Lord of all
The Presbyterian Layman October 2001 Volume 34, Number 6, October 5, 2001
On one disastrous day in September, Americans felt a special kinship with the citizens of Israel. For decades, the people of that beleaguered nation have experienced the bombing of their children on the way to school, the machine-gunning of loved ones while they prayed beside the wall and the catapulting of explosives onto noon-day shoppers.
Few would deny that these acts are repugnant, even intolerable. But what shall we say of the ideology that engenders many of them? We’re talking here about jihad, a religious doctrine whose adherents do these things as expressions of “the holy life.” Driven by an ideology that calls evil good, followers of jihad murder Jews in Israel, Christians in Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Southern Sudan … and now people of various faiths whose only offense is that they live and work in America.
Driven to our knees by these horrendous acts, we are forced to ask, are all sincerely held religious convictions acceptable pathways to God?
Postmodernism says that they are. Placing all religious preferences on a level plane, its advocates declare that those who call Scripture God’s truth are arrogant. They don’t mind saying that Jesus is one among many ways to salvation, but they steadfastly refuse to declare with Scripture that he is the only way to salvation.
Culture-bound Christians lack grounding in God’s Word. That makes them particularly susceptible to such postmodern sentiments. Yearning for peace, and lured by the notion of “inclusiveness,” they forfeit the tool God has given to us for discerning truth from falsehood and good from evil. Refusing to honor God’s revealed Word, they cling to the flimsy philosophy that one worldview is as good as another, cringing over acts of unspeakable horror, but impotent to confront the sincerely held religious beliefs that spawned them.
People who believe the gospel are not subject to this deception. We know that Jesus alone is Lord, not because we said so, but because God did. John’s gospel reminds us that God so loved the world – inhabited by humanists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Animists, and proponents of every philosophy under heaven – that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall be saved.
On September 11, those who found themselves in the fiery furnace, those who struck the spark, and all who witnessed the horror, came face to face with one eternal truth: Jesus Christ alone is the way to God. All of us are invited to share this gospel, and no one can ignore it with impunity.