CONFIDENCE IN THE FACE OF HARD QUESTIONS: Is Jesus the Only Way to God?

The world does not like the idea that one particular belief system possesses an exclusive claim to access God.  Even in the evangelical church 19 percent of church goers believe there are other ways to God. That is the opposite of what God’s Word teaches.  Think for a minute.  Before the Pentecost it seems the Holy Spirit was only accessible to humanity sporadically.  Humans were otherwise perpetually separated FROM God by their human nature.  SO THEN, if there are other ways to God than the faith in the example that he sent to humanity, then why was there a need for a messiah in the first place?

We’ll dig a bit into that as we look 1 John 5:1-13, where we will learn that because Jesus is the Son of God, he is the only one who can carry us into the presence of God in all of God’s forms.  Our faith in Jesus as the Messiah will carry us into the presence of God the son; no one else can do that for us.  Our faith in Jesus the Messiah allows us access to the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of God.  In the Old Testament times humanity did not seem to have ready access to the Spirit of God.  Our faith in Jesus the Messiah, and the action of the Holy Spirit carries us into the presence of God the Creator of all that is.  Thus our faith in Jesus carries us into the presence of God, the son (physical aspect), God the Spirit (spiritual aspect), and God the Father (creator of all).  The point is, without Jesus, humanity is NOT LIKELY to discover such access to God.  Historically they did not, they remained at a distance from God, never drawing intimately close in any way.  Jesus allows us to become intimate with the creator of the universe.

John the apostle, in 1 John was to encourage love for other believers, stress obedience to God’s ethics, and to provide a basis for assurance of being brought BACK into the family of God through faith in Jesus.

1 John 5:1-5

1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father also loves the one born of him.

2 This is how we know that we love God’s children: when we love God and obey his commands.

3 For this is what love for God is: to keep his commands. And his commands are not a burden,

4 because everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. This is the victory that has conquered the world: our faith.

5 Who is the one who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

The Greek word used here for belief and the verb form believe mean more than merely assenting to these realities. These terms also have the sense of commitment.  It is not knowing that “people say that Jesus is God’s Anointed One, sent to proclaim and accomplish His plan of redemption”.  It is about KNOWING that Jesus IS God’s Anointed One sent to restore humanity to God’s family.

Believers will love both God the Father and His reborn children. When Jesus was asked which of the Old Testament commandments was the greatest, He quoted Deuteronomy 6:5 that says we should love God with every part of our being. One key evidence of our spiritual rebirth is that we love our Christian brothers and sisters. Jesus taught His disciples that they should “love one another”; this love is evidence that one is a true disciple of Jesus. 

John added that another indication of the genuine nature of loving other Christians is that we consistently obey God’s commands. By commands John meant all of God’s commands found in both Old and New Testaments. Both the Old and New Testaments teach and demonstrate God’s ethical morals.  The word Command is from Latin commendare meaning to entrust to.  John is basically telling us that believers will consistently live up to God’s trust in us, to care for what he has entrusted to us.  Living up to such trust is both an outcome of loving God and is a PART of Loving God. Love for God is not just an emotional experience,  It is as an ethical, moral, “living-correctly” lifestyle commitment.  Humanity has never seemed to make that commitment on their own in the absence of God’s Messiah.

Non-believers often think the Christian lifestyle is an impossible burden—“no one can be good all the time and have any fun!”  But this is the opposite of the truth Jesus taught. True Joy comes in setting aside the burden of having to choose whether to be “good or bad”, “right or wrong”, or trying to guess what other humans think is right or wrong…especially in an era where it seems that MANY seem to believe that harmfulness is good and helpfulness is bad.  Just adhering to ONE ethical standard makes for much easier navigation through life and the weight of sin’s guilt and slavery to sin the individual has before he comes to faith in Christ is the burden that faith in Jesus the Messiah removes.  This does not mean God’s ethical standards are not at times demanding and difficult but they are an easy yoke and a light burden in comparison to the overwhelming, impossible burden of slavery to sin.

The worldly human does not comprehend that the ability to give up the adherence to some 8 billion human opinions of right and wrong is a joyful liberation.  Adhering to God’s “one set of moral principles” is MUCH less stressful than navigating through 8 billion possibilities, if you can catch the meaning of the illustration.

Once we are reborn in Christ we are able to overcome the worldly passions that are part of the unredeemed world. How?  God sends the Holy Spirit to live within us to teach us and guide us.  This enables us both to know God’s truth and to obey it.  Verse 4 describes this as the victory that has conquered the world.  

