Resources For "He Is, I'm Not" Series From Each Harderwyk Preacher
I. New For This Week
Is Jesus the Only Way? In this blog post by Lutheran pastor Bruce Hillman, he writes: "To the extent that God is exclusive by offering salvation only through Christ we can say he is more gracious than other systems because he takes on our guilt upon himself while gifting us his righteousness." Hillman offers a thoughtful, pastoral and relational reflection on the exclusivity of Jesus' statement in John 14:6. CLICK HERE for entire post.
Christ's Exclusive Truth-Claims Make Believing "All Religions are Basically the Same" Impossible This blog post by author Randy Alcorn includes the story of Tim Keller and a Muslim Cleric responding together to a college student insisting that "all religions are fundamentally alike." CLICK HERE for the entire post.
II. From The Commentaries
From NT Wright in John For Everyone - “Jesus’ reply has haunted and confronted the world’s imagination ever since. ‘I am the way.’ If you want to know how to get to the father’s house, you must come with me.
Within the Western world of the last two centuries or so, this saying of Jesus has become one of the most controversial. ‘I am the way and the truth and the life!’ How dare he, people have asked. How dare John, or the church, or anyone else, put such words into anyone’s mouth? Isn’t this the height of arrogance, to imagine that Jesus or anyone else was the only way? Don’t we now know that this attitude has done untold damage around the world, as Jesus’ followers have insisted that everyone else should give up their own ways of life and follow his instead? I know people, professing Christians, for whom it seems that their central article of faith is their rejection of this idea of Jesus’ uniqueness.
The trouble with this is that it doesn’t work. If you dethrone Jesus, you enthrone something, or someone, else instead. The belief that ‘all religions are really the same’ sounds nice and democratic—though the study of religions quickly shows that it 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 Moses nor Krishna gives us direct access to it. They all provide a way towards the foothills of the mountain, not the way to the summit.
It isn’t just John’s gospel that you lose if you embrace this idea. The whole New Testament—the whole of early Christianity—insists that the one true and living God, the creator, is the God of Israel; and that the God of Israel has acted decisively, within history, to bring Israel’s story to its proper goal, and through that to address, and rescue, the world. The idea of a vague general truth, to which all ‘religions’ bear some kind of oblique witness, is foreign to Christianity. It is, in fact, in its present form, part of the eighteenth-century protest against Christianity—even though some people produce it like a rabbit out of a hat, as though it was quite a new idea.
The real answer is that, though of course it’s true that many Christians and churches have been arrogant in the way they have presented the gospel, the whole setting of this passage shows that such arrogance is a denial of the very truth it’s claiming to present. The truth, the life, through which we know and find the way, is Jesus himself: the Jesus who washed the disciples’ feet and told them to copy his example, the Jesus who was on his way to give his life as the shepherd for the sheep. Was that arrogant? Was that self-serving? Only when the church recovers the nerve to follow Jesus in his own mission and vocation, I suspect, will it be able to recover its nerve fully in making the claim of verse 6.
Unless it does, though, it loses also the vision of the father which this whole passage sets out before us. Don’t come with a set, fixed idea of who God is, and try to fit Jesus into that. Look at Jesus, the Jesus who wept at the tomb of his friend, the Jesus who washed his followers’ feet, and you’ll see who is the true God. That was Jesus’ answer to Philip. It is his answer to the natural questions that arise in people’s minds today. Only when his followers are themselves continuing to do what Jesus did may they be believed when they speak the earth-shattering truth that he spoke.”
III. Ongoing Resources
1) Scotty Smith’s Heavenward Daily Prayers - CLICK HERE to see the daily prayer blog of Scotty Smith. You will see an option to have them delivered to your email inbox each day as well.
2) Simple Lectio Divina Overview - CLICK HERE for a simple introduction of the spiritual practice of a more personal way of experience the Word through contemplation and reflection.
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