Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Any marathon runner will tell you there's only one goal line and only one route that gets you there.
Rules are rules. You have to follow the track to win. Today, we explore a tough subject.
The trip will not be easy, but we invite you along for the journey. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. We're in a series on 10 Lies About God and Why You Might Already Be Deceived. Pastor Lutzer, on the surface, it just seems fair. God is obligated to save followers of other religions, and you're calling that lie number five, even if those followers are sincere. Well, Dave, as you know, this is a very controversial issue.
It's a very difficult issue. But let me emphasize that faith itself never saves unless it's faith in the right truth. But at the same time, I want to emphasize that God judges people on the basis of what they did with what they knew.
A further explanation of this is in a book I've written entitled 10 Lies About God, a book that we are making available for you for a gift of any amount. I'm going to be giving you that contact info right now, but also at the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you that info again. Here's what you can do.
Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let me simply say this. When it comes to studying the Bible, it's not like going through a cafeteria and selecting only the chocolates. Sometimes we have to deal with hard issues, and we're doing that today. I want you to visualize a woman, a mother in a third world country. She lives in poverty, in squalor. Her children are dirty and hungry, and her husband has been killed in a civil war. She walks miles just to get a little bit of milk for her starving children. Then she contracts a disease, and after months of suffering, she dies. And because she is not a member of the Christian religion but belongs to some other religion, she trades this hell for another hell, a temporary hell for an eternal one.
Is that even thinkable? Doesn't that raise all kinds of issues regarding the love of God and the justice of God and that which is right and that which is proper? You know, of course, that there is no issue that is as controversial about Christianity as the matter of what about other religions and whether there is salvation through Jesus Christ alone or whether there are other options out there that are just as good. All that the Southern Baptists have to do is to publish a prayer calendar and say, pray for your Jewish friends that they'll come to know Christ as Messiah, and you have a storm of protest. There are not too many sins left in contemporary society, but there are some, and one of them is to be perceived as intolerant.
And, of course, along with that word goes words like bigotry and narrow-mindedness and you name it. A number of years ago, actually, the Chicago Trib had an article entitled, Theologians Opening Heaven's Gate a Bit Wider, in which they said that the old doctrine that one had to be saved through Christ alone was being roundly condemned by Catholics and Protestants and everyone in the religious community. The whole idea of salvation somehow being limited, like one author said, limited to those who happen to be born in the right country at the right time and the right circumstances is so contrary to what we would think would be fair.
That's very difficult to accept. Well, as you know, this is a series of messages titled, 10 Lies About God and How You Already May Be Deceived. We've talked about matters such as whether we can refashion God according to our image, whether he can become what we want him to be. We've discussed whether there are many paths to God or whether he is more tolerant than he used to be, looking at the difference between the Old and the New Testament, and we discovered that it is a lie to think he is more tolerant. We've asked the question of whether or not God actually personally suffered and you will remember the message in which I say, yes, he did. And now we come to the lie that God is obligated to save followers of other religions. Very sensitive, very difficult, but we need to face the issue.
Now, before we get into details, I have a question to ask you. How are we going to resolve this controversy? How are we going to answer those charges of bigotry? Nobody wants to be called a bigot.
Nobody wants to be a bigot. Where are we going to go to somehow unravel what is an important issue and not a theoretical one? Sometimes people say, you know, theologians just deal with issues that aren't connected to real life. Good theology is always connected to real life. This matter is a matter of life and death. It's a matter of heaven and hell. We're not talking theory here.
We're talking actuality. We're speaking about our friends. We're speaking about ourselves, but to where will we turn to find an answer? Well, you know, of course, that Christianity teaches that God who exists, who created all things is a self revealing God and because he has spoken in the scriptures, it is our responsibility to find out what they say and also what they don't say and then not take our beliefs further than the scriptures themselves go. So today we're going to be speaking about some things that are clear in the Bible as well as some things that are less clear and we hope to make those distinctions. Where do we go? Do we turn to one another and say, what's your opinion?
What's my opinion? No, that's not the way to find truth about God. Do we turn to nature? Does it help us?
Yes, it helps us some as we'll discover today, but we can't solve that question. We can't turn within ourselves and think that wisdom resides within us because we are so prone to be wrong. We actually have only one place to turn and that is the Bible.
So let me begin today by telling you the plan of this message. We're going to answer four questions. Question number one is, is Christ the only way?
If so, and why? Question number two is going to be, what does the Bible say about non-Christian religions? How does it regard them?
How does it interpret them? Question number three is, how is God going to judge people, both those who have heard the Christian message and those who haven't? And then number four is going to be something about what the final judgment is going to be like. That's where we're headed and thank you so much for going with me on this interesting and perhaps controversial journey. Question number one, is Christ the only way?
Yes, of course. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. Paul said in the New Testament, there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. And the apostles said, neither is there salvation in any other for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.
