Is Jesus the Only Way to God? A Conversation With a Caller Who Says No
I was in the middle of an answer for a session on the PFN Live Channel when the call came in.
The question on the table was one I get more than almost any other, and I have never once thought it was a stupid question. What about the doctor in North Korea who has never heard the gospel and spends his life patching up people who cannot pay him? Why does he end up outside, while a man who spent forty years doing real damage to real people repents at the end of it and ends up inside? Would it not be better, and kinder, if everyone eventually arrived in the same place?
I had started where I usually start, which is with justice, because most objections to hell turn out to be objections to justice once you follow them far enough. Justice is getting what you deserve. That is the whole definition. And if God is holy, if he really is set apart and other and a cut above everything we are, then what we deserve is not a rounding error. We come into the world already leaning away from him.
That was where I was when the notification came up on my screen, and I clicked accept.
Five belief systems in one life
The caller went by For the People. He told me he was sixty five, which meant he had been thinking about all of this since before I was born, and I said so.
He had a Christian upbringing, very briefly. Then, in his words, he started messing up. County jails. Penitentiaries. Somewhere in there he found orthodox Islam and left Christianity for it. Then he left orthodox Islam for the teachings of the most honorable Elijah Muhammad. Then he left those teachings and became an atheist. Then he left atheism for black power, which is where he told me he is today, and which he explained to me as the origin of everything that exists, since God said let there be light and something had to be there before the light.
He did not describe any of that as a collapse. He called them hallways. He said everything on this planet is a teacher, and I told him that part is true, because it is.
I also told him early that I was not going to debate him, and I meant it. When two men start performing for an audience, neither one of them is listening anymore. I told him I am a pastor, a Bible teacher at a Christian school, a husband and a dad, and that I get nothing out of these conversations except the joy of having them.
Is it selfish for God to provide only one way?
His objection came out clean and unhedged, which I appreciated. If there is a creator, he said, it would be very selfish of that creator to say there is only one way to get back to me.
That sentence is doing more work than it looks like it is doing.
It assumes the other roads were open and God closed them. It pictures him standing in front of several working doors, arms crossed, insisting everyone use his. If that were the situation, selfish would be a fair word, and I would want an answer too.
But that is not the situation Scripture describes. The roads back are not closed by God’s pettiness. They are closed by the fact that we are the problem. A holy God and a rebellious creature do not have a gap that better effort or more sincere searching can close. The gap is moral, it is ours, and no road we build from our side reaches across it.
So the number of rescues is not the scandal. The existence of one is the mercy. I asked him to think about it from the other direction. If there is a creator, would you not expect him to make it clear? Would you not expect him to say, in language a person could actually understand, here is how you and I get made right again, and here is the door?
That is what the sentence he objects to is doing. Jesus said no one comes to the Father except through me, and people quote that second half as though it were a locked gate. Read the whole sentence. He also said I am the way. The first half is an open door with a man standing in it saying come through here. The invitation never gets narrower than whoever. In Acts 16 a jailer asks what he must do to be saved and is told to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and that is the entire instruction.
Every road makes a claim
This is the part he did not expect me to say, and it is the part I would most want you to take with you.
The all roads idea is not the humble alternative to exclusive religion. It is its own exclusive claim, and it happens to contradict the roads it says it is including.
He had walked several of those roads himself, so he knew this better than most. Orthodox Islam does not teach that Jesus is one true way among several. It teaches that he was a prophet and that he was not crucified. Buddhism does not offer a creator to be reconciled to. Atheism denies the category outright. To say all of them arrive at the same destination, you have to overrule every one of them about what it teaches, which is a far more sweeping claim than anything I said on that livestream.
So exclusivity by itself is not the objection. Every serious worldview has a shape, and having a shape means ruling something out. The only question worth arguing about is which claim is true.
What Jesus actually prayed
He went to John 17, and it was a good move. He read the part where Jesus prays for those who will believe through the message of the apostles, and drew this conclusion: Jesus never specified how they believe. Christians say Son of God. Muslims say prophet. Jesus, he said, cared about who believes in him and not how. I had the passage up on the screen while he talked, so we read it together.
The trouble with that reading is that the same prayer defines its terms a few verses earlier. In verse three Jesus says eternal life is knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent. In verse eight he says the words the Father gave him he gave to them, and they received them. The unity he asks for later is built on content that has already been delivered and received. Nothing in that chapter treats the identity of Jesus as a detail the believer gets to fill in.
Then he tried something sharper. He pointed at John 20:31, where John says these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and he asked me: are you a son of God?
That is a good question asked in a way that hides a switch. Believers are called sons and daughters of God by adoption, brought into a family we had no claim on. John says in chapter one that to those who received him he gave the right to become children of God, and become is doing the work in that sentence. Jesus never becomes anything. John calls him the only begotten, the unique one, the Son eternally. The same phrase is carrying two different loads, and blending them is a fallacy of equivocation. I named it on the stream. I am saying it more carefully here.
Where he was right
He was also right about some things, and I am not interested in pretending otherwise.
