We have received the same question from a number of listeners through email over the past few weeks, and this is the question, Pastor John. Is Jesus the only way to be saved? Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." So Jesus himself is saying there isn't any other pathway to the Father except through me.

And then Peter later in the book of Acts picks that up. He says in Acts 4, 12, "There is no salvation in anyone else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." And so Peter is taking Jesus' words and he's carrying them forward into the mission of the Church, and saying there isn't any other name out there on which you can call in order to be saved.

And another amazing way Jesus addresses this, it seems to me, is that he makes the embrace of himself as the crucified and risen Messiah the litmus test of other religions. So if you're talking with somebody who has their set of religions, and you want to test to see whether they have saving faith, what you do is you put Jesus and his fullness out on the table for them to see, and see if they will embrace Jesus.

Because Jesus said, "You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also." If you knew me, you would know my Father also. In other words, knowing me is the condition of truly knowing my Father, namely God, the Creator of the world. That was John 8, 19.

In John 5, 23, Jesus said, "Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him." So he makes himself, the honoring of himself, as the litmus test of honoring the Father. Or John 6, 45, "Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me." So if a person won't come to Jesus as the Savior, as the one who died for sins, as the one who rose from the dead, then Jesus says, "All their claims notwithstanding, they have learned from the Father." When you go to Paul in the New Testament, one of the most amazing passages that have had a missionary impact on me is Romans 5, 12, following where Paul sets up Adam as the head of a race of people, all of us who have fallen and are under condemnation, and Christ as the second Adam, as the head of a new humanity, so that in Christ we are now counted as righteous the way we were counted as sinners in Adam, which means that in Paul's mind, the problem of the entire human race, every religion in the world, every tribe and people in the world, is the same, namely alienated from God in Adam, and Jesus comes into the world as the answer to that problem.

There isn't another answer out there because there isn't another problem out there. So Paul's conception of how to think about being remedied from our human condition is that Adam brought it into being, and Christ is the only answer to it. And then he spells it out for missions, Paul does in Romans 10, where he says, "Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

How shall they call upon the name of the Lord in whom they've not believed, and how shall they believe in whom they've not heard, and how shall they hear without someone preaching? Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." Now I think that sequence of thought is Paul's decisive word about missions in regard to, "Are there other ways out there for people to call upon the name of the Lord and be saved?" And he's saying, "No, there's one name, it's Jesus.

They have to hear about him. In order to hear about him, they have to be messengers, or missionaries, or preachers, or people to share the gospel, and that's the way faith is awakened, and salvation comes through faith." So my conclusion, Tony, in response to that first question is, yes, the Bible does present Jesus as the one way among all the religions of the world, which is why there is such a weighty mandate on the Church to spread the gospel to all the peoples of the world.

There's no salvation without knowing and embracing, believing Christ as the one who died for our sins and rose again. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.