Faith is the ability of God’s children to overcome Satan’s lies and sin’s temptations by the victory which Jesus has already won. Those who believe, who have put their faith in Jesus, are able to share in His victory.  While not the same, Jesus, the HUMAN, has demonstrated to humanity that “if I can do it you can do it too” so to speak.   To stress his point John asked a rhetorical question: “Who is the one who conquers the world?” He then repeated in a fuller way what he had just said about the believer’s faith in Jesus being the key to such victories. In this verse, John referred to Jesus as the Son of God. By using the title Son of God John stressed both Jesus’s divine nature as well as the reality of Jesus’s human nature and His identification with those He came to save. 

Next we will see that we can know this not just because Jesus teaches that it is so, but because GOD testifies to it. God really IS humanity’s witness that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah.  Let’s see.

1 John 5:6-10

6 Jesus Christ—he is the one who came by water and blood, not by water only, but by water and by blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.

7 For there are three that testify:

8 the Spirit, the water, and the blood—​and these three are in agreement.

9 If we accept human testimony, God’s testimony is greater, because it is God’s testimony that he has given about his Son.

10 The one who believes in the Son of God has this testimony within himself. The one who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony God has given about his Son. 

Many false teachings about Jesus developed as humanity applied its own reasoning after Jesus had returned to heaven. One teaching was influenced by Greek philosophy. Some Greek philosophers taught that everything physical is evil and that the only good things are spiritual. Some teachers in the church began to connect with these ideas as they rationalized about Jesus. They said that Jesus was fully human when He was born but without any divine nature because God would not inhabit anything material. They went on to say that at Jesus’s baptism, Christ, the spiritual being, came into Jesus’s body to enable Him to teach and perform miraculous signs. Then just before He was crucified this spiritual Christ left Jesus’ physical body since God could not die. John and Paul were among those who strongly opposed such doctrines as harmful because such teachings not only denied reality but also led to immoral lifestyles; those who held to such false teachings believed what they did in their physical bodies had no effect on their spirits. 

At Jesus’ baptism the first witness that Jesus is the Messiah was “the Spirit of God” who came to Jesus to encourage and guide Him. God the Father declared that Jesus was His “beloved Son”.  A second witness to Jesus being both God and man was Jesus’s death by his spilt blood on the cross. The New Testament writers stressed that Jesus provided our salvation from sin and death by shedding His blood. Another false teaching said that because flesh was evil, Jesus was only a spirit who appeared to be a man. John wrote that Jesus’s baptism and His death were witnesses of His incarnation. He stressed that Jesus’s uniqueness as both fully God and fully man and His literal death on the cross confirm that “Jesus is the Christ”, “the Son of God”.

So it was GOD that testified that Jesus is the messiah.  This was done three times by the baptism – in water and of the Holy Spirit.  By the Spirit – which appears as a descending dove and audibly testified  that Jesus was God’s son.  And by the blood – through Jesus’ flogging, beating, and death on the cross.  Through ALL of this Jesus was immersed in the spirit of GOD’S mission of BEING the anointed of God and becoming the shepherd of humanity leading them back to God.

John notes in verse 6 that the Spirit is the one who testifies. The Holy Spirit testified about Jesus in several ways. He did so through His inspiration of the Old Testament writings that foretold the coming of God’s Messiah. The Spirit empowered John the Baptist to go before Jesus “in the spirit and power of Elijah”. The events of Pentecost—the Holy Spirit’s filling of Jesus’s disciples and then enabling them to powerfully proclaim the gospel—signaled the beginning of the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise concerning the Spirit’s work. The rest of the book of Acts describes how the Holy Spirit worked through Christians enabling them to testify about Jesus.  The believer’s life itself testifies to the power and love of God.

John also notes that the Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of truth” and He speaks the truth that He receives from Jesus. Let’s say it this way:  GOD IS TRUTH – that which is in accordance with fact or reality.  The HOLY SPIRIT is the SPIRIT OF GOD – the divine force, quality and influence of God in the universe,  Therefore the SPIRIT of God IS TRUTH – divine force, quality and influence of being in accord with reality, as things actually are, rather than as idealize by others.

John stressed that all three of these witnesses—the Spirit, the water, and the blood—testify in the world’s courtroom that Jesus is who He claimed to be. Not only do these three witnesses—the Spirit, the water, and the blood—agree with one another; they also agree with God’s testimony. Therefore, according to John, believing in Jesus as the Son of God is equivalent to accepting God’s testimony about his Son.