He pushed hard on Egypt. He pointed out that Joseph lived in Egypt for the better part of a century, was raised to second in command by Pharaoh himself, and was embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt when he died at a hundred and ten. Abraham went to Egypt because of famine and was fed there. The Egyptians in those chapters are not monsters. Pharaoh could have killed Abraham for lying about his wife and instead sent him away with his life.
His complaint was that people preach Egypt as a cartoon of evil, and he is correct. That is a preaching problem. It is not a Bible problem, because the Bible is the source of everything he just said. Exodus 1:8 tells us plainly why the slavery started, and it was not divine punishment for lawbreaking. A new king arose who did not know Joseph, looked at a growing people group, and made a political calculation. The text says it in the open.
He said something else that has stayed with me since. People do not deal with the details. He is right. Most of the objections I hear, and a fair number of the sermons, would not survive an hour of slow reading.
The pharaoh with no name
His strongest historical push was about that same king. The Bible names everybody, he said. Adam. Eve. Cain. Abel. Moses. David. Solomon. But it never names the pharaoh of the exodus, and Egyptian records kept careful track of dynasties and reigns, so maybe the story never happened at all.
I gave him two answers, and I gave him the honest version of the first one.
Historically, we do not know which pharaoh it was. There are candidates and there is real scholarly disagreement, and I am not going to invent certainty I do not have.
Literarily, the silence looks intentional, because the entire book is a contest over whose name gets known. Pharaoh opens by asking who is the LORD that I should obey his voice. By the end, God has given his name, made it known, and emptied the most powerful throne on earth of its dignity, and the man on that throne exits the story without a name attached to him. Hebrew narrative does this kind of thing on purpose. The book of Esther never mentions God once, and the omission is the point.
There is also a problem with using Egyptian silence as evidence. Egyptian royal records were monuments rather than archives, built to celebrate. No pharaoh commissioned a wall carving about the year his slaves walked out. Israel’s records run the other direction, and that is worth sitting with. Their founding father lies about his wife. Their greatest king commits adultery and arranges a murder. The nation is the villain of its own book more often than it is the hero. Nobody inventing a flattering national story writes it that way.
The question I did not get to answer
He closed with John 14:12. If you believe in me, you will do the works that I do, and greater works than these. Faith the size of a mustard seed. Then he said, nobody on this planet has done that. Peter and John healed a man in Acts who had never walked. No famous television preacher has matched it, and they all claim his name.
He thanked me and got off the line, and I never got to answer him. It deserves an answer.
Two things about it. The mustard seed line he attached to it is not in John at all. It comes from Matthew 17 and Luke 17, and in both places the point is the object of the faith rather than the quantity of it, since a small faith in a great God does what a great confidence in nothing cannot. And the verse itself has a reason clause that almost never gets read out loud. Jesus says greater works, because I go to the Father. Two verses later he promises the Spirit, and in chapter sixteen he tells them it is to their advantage that he goes away so that the Helper will come. The greater works are tied to Pentecost and to what happens when the Spirit comes on the whole church rather than accompanying one man walking one region.
Greater in what sense, then. Jesus preached for roughly three years in a territory you could cross on foot in a week. Peter stands up in Jerusalem after the Spirit falls and three thousand people are cut to the heart in an afternoon. Within a generation the message is in Rome. Whatever you conclude about miracles today, and Christians land in different places on that, the promise was never that an individual disciple would outclass the Son of God in raw power. It was that the work would go further through them than it did through his own feet.
And on his other point, about the men on television, I have very little to defend. He is right that a great deal of what gets promised in Jesus’ name never gets delivered. That says something about the men making the promise. It says nothing about the man they are quoting.
What he thanked me for
Before he hung up, he thanked me. Not for the argument. He thanked me for how I handled somebody disagreeing with my belief system, and he told the audience that this is something people should see, that we can do this without arguing, fussing, fighting, and talking over each other.
I have thought about that more than anything else from that night. A man who has walked through five belief systems and heard every version of the pitch came away commenting on the tone. That should tell us something about how most of these conversations sound to the person on the other side of them.
I do not know whether anything I said moved him. That was never the part I was responsible for. My job was to be clear about who Jesus said he was, honest where the evidence is genuinely uncertain, willing to concede what he got right, and able to stay in the room without turning it into a fight.
I will not soften where it lands, though. I said it to him the way C. S. Lewis said it, because Lewis said it better than I can. Either Jesus was lying about himself, or he was out of his mind, or he was telling the truth, and no other founder of anything claimed to be God in the flesh and then backed the claim by walking out of his own tomb. If he stayed dead, he is one more failed prophet in a long line of them and none of this matters. If he did not, he has earned the right to say the sentence that offends us.
Which means turning him down is not choosing a different road home. It is turning down the only rescue that ever came.
If you have a For the People in your life, and most of us do, the work is not to win the exchange. Know the text well enough to deal with the details. Be honest when you do not know something. Keep making the beeline back to the cross. God’s word does not come back void, and that part was never yours to manage anyway. Yours is to stay kind and stay clear.
