Challenging Perceptions: The Diversity and Uniqueness of Faiths

Most of you know, my name is Stephen lead pastor here.

If you're watching online, welcome.

This is prerecorded from Sundays, but I want to say I'm glad that you're all here today.

It is summer in Madison.

We have a lot of it's summer ish.

I saw that and so, yeah, I think it's 50 degrees right now.

We're almost in the June.

Maybe someday it'll be summer here, but we have people traveling and just sleeping in and other things.

But I'm glad that you guys are here Now.

Many people believe and you might be one of these people who believe this that if somebody has a strongly held religious belief, a strongly held religious belief, that they must be intolerant of other religious beliefs.

It's kind of like, if you're very strong in your beliefs and your opinions about these things and that must mean that you have strong opinions about these other religions and ideas and belief systems you must be intolerant.

These people can be us.

That might be you.

You might describe yourself that way.

You hear other people have very strong beliefs.

You're like, oh, they're so intolerant.

But if it's not you, you certainly have friends or family who feel that way.

They might, even they might feel that way about you that your strong beliefs make you intolerant Coworkers and neighbors.

That's kind of what makes it scary to talk about faith and church and spirituality in those spaces is that you don't want to come across as a bigot or intolerant or small minded.

But these people could also be our kids, they could be our spouses, they could be just about anybody in our lives who kind of get a little weirded out.

If you have a strong faith and this can, honestly it can make having a strong faith seem like a bad thing, like you're trying to.

Like you have a strong faith and you're trying to hide that Like I don't want anyone to know that Like I'm really strong in my faith.

I think it's just a little ironic, but a philosophy of sorts that I know you're all familiar with has developed recently and has been adopted by many, many people, including celebrities, madonna.

I have a quote.

Madonna articulates it with this statement.

She says I do believe that all paths lead to God.

It's a shame that we end up having religion religious wars, because so many of the messages are the same.

And she's saying that the messages between faiths, whether it's Christianity and Hinduism or Buddhism, they're essentially all the same and they present different ways to the same destination.

It's kind of like you being here today we're all in the same destination, but you all came from different places.

Right, we don't live together.

You all came from different places.

You all took different routes to get here.

Some of you sped but you might have ran a red light.

I don't know if some of you followed the law perfectly to get here.

But essentially the idea is we all come from different places but we're on this journey and eventually we all end up in the same place.

Sarah has been a champion of this type of view.

She says there are many paths, many ways to what you call God, and then she says there couldn't possibly be one way.

They can't just possibly be just one way.

Statements like these are very popular today I mean, I'm sure this is not the first time you've heard of these types of ideas and they sound peaceful and they sound harmonious, especially, in contrast.

Let's contrast it with something that's written in the Bible which seems very inclusive I'm sorry, exclusive and seems a little bit intolerant, like verse John 512, which reads whoever has the son has life.

Whoever does not have God's son does not have life.

That's a pretty different statement than what Madonna and Oprah are saying John, the follower of Jesus, is saying actually, if you have God, you have life, and if you don't, you don't.

So we're kind of in this place.

If you're a believer in the room or watching online, we never presume that everyone is, but you're in this place of choosing.

If all paths lead to God, then passages like this in the Bible are wrong.

I mean, that's just the truth.

If all paths lead to God, then a bunch of statements that we're going to talk about today, about how Jesus is the only one, would just be true.

The verses the opposite is true too.

If these are true, if these are true, then in fact, all paths don't lead to God.

Now, this can seem again.

What I'm saying is that it can seem like a super intolerant view of society.

And so what do we do with this?

When we come to these parts in the Bible, we just don't quite know what to do with, and perhaps we're being challenged by that like, oh, you really think that Jesus is the only way.

You know there are 100 million gods in the world, but you just happen to believe in the right one, right?

That's kind of how it goes.

Well, let's talk about that today.

On the fifth week of our study how Not to Read the Bible, which is based on this book by Dan Kimball Really good book but also this series is based on the Bible.

I just got to continue to throw that out here.

We're not doing a book study on Kimball's book.