Jesus promised His disciples that after He returned to heaven He would send the Holy Spirit to be with them to guide them. The Holy Spirit, prior to Pentecost, provided “episodic appearances” in the lives of humanity.  After Jesus’ ascension, Jesus promised that ANYONE who would choose to immerse themselves in the Spirit of God could receive the Spirit of God. The Spirit who lives in us because of our faith in Jesus enables us to know in our human spirits that we are eternally linked to God the Father and to His Son.

So, ultimately, John pointed to four valid witnesses—the Spirit, the water, the blood, and God the Father—to confirm Jesus’s claim to be the Christ, the incarnate Son of God. Those who reject the testimonies of these witnesses are not only missing the blessings Jesus offers but are also calling God a liar. God’s testimony about Jesus is clear, and His most powerful confirmation was God “raising him from the dead”. To deny Jesus is to deny His Father’s words and actions regarding His Son.  It REALLY doesn’t seem wise to call the “all power in the universe” a liar!

1 John 5:11-13

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

12 The one who has the Son has life. The one who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

13 I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.

From the beginning of time God worked to fix what sin had broken. In fact, God had planned for our redemption in Christ before the foundation of the world.  Stated another way, from the moment the universe was created God had a plan, at some point in the unfolding of the universe, to step into humanity to “show humanity how to play the game” so to speak.  Just as you wouldn’t throw an infant child into an adult’s game without teaching them the rules and strategies of the game, often by giving examples, God knew that he would have to “teach us infants” how to play the game.  It was GOD’S PLAN ALL ALONG. The Old Testament is full of prophecies about God’s plan and His working to fulfill it.  John was simply pointing to the specific point in time when the Father sent His Son into the world “taking on the likeness on humanity”.

We tend to think of the gift of eternal life as something that we do not YET possess.  As Jesus told Martha, even though a person dies physically, through faith in Him we “will never die”. Though eternal life certainly means life beyond the grave, it also means a new kind of life before the grave. Jesus told His disciples that He came to provide a new quality of life and to provide this life in abundance.  We already have been given eternal life.  Now we just have to choose whether we have an “eternal joyful eternal life”, or an “eternal life of harmful suffering.” The eternal life provided by God opens the way for us to have direct access to our heavenly Father. We are set free from our unavoidable service to harm and suffering, but now we have the ability to choose to do joyful good rather than suffering harm.  In this new life, made possible through Jesus’s sacrifice, we “have peace [no struggle and all security] with God”. We have the ability to do the “good works” for which God created us.

In verse 11 John tells us that this life is in his Son. This statement contains two key elements: (1) Jesus came to earth to enable everyone who believes to have eternal life. (2) The only way to receive eternal life is through faith that God did INDEED step into humanity to be the example to humanity that they DO have the ability to choose joyful good over harmful suffering. 

One of the unique aspects of Christianity is its teaching that there is only one way to God and that way is through faith in Jesus Christ. This confuses some, “what do ya mean there is only one religion that works!” But NOTE it is not in the “religion” of Jesus Christ, it is though FAITH in Jesus Christ.  It is through FAITH in God.  Some men have always had the ability to place their faith in God…Abraham, Noah, and many others, but it was when Jesus was FAITHFUL to God, even to the point of willingly experiencing death, so that he might show, teach and encourage others the way to return to God, that humanity could finally comprehend that the key to receiving God’s gift of eternal life is to enter into a personal relationship with God through faith in the “part” of God that became human to show us how it CAN be done, IF YOU CHOOSE TO. 

To receive God’s gift, each person has to believe that Jesus is the incarnate Son of God whose sacrificial death atones for our guilt and sins. Then that person has to commit to LEARNING and to trust Him for the rest of his life. Those who refuse to accept God’s revealed truth about His Son are choosing eternal suffering over joy.

Throughout his letter John pointed to various ways that his readers could know that they had “fellowship”with God the Father through their faith in God the Son. Many times John affirmed the faith of his readers and stated his confidence in the genuineness of their faith in Christ and relationship with God.  To know God is to have understanding through experience, and being intimately acquainted with God. Though we cannot see the Spirit; we sense Spirit’s presence and power as Spirit teaches us truth, as Spirit empowers us to be Jesus’s witnesses, and as Spirit supplies the spiritual gifts the church needs to do its work.

With this knowledge, we can be absolutely certain that we have eternal life through our faith in God’s Son.  Without this knowledge we are “on our own” and are liable to end up with eternal suffering.  The point is that Jesus, the Messiah is the ONLY (sure) way to God.  Any other way is an “eternal gamble.”