It doesn’t take long to be in Canada before you realize that most Canadians honestly believe that if religion is a valid option in this tolerant society than all religions are equally valid. It is true that some Canadians believe religion is dangerous and not something for any sane person to pursue, but for many there is still some sense of spiritual sensitivity to something. It only takes a national tragedy to realize this.
The Chaplain of the Humboldt, Saskatchewan junior ice hockey team devastated in the crash that killed 15 of the 29 members on board the bus that was T-boned by a semi-trailer truck remarked that two questions haunt us in tragedies like this. Why? And Where? We ask Why did this happen? And we ask Where was God? He said that although he couldn’t answer why he knew that God was both on the throne in control of this and he was in the middle of the valley of the darkness with the broken-hearted and wounded. He said the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus showed God’s commitment to help us fear now evil because he was with us.
Few other religions have this sense of Immanence and Transcendence so intimately tied together. Many of the existing faiths consider that we are all travellers finding our own trails up the mountain of belief to get to the top where we will all meet God as he is. They don’t think he is really knowable.
What if the world of multi-cultural faith options are really a maze created by men to try and answer the four questions of who am I? where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? Since we all have the same questions it makes sense that we’re all trying to find the same solution. We just find different ways to get there. Like finding our own path to the local Starbucks or McDonalds.
The vision of a maze makes sense if you realize that there is only one true path even if it appears that there are many ways to enter and find your way to the center. In reality, all are dead ends except for the path of Jesus.
In reality all religions make exclusive claims and do not believe the same things, regardless of what we would like to imagine. Most religions, apart from Buddhism, believes in the existence of some divine being – already we have a major difference. While Judaism, Christianity and Islam claim that there is one God while Hinduism presents the divine essence as made up of millions of gods and goddesses who inhabit the physical images created to represent them. Islam and Judaism rejects that Jesus is God in the flesh and therefore shows more differentiation in what we believe.
Ravi Zacharias, in his book Jesus Among Other Gods (p. 7), states that “All religions are not the same… At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not and accordingly, of defining life’s purpose. Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of religions but also a caricatured view of even the best known ones. Every religion at its core is exclusive.”
Most of us are committed to what we follow because we have come to believe it for one reason or another. Why have you staked your eternity on what you understand to be true? How do you share your truth with people who believe differently than you? What is the best picture you can think of as to how we present the various attempts of man to find his way to God?
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