Is Jesus the Only Way to Be Saved?
00:00:00.000 | We have received the same question from a number of listeners through email over
00:00:07.760 | the past few weeks, and this is the question, Pastor John. Is Jesus the only
00:00:12.280 | way to be saved? Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to
00:00:20.240 | the Father except through me." So Jesus himself is saying there isn't any other
00:00:26.800 | pathway to the Father except through me. And then Peter later in the book of Acts
00:00:34.160 | picks that up. He says in Acts 4, 12, "There is no salvation in anyone else, for
00:00:43.560 | there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be
00:00:48.760 | saved." And so Peter is taking Jesus' words and he's carrying them forward into the
00:00:54.720 | mission of the Church, and saying there isn't any other name out there on which
00:00:59.840 | you can call in order to be saved. And another amazing way Jesus addresses
00:01:08.160 | this, it seems to me, is that he makes the embrace of himself as the crucified and
00:01:17.040 | risen Messiah the litmus test of other religions. So if you're talking with
00:01:22.960 | somebody who has their set of religions, and you want to test to see whether they
00:01:30.040 | have saving faith, what you do is you put Jesus and his fullness out on the table
00:01:37.000 | for them to see, and see if they will embrace Jesus. Because Jesus said, "You
00:01:43.720 | know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also." If
00:01:50.440 | you knew me, you would know my Father also. In other words, knowing me is the
00:01:55.680 | condition of truly knowing my Father, namely God, the Creator of the world.
00:02:00.520 | That was John 8, 19. In John 5, 23, Jesus said, "Whoever does not honor the Son does
00:02:09.280 | not honor the Father who sent him." So he makes himself, the honoring of himself, as
00:02:14.640 | the litmus test of honoring the Father. Or John 6, 45, "Everyone who has heard and
00:02:21.320 | learned from the Father comes to me." So if a person won't come to Jesus as the
00:02:28.520 | Savior, as the one who died for sins, as the one who rose from the dead, then Jesus
00:02:34.680 | says, "All their claims notwithstanding, they have learned from the Father." When
00:02:41.320 | you go to Paul in the New Testament, one of the most amazing passages that have
00:02:47.960 | had a missionary impact on me is Romans 5, 12, following where Paul sets up Adam as
00:02:55.800 | the head of a race of people, all of us who have fallen and are under
00:03:02.200 | condemnation, and Christ as the second Adam, as the head of a new humanity, so
00:03:09.040 | that in Christ we are now counted as righteous the way we were counted as
00:03:14.200 | sinners in Adam, which means that in Paul's mind, the problem of the entire
00:03:19.680 | human race, every religion in the world, every tribe and people in the world, is
00:03:24.800 | the same, namely alienated from God in Adam, and Jesus comes into the world as
00:03:31.440 | the answer to that problem. There isn't another answer out there because there
00:03:37.000 | isn't another problem out there. So Paul's conception of how to think about
00:03:43.080 | being remedied from our human condition is that Adam brought it into being, and
00:03:49.400 | Christ is the only answer to it. And then he spells it out for missions, Paul
00:03:56.640 | does in Romans 10, where he says, "Everyone who calls upon the name of the
00:04:03.920 | Lord will be saved. How shall they call upon the name of the Lord in whom they've
00:04:08.880 | not believed, and how shall they believe in whom they've not heard, and how shall
00:04:13.900 | they hear without someone preaching? Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by
00:04:17.880 | the word of Christ." Now I think that sequence of thought is Paul's decisive
00:04:22.880 | word about missions in regard to, "Are there other ways out there for people to
00:04:28.880 | call upon the name of the Lord and be saved?" And he's saying, "No, there's
00:04:32.640 | one name, it's Jesus. They have to hear about him. In order to hear about him,
00:04:36.800 | they have to be messengers, or missionaries, or preachers, or people to
00:04:40.760 | share the gospel, and that's the way faith is awakened, and salvation comes
00:04:45.600 | through faith." So my conclusion, Tony, in response to that first question is, yes,
00:04:53.040 | the Bible does present Jesus as the one way among all the religions of the
00:04:59.440 | world, which is why there is such a weighty mandate on the Church to spread
00:05:04.640 | the gospel to all the peoples of the world. There's no salvation without
00:05:08.440 | knowing and embracing, believing Christ as the one who died for our sins and
00:05:14.520 | rose again. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:05:17.800 | Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:05:21.160 | At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from
00:05:24.240 | John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:05:28.560 | [BLANK_AUDIO]