Now this series, as we've said every week for everyone Follower of Jesus, you're reading the Bible.

You're reading the Bible between Sundays and you get to some weird parts.

You might be reading the Old Testament, you might be reading Revelation, but you get to some weird parts and you're like I don't know what to do with this.

And so you probably do what a lot of us do, which is you just skip it.

You just, you know, keep reading and get to a part that you do understand, and then maybe you tweet that or Instagram that.

But eventually what happens is like you do that a lot, right, you read the Bible a lot and you just continue to skip the parts you don't understand.

Probably the list of things you don't understand it really adds up and there's a lot then that you don't understand.

And then somebody questions it and it's not new to you.

You are also questioning it and you're like, why don't really know?

And then that can make us feel insecure about our faith, like why don't I know, why don't I have an answer.

And so this series was trying to help provide you with some tools not trying to tell you what to think, but how to think and how to read the Bible.

It might be somebody in your life who questions your faith because of what's written in the Bible, so you're kind of set.

Maybe You're like, yeah, I've got some answers.

There are certainly things I don't know, but I've got a mom, a dad, a son, a daughter, a brother, sister, again a spouse, a coworker, a neighbor, and they don't understand why I believe, what I believe.

And then they have these questions and I'm just, yeah, I would like some answers or direction so that I can have a conversation with them.

And so this series could help you with that.

And it could be.

If you're watching online, you're just exploring faith, bible, you Googled a question and our YouTube page came up with this topic today of do all paths lead to God?

And all of this is to say that in our society, really in the last maybe 20, 30, 50, 100 years, we continue to see illiteracy with the Bible increase and that makes the Bible a stumbling block of sorts, because it's misunderstood.

And so we take one verse and we don't understand the culture, we don't understand the context, we don't understand the language, we don't understand any of that stuff.

And so then it's like, wow, I don't know what to do with this, and so we drop it, but we don't have to do that.

So so far in this series, what we have learned every week?

We can't just read one Bible verse.

You can't just read one Bible verse out of context and throw it on an image and share it and develop an entire theology of your faith around that one verse.

That's not at all how the Bible was ever ever intended to be read.

We need to look at the Bible from beginning to end.

We have to remember that this is the story of God.

It's the story of God's people, it's our story today, and at different points in the story, different things are going on.

We need to remember that the Bible was written for us, not to us.

There's no letter in the New Testament written to the church in Madison or to Madison Church.

They were written to churches thousands of years ago in places like Galatia and Ephesus.

Now, just because it wasn't written to us doesn't mean that we can't get something out of it.

We absolutely can, but then that means we have to read it through that lens.

Paul isn't necessarily telling me in my 21st century context something he's telling some people 2000 years ago, so I need to find out what the meaning is and how that applies to my life today.

And the fourth thing that we've talked about is that every Old and New Testament passage points us right to Jesus.

So when we're reading the Old Testament, we need to look forward in anticipation of Jesus, and we read much of the New Testament.

We're looking back not just on Jesus, but also present the mission of God and the future in which Jesus makes all things.

Right Now we've applied these four study tools to the subjects of slavery in the Bible, to women in ministry in the Bible, and last week we talked about science and Genesis, and so what we're doing again, we're taking these topics that we think that people are talking about, asking, about questioning, and we're saying, okay, we know that they pull out this one verse, but here are a whole bunch of other verses and here's how it fits into the story of God and here's how it points to Jesus, and so do all paths lead to God.

That's the question for today.

That's the subject that we're going to apply those four tools to today.

The idea of all faiths leading to the same God is a very attractive belief, at surface level, I mean it is.

If you're a follower of Jesus today and you've read any of the Gospels, you know that what distinguishes our God, what distinguishes Jesus and I would say our faith, from a lot of other philosophies or religions, is the amount of love, grace and forgiveness our God offers us.

And so if we begin to understand that and I don't think you ever really do get to understand that, but if we begin to understand that God's so full of love, grace and forgiveness, why wouldn't we want every person in the entire world, no matter where they're from, no matter what they're doing, no matter what they believe, why wouldn't we all want to end up in the same place?