Could it be any clearer than that? And of course, it's not that way arbitrarily. That's the way it is because of who God is. I've already emphasized this so often that I shall not underline it again but I need to say that Jesus is the only savior among all the religions of the world. I've emphasized that after being at the Parliament of World Religions and discovered that there are many teachers, many gurus, but nobody who is actually able to make a sacrifice to God that God will accept. There are no saviors.
There are just teachers. Furthermore, Jesus is the only one who has what we need to stand in the presence of a holy God, namely the perfections and the righteousness that have to be credited to us for God to accept us. So it's not a matter of bigotry. It's not a matter of saying, well, what makes you think that you're right and others are wrong?
This is just the way it is. The infinite glory and the wonder and the holiness of God demands an infinite and holy sacrifice on behalf of sinners in order to receive them and Christ is the only one out there who meets those requirements. There are no other options. Now you look in the Old Testament. You say, well, before Christ came how they were saved. Is David going to be in heaven? Yeah, David's going to be in heaven. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, they never knew much about Christ.
Maybe some glimmers but not much. But the Bible says that what God did is he saved these Old Testament people on credit. Now you know what it is to buy something on credit. When you buy something on credit, you go into a store and you say, you know, I want this piece of furniture.
I want this car or whatever it is that your little heart desires and people today will give it to you. And some instances you don't even have to put anything down. But if you know anything about the credit process, the bills will come in. God says in the Old Testament, I'm going to save you on the basis of the fact that your bill will eventually be paid when Jesus dies. So there is no salvation apart from Christ, not even a possibility that it can be otherwise. But that doesn't necessarily solve the question of other religions, does it? There is in evangelical circles today what is sometimes called the wider mercy view. And the wider mercy view says that it's possible for people of other religions who sincerely follow their other religions to be saved by Christ, though they don't necessarily know it until they get to heaven.
C.S. Lewis propounded this and a number of other theologians have taken it up. And their view is that the sincere Buddhist or the sincere Hindu or sincere regardless of what their religion is, they will discover when they die, Jesus will say, you didn't know my name, but you were actually worshiping and loving me.
And on the basis of my sacrifice, you too will be accepted. Now, in many respects, that seems to be an attractive view. But the problem is you just can't quite find it in the Bible. They give illustrations of it. They say, well, look at Job or look at the Old Testament saints or look at Cornelius in the New Testament because he was a Gentile God thearer before the gospel was clearly presented to him. But the problem is that all these illustrations are illustrations of people who were exposed to the true God and they were given some special revelation. They heard the message.
That's the problem. Sometimes people who interpret the Bible on the basis of human fairness are those who say, look, it's got to be made fair. So in order to be fair, it has to be this way. Well, I'm going to be commenting on that in just a few moments, the whole notion of fairness, but that we really don't have a right to reinterpret the Bible just to try to make God fair. I want you to know that if there is a plan like that, that God will save people of other religions based on what Jesus did. All that I can say is God has not seen fit to reveal it in the Bible.
So it's best not to speculate. Is salvation through Christ alone? Absolutely.
There is no other option as I've mentioned. Let's go on to question number two, however. What does the Bible teach about non-Christian religions or as we sometimes say, pagan religions? What does the Bible have to say about that? Well, first of all, let me say in the Old Testament, our Jewish friends need to be reminded that the God of the Old Testament, who is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, there was no tolerance in the Old Testament. Now we dealt with that in a previous message, but let me remind you of the fact that it says in Deuteronomy, for example, that when it comes to the pagans, you will smash their altars and you'll bring them down.
There was no sense in which saying, well, they can be saved too because they're sincere. You sure don't find that in the Old Testament. I can't imagine Elijah on Mount Carmel, and some of you perhaps have been to Mount Carmel, those of us who have been to Israel. I mean, we're standing there on Mount Carmel where the fire of God came and destroyed everything that was there, but it was the God of Baal, the God of Baal. It would be unthinkable that Elijah would say to himself, well, these religions, they have their path to God too. No, you don't find that because we've learned that God is holy and you just don't come to him in any way. And then you look at the New Testament and you discover that Paul says that those who worship idols aren't even really worshiping the idols. They are worshiping the demons that the idols represent. That's pretty strong. The New Testament and the Old Testament together show that the pagan religions simply do not have any merit in God's sight.
Now hang on for a moment, but that's what, that's what it says. In fact, the Bible gives an entirely different interpretation of religion. When I was in a university many, many years ago, the whole thing went this way. Look, there is an evolution in religion and first of all, people believed in many gods and then they straighten it out a little bit and then it became more refined until you have Christianity with its belief in one God, but three in one and so forth. Actually, the Bible gives an opposite view. Instead of the evolution of religion, the Bible talks about the devolution of religion. It says in Romans who, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations. Their foolish heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise. They became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man to birds and to four-footed beasts and creeping things and they worship the works of their hands. So the religions of the world are really not so much in a state of evolution, but they represent a time when people did understand the true God.
