Summary
"God Is Too Big to Fit into One Religion"
A popular bumper-sticker slogan claims that God is too big, too majestic, too vast to be confined to one religion. Behind it sits a familiar set of phrases: "There are many ways up the mountain," "We all worship the same God, we just call Him by different names." The slogan trades on something true about God's greatness—Scripture itself confesses that "great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable" Psalm 145:3—and then draws a false conclusion from it.
The conclusion fails on simple logic. The principle of non-contradiction says that A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time. A grocery store cannot simultaneously be two different stores; an ant cannot also be an aardvark. Apply this to the world's religions and the slogan collapses. Islam confesses that God is not Triune, that Jesus did not die on the cross, and that Jesus is not the Son of God. Christianity confesses one God in three persons, the crucifixion of Christ, and the divine sonship of Jesus. Hinduism affirms hundreds of millions of gods; Christianity confesses one. These are contradictory claims about God's very being and work. They cannot all be true at once. God does not "spill over the banks" into mutually exclusive truth claims about Himself.
The deeper answer, however, is not logic alone but the words of Christ Himself. On the night of His betrayal, with His disciples troubled that He was going where they could not follow, Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" John 14:6. Notice the definite article: not a way, but the way; not a truth among many, but the truth; not one source of life, but the life. The same exclusivity rings through the rest of the New Testament: "I am the gate" John 10:9; "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" Acts 4:12; "There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" 1 Timothy 2:5; "No one who denies the Son has the Father" 1 John 2:23. To deny Christ as Savior and Lord is not to worship the true God by another name; it is to be without the Father altogether.
These verses sound exclusive because they are exclusive. The temptation in every age—Paul saw it in Athens surrounded by idols, and we see it in our own hearts—is to fashion a god more agreeable to our preferences, a god cut down to our size. Every religion outside of Christ is, at root, idolatry: a god formed in the human mind rather than received from God's own self-revelation. Even Christians can drift this way, sculpting an image of God divorced from Scripture. A recent survey found that 42% of self-identified Christians believe God accepts the worship of all religions—a confession that quietly exchanges Christ for an idol.
And yet this is precisely where the gospel meets us. To idol-makers like us, God sends His Son. On the cross, the Lord Jesus bears the full weight of our sin, including our idol-making, pays the debt in full, and declares us forgiven. The very God whom we have tried to shrink does not turn away in disgust; He stoops down in grace. The guarantee that Christianity is true is not a philosophical proof but a Person—the risen Christ. The founders of every other major world religion are dead. Jesus lives. That is why His "the" stands: the way, the truth, the life. As "The" 6-18-23 puts it, God would never be so small as to acquiesce to a slogan that empties His Son's cross of its meaning.
Video citations
- "The" 6-18-23 — Would you open your Bibles please with me to the Gospel of John the 14th chapter for our study today? If you're using a Pew edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find that on page 95 in the New…