We should want that as followers of Jesus, we should want an ending in which we are all together, no matter what people think or do.

But the thing is and this is a little bit of the problem that comes with this philosophy of all paths lead to God.

The people who tend to say these things, I mean, whether it's Oprah or Madonna or our neighbors or coworkers, the people who say these things All paths lead to God have not looked terribly Close at what these different faiths say about themselves.

I'm not trying to put words and other people's mouths, but we have to look at well, what do these different faiths say, the?

And they are different with their own words, and they do have some similarities.

So let's start with the similarities first.

There's a golden rule, right, and the Bible do to others, you'd have them, do to you.

Almost every religion has a golden rule which is like that love other people, treat other people well.

There's different variations of that, and so there are similarities.

I just want to acknowledge that on the onset of what we're talking about here.

But I want to say that those are kind of the beginning of the path and that's the language.

Right, there's a mountain and there's a path, and so love your neighbors.

That's kind of the what.

What do you need to do?

Love your neighbors.

And as we begin to study other faiths, including the Christian faith, and what we begin to see is the how we love other people Looks different depending on which belief system we're talking about, and the why is Vastly different depending on which faith we're talking about.

So, love your neighbors, that's great.

That's the what.

But the how and why changes depending on which system of beliefs that we are talking about.

And then the deeper that we moved with each belief system, we actually end up in different places.

So the thought is is that there's this mountain and God's at the top of the mountain, and then all the paths lead to God, or you know, you all left from your home.

We all took different routes, but we're all here.

But what we begin to see as we study the different religions is that we're actually going to different places.

You might leave your house, we're on a journey, but we're all not all ending up here.

For example, let's just answer three questions About who God is, who Jesus is, and how does someone attain salvation According to Christianity, hinduism and Islam?

Christianity claims that there is one God who is triune in nature.

That's father, son, holy Spirit.

What they say about Jesus is that Jesus is the son of God and Jesus is the way to salvation because of his life, does or death and Resurrection on the cross.

Going to heaven or hell is not based on anything that you do.

It's based on what Jesus did for you.

Now let's talk about Hinduism.

What do they think about God, jesus and the afterlife?

Hinduism claims that there are thousands of gods, though there is a background force in the universe known as Brahman.

Jesus was a wise teacher and he could be one of the gods.

This is in Hinduism.

He could be one of the gods, but Jesus is certainly not the only way to the gods, and when you die, you're either reincarnated the payoff your karmic debt or you become one with Brahma.

Okay, so that's how they answer the questions.

Again, we're talking about a different.

Now we're talking about a different mountain, because we have one God who claims in Christianity, this is the God, and Hinduism we're describing a different one.

Islam, like Christianity, claims that there is only one God, but this God is described distinctly different than the one we read about in the Bible.

What do they say about Jesus?

He is a prophet, but he is not God.

What do they say about the afterlife has nothing to do with anything that Jesus did.

The way that you get to paradise is Based on how much good you do versus how much bad you do, and if you did more good than bad, you get to go to paradise if you did more bad than good.

You don't.

So I want to kind of show you that, according to their own vernacular, like what they believe I'm not putting words in their mouth and I know that this is a very simplified view.

But these aren't just different paths up a mountain.

There's three different summits.

They're three different destinations.

They don't end up at the same place because the God at the top isn't the same God depending on which mountain you're on.

Madonna, oprah and others, you or me, we may want all paths to lead to God.

Again, I share that sentiment.

We may want that, but according to each faith, it doesn't work out that way.

According to their own words and T right contributes to this that the belief that all religions are really the same Sounds democratic, though the study of religions quickly shows that this isn't true.

What you are really saying, if you claim that they're all the same, is that none of them are more than distant echoes, distorted images of reality.

You're saying that reality, god the divine, is remote and unknowable, and that neither Jesus, nor Buddha, nor Krishna gives us direct access to it.

They all provide a way towards the foothills of the mountain, but not the way to the summit.