They turned away from the truth and they ended up in false religions, which are really anti-God. Remember that old story about the elephants, how, well, the elephant, I should say, how you have four different people describing an elephant, the four blind men of Indostan, if I remember correctly. And in one instance, the man said, well, I think that the elephant is like a tree because the man was up against one of the legs of the elephant.
The other one said, I think it's like a rope because he was hanging onto the tail and you have different explanations. And then they discovered, presto, it's all the same elephant. The purpose of that story is to say it's all the same God, it's just different expressions.
No, there are several reasons why that illustration is fatally flawed, but let me give you one of them is because the Bible would teach, we're even talking about different elephants. I mean, we're talking about different gods. The God of other religions is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So the simple fact is that even though there is similarity in teaching, in some instances, Buddhism, for example, has some things about self-denial and so forth that may indeed be compatible with Christianity. But when it comes to the matter of salvation, of how people get to God, the Bible consistently gives no hope to those who are in some other religion. Not any teacher will do, not any sacrifice will do, only Christ for the reasons that we've already outlined.
Let's go on to a third question. We've looked at the question of whether or not Christ is the only way and answered yes. What about the other religions? Well, according to the Bible, they fall short of what God requires and they are actually expressions of a warped idea of God. What about the basis of God's judgment?
What about those who have never heard? Well, take your Bible now and turn to Romans chapter 1. I already quoted some of the verses from Romans 1, but I shall now begin at verse 18 and then we shall go briefly to chapter 2. Let me give you the principle and after I've given you the principle, we shall read exactly what the text says. The principle is this. Everyone will be judged on the basis of what he or she did with what he or she knew.
That's the basis. Now, with that background, let's show it in the text. Romans chapter 1 verse 18, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that men, and we may include women, are without excuse.
Wow. Paul is discussing the question of how those who were not privy to God's revelation to the Jewish people, how they are going to be judged. And he says that nature displays the power, the eternal power and godhood, and it is such a clear display that for them to fall into worshiping pagan gods leaves them really without an excuse. Now, let me give you another passage in which the Apostle Paul shows the fairness of God's judgment, his justice, by there are two lights.
There is the light of nature and the light of conscience. Now, we're talking about general revelation. General revelation means that this is revealed to everybody.
General revelation has to do with the Bible, so keep those terms distinct. But notice it says in verse 12 of chapter 2 of Romans, all who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but those who obey it. Indeed, now notice, when the gentiles who do not have the law do by nature things required in the law, they are law unto themselves even though they do not have the law since they show the requirements of the law are written on their hearts. Their consciences bear witness and their thoughts now accusing or defending them.
So all of this enters in. What is Paul saying? What he's saying is that the Jewish people who receive the law are going to be judged by that standard, but the gentiles who did not receive the law, they are going to be judged by the light of nature and by their own consciences.
Now let me be very clear about this. God isn't going to take the gentiles and say, why did you not keep the Sabbath day to keep it holy? They'd say, wait a moment, we never heard that we were supposed to keep the Sabbath day holy. He'll say that to the Jewish people, but not to the gentiles over here because the text says that they did not receive the law, so they're not going to be judged by the law, but God will say to these other people who did not have special revelation, you committed murder and you knew that it was wrong. You lied and you knew it was wrong. You were a thief and you knew that that was wrong.
Why? Because those are the kinds of laws that are written in people's hearts and their consciences and that is the standard by which the judgment will take place. Don't ever think that God is going to take people from other religions and say, I'm going to send you to hell because you never believed in Jesus.
That would be manifestly unfair. Well, my friend, I know it's so easy for us to say to ourselves, we want to have a God who thinks like we do, but the God of scripture is quite different than that and we need to bow even when we have unanswered questions. I've dealt with a lot of hard issues in the book that we are making available for you. It's entitled 10 Lies About God, and one of those chapters is entitled The Lie That God Is Obligated to Save People Who Are Committed to Other Religions, and we must deal with these issues biblically. For a gift of any amount we're making available for you, this book entitled 10 Lies About God, here's what you can do.
Go to rtwoffer.com or you can pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. If you've been listening to the Ministry of Running to Win, you know that our passion is to preach the gospel. It's to be biblical. It's to help all of us to run the race of life successfully, knowing God as far as it is possible that we as humans can know him. Here's what you do.
Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I like to emphasize that it's because of people just like you that running to win goes around the world, 50 different countries, seven different languages. My friend, this is your ministry. Thank you in advance for standing with us.
You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. In Bible times, all roads led to Rome. Some feel that all spiritual roads lead to heaven, even those that never intersect. Consider the claim of Christ that he's the only way to God.
Some say this is unfair. Anyone who is sincere in their belief deserves a shot at heaven. Next time on Running to Win, we look at fairness from God's point of view. Thanks for listening. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
