The issue of other religions is often quite divisive, for in this modern democratic way of thinking, many people do not like the idea of on
e religion having sole claim to the truth. It is hard to reconcile the disparity because our natural human inclination is to hope (if not believe) that all religions have a valid claim on the truth; that is, we do not like to think of millions of people as deceived or deluded.
But I am afraid that I think they are and Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. If we think about if for a second it is not so difficult to see why. I want to show you why God had to become man in order to love us perfectly. I will tell you what I think it is like. We have seen that human love reflects, in one sense, the divine love of God - but it must also be admitted that human love is something quite different; and this is what I think we see with our hope that all religions might have some claim on the truth.
It is our love which is directing this feeling, and this, I think, is an example of how human love can go wrong, or at least lead us down wrong paths. Two people love each other, and they should, if they are sincere people, wish for special things for their beloved. They should naturally be kind, generous, faithful, loving, caring, adoring - and an absence of these things almost always causes the relationship to be an unhealthy one.
Non-Christian love between two people has but one main limitation - it is conditioned; not just by these said things, but also under the proviso that these things continue to please when they are given. In other words, it is a love that delights more in what is taken than in what is given. And if it sounds like I am talking about an outwardly selfish person, it is not always so. It is only partly related to the characteristics of the individual - it has more to do with the fact that love, by itself, works for the benefit of the self before it works for the benefit of the beloved.
A man loves a girl and he gives to her all the said things - he cares for her and he is replete with kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and adoration - but he only does so because it allows him to love further; that is, the deployment of kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and adoration allow his feelings for her to deepen - it is a very subliminal thing – his giving conditions his own happiness.
So here we see that human love is very different to God’s love. God loves us in a way that requires something transcendent of human love - a love that involves giving unconditionally, a love that involves His becoming sin for us; ostensibly, becoming what we are, in order that we could become what He is. Human love never comes close.
He becomes a man so that He can love us perfectly; so that He could experience everything that we experience; so that He could die for us and offer us a way to Him. Therefore those who deny Christ’s divinity, deny the biggest part of God’s love - they are left with nothing but false hopes (remember Christianity is the only religion which claims that we can have a full and personal relationship with God - all the other religions deny this).
When I was describing the parochial nature of human love, I was, as I said a moment ago, talking about non-Christian relationships. A Christian relationship is a step higher - a step closer to the divine. A Christian relationship best allows both individuals to give abundantly, for it is Christ in the relationship who is stimulating this. There is, of course, another type of human love, a non-romantic love that is in between God’s love for us and our love for another human being. It is encapsulated every time a Christian hopes that a fellow human being will come to know Christ. There are no conditions attached, the Christian has no personal gain from another person’s conversion (outside of vicariousness) - the hope is hoped out of pure love for another human being (you do not even have to like the person), that they too might come to know Christ, that they too might have their life transformed, that they too might have eternal life in Heaven.
A romantic relationship between two Christians consists of three things; they have both the first kind of love and the second kind - in fact, it is a mixture of the two. But they also have the third kind of love, love for God and a full acceptance of His dying on the cross of us; a full imbibing of His Heavenly grace. All other religions have tried to take away from reality, God as a man; they have done to Christianity what an unfaithful husband does to monogamy.
A moment ago I said that God became sin for us; that is - God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). God humbled Himself by becoming a man, to bear the consequences of our sins, and in doing so created the perfect transformation of the first cause; so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. This means that God put us in the right relationship with Himself; there was an antithetical transference, whereby God ephemerally broke the relationship with His Son by casting all the burden of our sin onto Him. In other words, in bringing us to Him, He temporarily broke the relationship between Father and Son.
That is why Christ felt that He had been forsaken on the cross (Matthew 27:46). God, who made Himself nothing for us, emptied Himself of His glory. He was fully God and fully human, so that He could share every aspect of human feelings, including pain and suffering, anger, frustration, temptation, fear, and, in the end, death. And I presume that the nature of the divine in becoming man meant that He lowered Himself to a position below that of created man, for He did something that we could never do; He became perfectly obedient to death.
No other religion will help us to learn about our true selves; for if God says that He had to become man for this to happen, it is going to do man no good in the end if he carries on denying Christ’s divinity. All who claim for themselves a belief in God whom they have never acknowledged in Christ, will never know their true duties and, indeed, their weaknesses, which come about because of a desire that God remains unreachable. In a subliminal sense, if God remains unknowable to them, then so does the self - it is a mode of suppression, an effort to deny the only way that a man can be cured of his own pride. God did not want to remain a mystery; He wanted to be reached by all those who sought to know Him through His son. He wants to make Himself recognisable to all who come to realise that true self-surrender only occurs when it has been accepted that God humbled Himself and died for all of us.
We cannot know God without knowing ourselves as sinners and we cannot know the full extent of our sin until we come to realise that it took Christ’s dying to put us right with God. That is why you see, in human observation, a real dichotomy between those who do not seem to know God but know themselves as bad men and those who claim themselves to be good men. That is why Christ becoming sin for us is right at the centre of the dichotomy, for Christ bridges the gap by showing us God and showing us our own sin. God knew that in order to worship Him fully, He had to make Himself known through Christ; for it is impossible to properly worship that which is completely unknown to us.
Through the life and words of Christ, we are able to imbibe the divine wisdom and transfer it into our own lives, carving out for ourselves methods of conflating His divine wisdom with our life experiences - trying our best to become more like Him in everything we do. He teaches us to participate in divinity itself, to expose temporal things as mere distractions; to realise that nothing which is not part of the divine will see eternity.
God became man to show us that Christianity is the only religion entitled to proffer instructions for mankind’s salvation, redemption, renewal and transfiguring into the living God. Only through God becoming man could we, eventually, become like God.
Through Christ we are able to see the real nature of fallen man; by understanding that which was necessary for a remedy. God becoming man is a perfect expression of hope; it teaches us that even our proudest moments cannot compare to His glory. When Christ died, He stated that ‘It is finished’. No subsequent religions could add anything to the picture; in fact, by attempting to add, they merely subtract; they deny Christ as God and they unknowingly rely on themselves for salvation. The Bible is quite clear - only through Christ can we find salvation:
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12