And so and he right again, a theologian, a scholar, very prolific writer he says if we do this, if we say all religions are the same One, we're not actually doing a faithful study of what each religion says about themselves.

But he says to what we're saying is that God is distant and unknowable.

We've boiled down, we've gone from this God who's compassionate and has a covenant with us and loves us enough to die for us.

And what we've done by blending them all is that we've removed God.

We've we've taken them out, we've put them so distant because if they're all the same, god is a little bit deceptive Because he's out there.

But he's saying to one group of people there's thousands of me saying to another group of people, there's just me.

He's saying to some group of people that, well, it's Jesus and it's kind of deceptive, but don't just take my word for it, don't just take anti-rights for word for it.

I've got quotes from Jesus, muhammad and Buddha in which they're talking about the truth.

Jesus says I am the truth.

Muhammad declares the truth has been revealed to me and Buddha says that my teachings point the way To the attainment of the truth.

Even how they talk about truth is differently right.

So the biggest difference between Muhammad and Buddha is that they say I've got truth and it's this form of knowledge, I've got this and this will lead you to the afterlife and it will be great.

Jesus doesn't say that I've got this truth for you.

Jesus says I am the truth and here I am.

That's the biggest difference between them.

Buddha and Muhammad are saying here's how you can find God.

Jesus says I am God and I've come to find you.

That's the difference.

In that case, it's not about climbing up a mountain.

It's not about all paths lead to God.

It might be with these other faiths that we're going to do these things and with the knowledge we'll get to the top of God.

This is the story about God coming down from the mountain.

I am God, come to find you.

And this is a key difference between Christianity and the other religions of the world.

Now, does the Bible really teach I mean, we're getting down to this question Does the Bible really teach that Jesus is the only exclusive way to God?

Well, let's talk about our tools and how to read the Bible.

We've been talking about, we're talking about the story of God.

You remember, last week we talked about Genesis, we talked about science and we said the primary point of Genesis was not to answer our modern questions about science, that when Genesis was first written we had the Hebrews out in the wilderness.

They've seen some weird stuff.

They've seen seas parted, they've seen food come from the sky.

They've seen some weird things and they grew up generation after generation in Egypt in which they had lots of gods.

And so when God comes out and gives Moses the word for Genesis, it's really this is about me and it's confronting kind of some of the stuff that they learned in Egypt.

No, there wasn't a sun God.

There wasn't a moon God.

It was.

It was all me and I created people and I love you.

I know the Egyptian gods you learned about, tortured people and played with them and were really cruel, but but I love you.

And so what we read from Genesis right from the beginning is that God comes out and the very first thing he declares is I am God, I am the one God, and everything that you learned in Egypt about these other gods it just it wasn't true.

I'm the one God, I created everything, I love you.

But then we get to we might question.

I think that we're like okay, well, did people only ever believe in one God and then, eventually, they believed in multiple gods?

Or, right from the beginning, did people just believe in multiple gods?

Because that is what some people will speculate.

If you study history and your science, you might wonder like did we go from a lot of gods and then to one God?

Because people were primitive, of course they believed in a bunch of gods.

Well, karen Armstrong writes a book called the History of God and she has just a ton of evidence that she says points to the direction that the earliest societies that we know about, with people, they actually believed in one God.

She says there had been a primitive monotheism before men and women started to worship a number of gods.

In the beginning, therefore, there was one God, and I like this, I agree with this, I think the evidence is very supportive of it.

But it makes sense because you think about Adam and Eve, whether they're historical or just describing people, they have this relationship with God.

They have this relationship with God and they're worshiping one God, and it's after the fall that we see all of the problems occur, including, I believe, multiple gods.

That's one of the results of the fall now is that we're forsaking worshiping and relationship with the one God.

And now we're coming up with these other gods and worshiping them.

Now, after Genesis, after the fall, god reveals himself to the people.

He says I'm the one God.

And then there's this thing called the Shema, and it's the Jewish confession of faith, in which it begins by declaring the Lord God is the one true God.

And so if you're a good Jewish boy growing up in the Old Testament days, this was your confession of faith the Lord is one.

