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One way or many ways?

"Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going."

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?"

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

(John 14:1-6 ESV)

"You know the way to where I am going," Jesus said. Thomas, the really honest disciple, said, "we don't even know where you're going, so how can we know how to get there?"

Jesus called our ultimate destination his "Father's house." Heaven? The new creation, the new heavens and earth? "My Father's house" suffices, emphasizing not the location but the relationship. What is amazing is that the way to that personal place is also a Person. He himself is the road. And he is the only road.


Those outside the household of faith find this very troubling and intolerant. Yet, if the way back to the Father means a perfect human must act as a substitute for us all, being as it were, a champion or representative for this condemned human race... then how many candidates are out there? If he must be human, sinless, and somehow divinely powerful in order to bear the full responsibility of people before a holy God, then who else has done this? Who else has said, "I and the Father are one" and fully demonstrated it with his life? Who else said, "I came to give my life a ransom for many"? Who else was vindicated by the victorious resurrection?

No one else -- no other religious leader or government or saint -- can do what Christ did to reconcile us to the Father. That's why there's no other way. If religion is just having another road for us to follow, a set of rules or disciplines whereby we might work our way to God, then perhaps there are many roads to God. But if God himself must do it, if he must make the road come to us, then that's different.

What a joy to hear the many testimonies on Sunday, from so many different backgrounds -- Jewish, Buddhist, nominally Christian, and atheistic. And this shows that -- though there is only one way to God, there are certainly many different ways to get to Jesus!

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