Do All Roads Lead to God?

Hi, this is Bernie Dake. Welcome to the Salvation Army's Words of Life. Hi, for the Salvation Army and Words of Life, I'm Bernie Dake.

And I'm Cheryl Gillum. We hope you've been enjoying this series called Skeptics Welcome. This week, Ken discusses the question, do all roads lead to God? This is an interesting question. I mean, I believe that we all have this God-shaped vacuum that is within us, that we have this desire, right, for a higher power, if you will. I would say that, you know, we know as believers that the only one true road is through Jesus Christ.

The Bible clearly says that no one can come to the Father, but through Jesus. Yeah. Well, again, here's another tough one to unpack, but I promise you, as you listen to the rest of this episode, you will hear someone so eloquent, such as Captain Ken Argot, unpack this for us. Hi, I'm Megan Hoffer, and I want to invite you to check out another show brought to you by the Salvation Army. Heartbeat is a one-minute show about real life. Heartbeat touches on topics ranging from finances and prayer to dating and mental health.

If money is important to God, then it should be important to us. Recently, I began feeling like my life was on autopilot. The alarm goes off, get ready for work, battle the morning commute, rush to get home. If you are looking for a short message of hope to challenge you and brighten up your day, subscribe to Heartbeat wherever you get your podcasts or visit salvationarmysoundcast.org.

Well, good morning again. I hope that it has been helpful for you to understand that God does care when it feels like he doesn't. I hope that you can wrestle with God over these issues, and I hope that you give yourself permission to say to him, God, it's not fair.

David obviously did. That's why we've entitled this group of shows Skeptics Welcome, because not always do we understand at first glimpse what true reality is. Sometimes we need God to hit us over the head. Sometimes we need for us to wrestle with it for a while. And one of the questions that was sent in by someone was this idea, do all roads lead to God? Now, at the risk of being controversial, what if I said yes? Okay, hear me out.

Don't turn the show off. I need to explain. Because I do believe that all paths do lead to God, but only one makes that final leap to actually get you there. Paul writes in Romans chapter 1 verse 20, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible quality, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse. General revelation, creation itself, all the nations of the world at some point had some type of God concept simply because they understood there's no way they could have creation as it is and not believe that there's someone who designed it all.

And so no one's without excuse for looking for God. And many of those paths originally shown are us trying to wrestle with what does that God then look like. In fact, when God appeared to Abraham, it's different than when God appeared to Moses. They had a different understanding as they continued to have their encounters with God. And then finally, when we encounter Jesus, we see God in a totally different way from even the Jewish understanding of what they saw in the Old Testament. So, all paths eventually maybe even lead to Jesus.

Maybe I should say it that way. Jesus is the greatest story never told. And then not only that, the cross, the tomb, the risen Savior, but this divine appropriation of the Holy Spirit that God now dwells in the believer. That not only do we have this eye view of God, that this understanding of what we see and the design, but now we actually have the internal presence of God himself inside of us. However, the Holy Spirit cannot enter that which is not first redeemed by Christ.

No other religion has a solution for the sin problem of human error, of the human propensity to continue to choose self-preservation which ends up in chaos, which ends up in people being hurt. It's only God who can come in and change the believer's heart. And he does it through this idea of sacrifice and through this idea of bringing new life regeneration through the Holy Spirit. You see, sacrifice of self is necessary for us not to have the chaotic world that we live in.

Daily, we must be marked with the cross for in that our spirit is sealed and we are consecrated, made whole. We are returned to God's image because his presence now again resides in us. The true tragedy of the garden is not the sin. It was the loss of connection God's spirit was with them in fellowship and they turned their back on that fellowship for their own self initiative.

As we read through Genesis, you will continue to see story after story that continues to lead to more and more chaos, eventually leading to the destruction of the entire earth in chapter seven through nine of Genesis. So someone might say, I find comfort in meditation for someone who might be a Buddhist or studying other ancient religions. The truth is that that only gets you so far. Self-actualization doesn't deal with the issue of redeeming the self. The self must be sacrificed in order for God to redeem the soul.

And once that redemption comes, we are then regenerated by his holy spirit, making us whole. The other way religions deal with this issue is that they sort of mandate that God allows you based upon your works. Well, what we know is our works are failures.

I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel like I fail more often than I succeed. Not that that's the way we should live. We are to aim for holy lives. But the truth is, if I am relying upon my works to get to heaven, there is no way I'm getting through. Jesus offers us this grace. If you've ever played golf, there's this gentleman agreement that if the putts that you have to make are the same distance and one of you can make it, one of you can make it, then you both get the shot as it is.

And I said to the guy, wait, but I can't make that shot. But he said, but because I can, we both get the point. I didn't understand that concept, but I don't understand the concept of grace where Jesus can just come in and pay the penalty for my sin and I get to have his mercy and grace either. But that's the way it works. Which brings me to this topic of, but I get so much peace from doing this other thing.

I think one of the tragedies of the Protestant Reformation is that in our desire to elevate certain things, especially scriptures, which ought to be elevated in everybody's mind, we let certain things and practices go because we saw them as possibly part and parcel with what we were reforming. One of those topics is the issue of meditation. Now, people will say that meditation works for them.

And my thought is it probably does. I mean, how many of us probably need a little sleep app to go along, just some soothing music to help us go to sleep sometimes or maybe put us in a peaceful mood? Meditation is a practice of God. If you go all the way back to Psalm chapter one, you'll see there meditate on the scriptures day and night. The difference between other religions and the practice that we have of meditation is we're actually meditating on the scriptures, not on emptiness or just nothingness, that there is something upon which we can concentrate and bring our lives in focus with God's will. The other thing I see, I see other religions who are very good at their expectation of worship and evangelism. Take the Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, like every Saturday, they are out knocking on doors, trying to evangelize people. And how many of us Christians sit in our own houses on Saturday and do our own thing? So there's lots of these types of practices that happen in other places that were actually borrowed from Christianity, from our faith, but they work in other practices. Unitarians and their practice of love for all or Mormons with their idea of practice of mission and family importance, or Judaism and the issues of human dignity and inspiration.

Christianity is all of these and more. So we don't have to give up Jesus in order to have these other helpful practices in our life. It is interesting that we don't have a lot of conversion from other religions in the Bible.

We don't have those stories. Now, we do have ones from those who were converted from Judaism, but that's sort of a natural one because it was their Messiah. We do have the Roman centurion who says, this surely is the Son of God. We also have the centurion in which Peter is invited into the house and he begins to explain all these things and the centurion and their whole household is baptized. In the book of Acts, you do have Paul there at Athens again with the unknown God, let me tell you about him.

And then you have him again with King Agrippa. And King Agrippa says, do you really think that in such a short time, you can persuade me to believe? And the truth is King Agrippa actually is swayed a bit by Paul, but he is not convinced by Paul's logical arguments.

He is convinced because he sees Paul's attitude and his life and what he's been through and his passion. And I wonder when we're thinking about this idea of how do we help people who might be in a different religion or how do we help people understand that Jesus is the way to God, are we practicing that in our own life? We can't convince people in an argument that Jesus is the only way if somehow our life doesn't emulate that ideology. You see, people are convinced by the way you live your life. You live your life.

How are you living your life? That's your challenge this week. We'll be back next week to talk about the Bible and what specifically can we believe about the Bible to be true.

And we'll see you then as we continue to talk on Skeptics Welcome. God bless you. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support.

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