The Lord is one.

And furthermore, let's not forget, in the midst of all of this okay, in the midst of all of this the world is broken.

It is so infected with sin.

Bad things are happening all over the place, not because God wants it to, but because sin is in the world, because you and I, we have the free will to make bad decisions, to hurt people, even if we don't intend to, the decisions that we make can hurt people.

And so, in the midst of all of these things going on, with the confession that, yes, the Lord God is one, let's not forget that we're all damned and hellbound if something doesn't happen, like if Jesus doesn't come, if God doesn't step in.

We're so infected with sin and our choices, that we will be forever separated.

And that's when we get to the prophets and the prophets are saying hey, he's coming, he's coming, he's coming, god is coming.

God has not forgotten about us.

The Lord is one, but he is coming.

And that's when we get to Jesus.

Jesus enters the scene and, in John 14-6, reassuring his followers right before his death, he says I am the way, the truth and the life.

No one can come to the Father except through me.

In this context, very comforting, very, very comforting, because they live in a pluralistic society like you and I live in today.

There are lots of gods.

They're Roman gods, they're Greek gods, they're all sorts of gods.

And Jesus knows he's about to die and Jesus kind of has a pretty good feeling that they're not going to handle it super well.

He wasn't caught off guard by that and so, right before he goes, he says I just want to assure you.

You know he keeps telling them they're going to die and they're like okay, oh sure, and.

And he says, hey, let me tackle this in another direction.

I am the way, the truth and the life.

And you kind of think you have to wonder.

He says this right before he goes.

And it's just like this last thing he's trying to tell them, like hey, I know Saturday morning is going to come, the Friday after him to, and you're going to wander, you're going to doubt, but just remember, have confidence.

I am the way, the truth and the life.

Don't doubt just yet.

But then, after Jesus' ascension into heaven, his followers are on mission and they declare in places like in Acts 412, there is salvation and no one else.

God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.

In this context, there are religious leaders that Peter is confronting, and so we go from Jesus, who's comforting his disciples, saying I am the way to a kind of a confrontation in this point in which Peter says no, jesus is the one true way.

Now, in this situation, peter could have been killed for saying that, especially in the Roman Empire, in which saying that Jesus was the one true God was a backhanded way of saying that the Emperor is not a God, and the Emperor would not have appreciated that at all.

He just wanted you to be good little people, citizens, worship him when he comes to town and then, and then he'll leave and you can go on your own way.

But you have this Christian movement who's declaring that Jesus is God, the one true God we are followers of.

They call themselves not Christians.

They call themselves followers of the way, not all way the way.

We're followers of the way, again insinuating that, yeah, caesar, you're just some dude on a throne and we don't care.

And so people were being killed for that.

And I want to promise you I think that this message is kind of hard, but I want to promise you that it sounds.

This claim that there's only one God sounds just as crazy today as it did 2000 years ago when they were saying this and writing this.

It sounds just as crazy.

But the biblical texts are pretty consistent.

I mean by pretty, I mean they're very consistent, from Genesis, through the prophets, the Old Testament, through Jesus and through the church, going after some of the things that Paul has written.

When we look at Revelation and we see that Jesus comes back and establishes his kingdom, we see that the Bible very consistently teaches that Jesus is the way to heaven, because Jesus is the one in whom we have victory over our sins.

It's not these other gods.

That's not why we get to be with God.

It's not why we get to heaven.

It's because of what Jesus did for us.

And so what do you do with information like this?

It's the same application that we've gone over the last five weeks.

Now, join us next week because we're going to conclude this series.

Okay, we're going to talk about Old Testament violence, so we saved the best for last.

I think If you're curious about you're like man.

I read about Jesus in the New Testament.

He seems all about that grace, love and forgiveness.

But I read about the Old Testament God and that dude seems to have a little bit of a temper.

You would not be wrong.

What do we do with that?

Because it comes up a lot.

So join us next week.

Read the Bible this week, don't just read it here with us.

Read the Bible between Sundays, monday through Friday, but not just the verse.

