether something is objectively true or not is a separate issue from whether or not a person believes it. One unfortunate driver sincerely believed that trains don’t run on Sundays and ignored the warning that a train was coming around the curve and crossing the highway. He was killed instantly. Christ’s claims are either objectively true or false.

Objection #3: A religion as narrow as Christianity can’t be true. The assumption behind this objection is not valid. A position can be narrow and wrong or narrow and right. Just being narrow doesn’t mean it is right or wrong. At one time in history, believing that the world was not flat was narrowly held by few. In many areas of life, we have learned to be tolerant. Different strokes for different folks. Tolerance is a biblical virtue in personal relationships. Someone once said, “Tolerance in personal relationships is a virtue, but tolerance in truth is a travesty.” Truth is always intolerant of error. The fact that one plus one equals two is very narrow, but it is also reality.

C. Christianity is narrow but true. Christianity is undeniably narrow. As we know:

• Jesus claimed to have power to forgive sins
• Jesus claimed to be sinless
• Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of OT prophecies of the coming Messiah
• Jesus claimed to be Yahweh, the god of Israel
• Jesus claimed that he would rise from the dead
• The historic evidence for the fact of resurrection is overpowering

As C. S. Lewis pointed out, Jesus’ claims leave no possibility of calling him just a great religious teacher. Someone making these claims to be God was either self-deceived, in which case he was a deranged lunatic, a deceiver of others, in which case he was a liar, or he was who he claimed to be, Lord. Jesus left no other option open to us for understanding his identity. As Lewis says, “He did not intend to.”

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY OTHER RELIGIONS? A BIBLICAL RESPONSE

A. God created humans in his image to be worshippers. Archeologists, along with sociologists inform us that religion is a universal human phenomenon. Wherever man lives, he is found giving some recognition to a power or powers beyond himself. Joseph Gaer in his book, What the Great Religions Believe, points out,

“As far as we can determine, religion has existed in every society, from the most primitive to the most culturally advanced. The more keys modern science finds with which to open the locked doors of the past, and the more we learn about the early days of man on earth, the more evidence there is that all these societies in the past had one thing in common—some form of religion.

Religion is not only universal among human societies; it is also one of the features separating humans, as God’s image bearers, from the rest of creation. British historian Richard Cavendish observes, “Religion is one of the things that distinguishes man from animals. Apes and dolphins (the two creatures most like humans), as far as we know have no religions. But no group of human beings has ever been discovered which did not have religious beliefs” (The Great Religions).

B. Adam’s rebellion corrupted the human heart, causing all humans to refuse to be submissive and thankful to their creator, the true God. But because we’re created to be worshippers, we must worship someone or something. So, fallen man invents his own false God to worship in place of the true God. Paul explains,

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:18-25).

C. Because God created humans to be worshipping creatures the first two commandments focus on worshipping the only true God and no one or nothing else. Jesus’ words to the Father, in John 17:3, This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, were no doubt a reflection of these two commandments, You shall worship ONLY me and You shall worship THE TRUE me. Let’s drill down to review what these commands mean for our everyday lives.

Commandment #1: You shall have no other gods before me (Ex 20:3). This prohibition, of course, refers not only to the traditional idol worship of physical statues but to the idolatry of the heart. The corruption of the human heart at the fall causes the human heart to take good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, being liked, and even family and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts can deify these things, as the center of our lives because we believe we must have them for fulfillment, significance, security and safety.

Commandment #2: You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.  Historically, at the time the Ten Commandments were given, the gods of the neighboring peoples were visually represented by huge statues overlaid with gold, decorated lavishly with precious jewels. And they were housed in enormous temples that would hold thousands of people. It certainly could be argued that since we live in a concrete, material world, such physical tangible objects could be aids to worship. Contrast that now with the only true God who commands us not only to worship no one and nothing else but forbids his worshippers from crafting an object that will in any way serve to represent him. The natural question that arises is why not? What is so important that God makes this prohibition the second commandment. The answer is that God takes great pleasure in being loved for who he truly is. Perhaps an illustration may help. When pursuing their wives to make love, more than one husband has heard, “You don’t really want ME; you just want SEX,” which points to the need to persuade our wives that it is who she is—every part of her—that draws us irresistibly towards her. God wants us to be drawn irresistibly in love to him for who he actually is, not to a figment of our imagination. His desire is for us to come to know and love him, the only true God, for the being he is. This desire explains the prohibitions that arise from the 2nd commandment.  

1. God in his wisdom, knew that no image crafted by human hands could ever accurately represent the totality of who he is. No carving or statue could capture even a fraction of who our infinite, transcendent god is. Any man-made image would reduce God’s greatness. Any physical image of God is a grossly inadequate image of who he is. To understand this principle, imagine visiting the Swiss Alps, standing at the foot of them being dwarfed by grandeur that takes your breath away. Imagine returning home, trying to explain this experience and a friend saying, “Help the rest of us out. Here is a stick of gum. Chew it for a while, then make it into a replica of the Swiss Alps.” Your response would be, “a chewing gum replica of the Alps would be worse than no replica at all.”

2. Fashioning a physical statue to represent God starts with the craftsman’s formation of his own mental image. In the Roman world the statue for Artemis, the goddess of love, looked very different from statue of Mars, the god of war. Any idol maker must begin with his own mental picture before he turns his stone into a statue. So, the Second Commandment prohibits replacing the true God with our own mental image of God. The reason there are so many false religions in the world is that man was created to be a worshipping creature and having refused to submit to his creator or be thankful to him, has replaced the true God with one that man has fashioned himself. Our rising children and grandchildren need to know that all false cults and religions are the result of violating this second commandment and shaping our mental image of God ourselves the way WE want him to be. For example, the very idea that undergirds almost all other religions of the world—that we can earn our way to heaven by our good works--deinies the most foundational characteristics of God’s nature. He is holy and just. My hope is that this commandment and this episode will fire a passion within us to get to know, love, and celebrate the being who God actually is. That most honors him.

3. It is the jealous nature of God that is beneath both the first and second commandments. But doesn’t saying God is jealous sound offensive? Jealousy is usually thought of as a vice. Are we to think that God is a selfish, insecure deity, so full of spite that he gets back at those who spurn him for another lover? No, because there is a side to jealousy that is entirely right, and proper and virtuous—and that is the zeal to protect a covenantal love relationship. As J. I. Packer has written, “Married persons who felt no jealousy at the intrusion of a lover or an adulterer into their home would surely be lacking in moral perception; for the exclusiveness of marriage is the essence of marriage” (Knowing God). Scripture consistently views God’s jealousy as this kind of zealous commitment to guard the exclusivity of his covenantal love relationship with his people. God will tolerate no rivals. His people shall have no other gods before him. God will not even tolerate inaccurate images of himself used in worship. Those who center their affections, priorities, experiences, or desires on any thing or one other than God himself are consistently called adulterers in Scripture.

Just as lovers want, enjoy, adore, delight in, and come to intimately know each other, God wants to be the first being we want, enjoy, adore, delight in, and come to intimately know. May God be honored by our passion to come to know him, the only true God.

For Further Prayerful Thought

1. What is the difference between tolerance in relationships and tolerance regarding what is true? How do you see Scripture requiring us to tolerant of other people but intolerant of false ideas masquerading as truth?
2. How would you answer a Christian you were discipling who asked, “Why are there so many religions?”
3. What do you think of the statement, “God has too much dignity to accept adoration from worshippers who are not celebrating his true nature?” How does the second commandment relate to Jesus’ statement to the woman at the well in Samaria, “The Father desires worshippers to worship him in spirit and in truth?”