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This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Poole and Gary Schick.
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.
You have prophecies in the Old Testament that are fulfilled. Some of them in the Old Testament, others in the New, a whole lot of them about Jesus. And so it's not just that some prophet, you know, vaguely prophesied what might be and something like that sort of happened. They said the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. And when King Herod said, "Where's he supposed to be born? There's these guys looking for him." Well Scripture says Bethlehem. So pinpoint that on the scripture itself verifies. And then one last proof, I'm going to speak for my own life. Jesus has changed my life and He's still in the process of changing it. So I know through experience that He answers prayer, that He's with me because we've both had many moments that have verified the Jesus who said, "I am the way the truth and the life, I will never leave you. I'll send my spirits to dwell in you." I've still got a long way to go. Don't look at me and say, "Is that what Jesus is like?" Cause you won't be disappointed, but I can tell you he has been there over and over and over again and proved himself in beautiful ways.
Ben Poole
This is so good, and there's so much information we could dive into. It's hard to narrow it down really. One of the things that I thought of was all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, and the chances that these would be fulfilled in the way they perfectly were. I mean, it's so worldly impossible. It could not have happened outside of God orchestrating it to happen. There are books written on this, there's information you can read. And a lot of times people say, "Well, how do we know the Bible's true? How do we know that Christianity is the only way?" And sometimes the uneducated answer is "Well, I believe it. I've put my faith in it." And there's absolutely something true about that. I've put my faith in Christ. Hopefully you have as well, but you can take these things that Gary has shared here and you can look this up. This is verifiable information that is not hidden to the world. I mean, the archeology especially has made huge waves in secular belief. And every single time they find something, they're trying to prove the Bible wrong on this. They're like, "Oh man, I guess the Bible was true about that. And that may not change lives because they can say, "Well, it's just a historical book." But again, going back to the fact of this one story, telling God's story, 3000 plus years, different languages, different people, different family lines, all telling the same story. I know people have argued that they don't believe all these people really wrote it. But again, these are verifiable facts.
When you look back and go back to the earliest documentation of how things were written and where it was written, there's so much information. And if you also look back at all of these other faiths, it's not there. It is not there. And I think that goes back to the power of the Word of God. It's not so much the physical Bible you hold in your hand, but it's the message that never changes. It was written in Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic and it's changed so we can have it in English, and it's still being translated into other languages today - praise the Lord for that, by the way - but the message has never changed. It was always pointing to Jesus. It has always pointed to God, His work in the world. That is the message. You could read the Bible and you could find Jesus. That's something so powerful that I don't think any other faith has. And also, I appreciate what you said that you never read the Bible and look at these people thinking they are heroes. They're often writing the story of themselves sharing some of their deepest faults, even in the gospels and what took place, and their shame, and their ignorance, and letting women have a higher role in some places than culture would appreciate or approve of. And they were writing about their fear and running away and leaving Jesus behind. They wrote that about themselves, right? It just points to Jesus all the more. Again, thank you so much for this question. We pray that this conversation has been a blessing and I know we would love to talk more about this.
Gary Schick
And just one other thing - dig deeper. Read CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, read Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict that zeroes in on Jesus' death and resurrection, read Josh McDowell's More Evidence That Demands A Verdict that talks about the reliability of Scripture and how we can depend on it. There is not a book in the world that has been examined and scrutinized like the Bible. People say, "Well, how do you know that it hasn't changed?" We have more manuscripts of Scripture than any other book in ancient literature. We only have a handful of copies of Homer, his Iliad and Odyssey, we only have a handful of copies of Plato's writings, of Socrates. And nobody questions that this is what these guys said, and who knows how well those copies match, but you can take those thousands of New and Old Testament copies of Scripture and compare them, and over and over again it is saying the same thing. It hasn't changed, whether we're looking at something that's a couple hundred years before Christ like the Dead Sea Scrolls, or a copy of it from a thousand years after Christ, like the Leningrad, a copy of the Old Testament, Even in proximity to how close we are to the original manuscripts, we're very close. There is a consistency in God's Word, and a ring of truth that you'll find nowhere else.