Remember, don't just read a verse, start with a verse, but then maybe read a paragraph or a chapter and then get a Bible.

If you need one, you can take the blue ones, the green ones or the Bible app.

Now it's our mission and it's our mandate as believers, as followers of Jesus, to communicate God's love to people.

To communicate God's love to them, but he has the way, the truth and the light and it's not, I don't think, unloving to believe something that is true.

It might be a little inconvenient, it might be uncomfortable for us.

I used to say, before I had a daughter, quinn, I used to have this joke where I would say, just because something is inconvenient doesn't mean it's not true.

And then I would joke about other people's daughters.

I would say you know, when your daughter brings home the boyfriend in high school and you wish he wasn't real, that doesn't mean he's not real.

Now I have a daughter, the joke's not funny.

But it's that idea that things are inconvenient doesn't mean that they're not.

They're not true.

But I do think that the way that we present it can sometimes actually hinder the truth.

Because if we're just going around telling people that they're wrong, we will seem intolerant and they're not gonna care what you know.

If you've gotta tell people that you love them, if you've gotta tell people that you're not judging them, you've probably missed a few steps.

You've probably because those things are felt and people don't care what you know.

You know this right People don't care what you know until they know that you care.

And so, as followers of Jesus today, I firmly believe I'm teaching this that Jesus is the only way.

When we read the Bible, that he's the only way.

But I'm not telling you to then go out and combat with your co-workers and neighbors.

Go out and serve them, because that's what Jesus did.

Go out and love them.

Go out there and be for them when they're going through something hard, a crisis, a tragedy.

Be there for them, be the light and they'll come around.

I believe it.

Especially if you pray for them, they will come around and then that will give you the opportunity to tell them about Jesus in a way that you don't have to say well, this is the truth in love, because that's often code, for I'm going to tell you something really mean, but I'm going to have a nice tone.

We're not going to write, we're not going to judge them and they're going to know that we love them.

We're not going to have to tell them that.

They're going to know it.

I wanted to end with just this little story.

Dan Kimball, who writes the book.

He didn't grow up in the church, or he didn't grow up a Christian.

He's a pastor and a church leader now, but what was interesting is how he came to be a follower of Jesus he was.

He describes the story in his book.

He says that he was a freshman at the Colorado University and it was kind of the maybe like the first couple of weeks of semesters and you know, he got all the student organizations hanging out in the cafeteria, in the library trying to get you to join their group and he remembers walking through like the religious section of them and you have all the different religions handing out their stuff and these are different student groups and he comes to one table.

It's a Christian group and they're handing out pamphlets that Jesus is the only way.

And you know Turner Burn or something like that, which is extremely unhelpful.

But he takes one of those pamphlets because he was going to.

He's going to prove them wrong.

Is what he's going to do?

He's going to.

He was offended by it.

He thought this was simply just completely intolerant and he said in his own words, he thought to some degree this is even hateful to be doing this, especially in the midst of all of these other religions.

Now, this launched him into a journey and it was an exploration and what began as something that offended him and he says it did offend him to hear that Jesus was the way.

It led him to a place to realize that it wasn't intolerant, because he came to realize from a theological standpoint that, yeah, the world is broken, there's pain and suffering, there's sin in the world.

What do we do with sin?

We need that sin taken care of.

And that led him to this great promise of Jesus.

And as he studied the Bible, he said man, this is very consistent with everything in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.

We're told that there's sin in the world.

Sin is the problem.

We need a Savior.

Jesus is that Savior, and so now he's a pastor.

He's writing books.

We're basing this series on what he did and again, the medium how the idea of Jesus is the way was presented almost turned him off to faith.

In this case, because of God's grace, love and forgiveness, dan comes through.

But it is again a really important reminder that this isn't how we're not shoving this down people's throats.

We love them into this, and so the good news about our faith, the best news about our faith, is that it's not a religion based on what we do.

Our faith is a revelation from God.

It's a revelation from God.

It's an announcement of what God has done for us, despite and in spite of us.

And so let's make the decision today to either commit or recommit ourselves to following the way.

Let's pray.