The Only Way

I spoke last week about Christ's high standards and His unwillingness to compromise on the truth. But I don't think a statement better captures this than His words in John 14:6-7

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

He claimed to be the only way to God.
Not one of many ways, but the only way.
This does not allow for alternatives or exceptions, Christ is the only way.

Oftentimes people acknowledge that Jesus was a good man and taught truth, and they view Him merely as a good man who's teachings we ought to follow for a better life, but who was definitely not God.

But to quote CS Lewis,

"He has not left that open to us."

If He was merely a good man, He would not claim to be God.

His claim to deity takes Him out of the league of good men.

The only other options are that He was a liar, who knew He was not God, but set out to decieve, a madman who was honestly deluded into thinking of himself as God, or He is who He says He is, God.

He gives no other options. No other means of salvation but Himself. And this verse drives home that point very clearly.

We know He is not a liar, nor a lunatic, but God.
And if He is God we must worship Him as such.

CS Lewis puts it best;

"man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

Our life hack for this week: Come to Jesus for salvation.

#lifehacksfromJesus