Big questions
Is Jesus really the only way to God?
Jesus said so himself, and Christians believe him. The reason is not that Christians are better than anyone else. It is that only Jesus has dealt with the thing that separates us from God.
What Jesus claimed
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.”
This is not something the church invented later. It comes from Jesus, and his first followers repeated it at great personal risk.
There is salvation in none other, for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, by which we must be saved!
Why only Jesus?
If our problem were ignorance, any wise teacher might do. If it were a lack of effort, any demanding religion might do. The Bible says our problem is sin, which has cut us off from God, and that we cannot repair it ourselves. We need someone to deal with it for us. Christians believe that only Jesus, being both God and man, could do that, and that he did it by dying and rising again.
For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.
Aren’t all religions basically the same?
The world’s religions share a good deal of moral teaching, and Christians can gladly recognise truth and goodness wherever they find it. But the religions make very different claims about who God is, who Jesus was and how a person is put right. They cannot all be correct. Saying that they are all the same does not respect them. It ignores what each one actually says.
Isn’t it arrogant to say so?
It would be arrogant if Christians were claiming to be cleverer or better than other people. They are claiming the opposite: that they could not save themselves and had to be rescued. A person who has found the way out of a burning building is not arrogant for telling others where the door is.
The claim is exclusive about the way. The invitation is as wide as it could be.
For God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through him.
What about people who have never heard?
The Bible does not answer this as fully as we might like. It does tell us that God is perfectly just and perfectly merciful, that he will judge no one unfairly, and that he does not want anyone to be lost. Christians can leave the question with him. The more pressing matter for anyone reading this page is what to do with what they have heard.
How Christians should say it
Christians have not always spoken about their faith graciously, and where they have been proud or contemptuous they have gone against their own Scriptures.
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; and always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, with humility and fear.