Don't all religions lead to God? 

All religions lead to the same place. That much is true. But do they lead to God?

All religions teach basically the same thing. If you live a good enough life, you can earn your way into God’s good graces. For a westerner, that might mean you get to go to heaven. For an eastern believer, that might mean you stop being reborn and you become one with the Supreme Being. And there are other variations on the theme.

But the question then becomes, how good is good enough for God? Most people are convinced they are good enough. They’re at least as good as the next guy, and much better than some – hence, good enough for God. These people are staking their whole eternity on that assumption. Given that we are talking about how we will live forever and forever and forever, once our life on earth is done, it might be wise to make sure that that assumption is correct.

As part of evaluating the assumption that you can lead a good enough life to get to God, consider this. While all religions teach that you can earn your way into God’s favour by living a good life, there is one faith that teaches the exact opposite. It teaches this: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” There is also a quote from another faith, which says: “The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Everything within you might be in protest at this point, saying it is an absolute lie that you do not do good. You can think of plenty of things you have done that were good. Besides, who would want to follow a faith where you’re told you can’t ever be good enough. Isn’t that kind of hopeless and depressing? What kind of crazy faith is that, anyway?

That kind of crazy faith is Christianity. The other faith that would agree with its position is Judaism. But let’s make a distinction. There is Christian religion and Jewish religion, which teach that you can earn your way to God. But that is a false view of what Christianity and Judaism are all about. The God of those faiths, Who has spoken in the Bible, says that there is no one who is good enough to earn their way to God. The passages just quoted can be found in Romans 3:10-12[1] and Psalm 14:2-3.[2] That being the case, what hope does a Christian or a Jew have for their life in eternity?

Before we answer that question, let’s look another question. Why does the God of the Bible say that we can never be good enough? The answer is quite simple. God has a different standard of goodness than we do. We compare ourselves to others and, by that comparison, we look pretty good. God compares us to Himself. He says:

“Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2; Old Testament)

“But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’” (1 Peter 1:15-16; New Testament)

The standard here is not “good enough”. The standard is perfection, total holiness, no mistakes, no wrongs. Who can measure up to that? No one.

But the conclusion is not hopelessness. Strangely enough, the conclusion is a better hope than what is offered in any religion. The same Scriptures that set the impossible standard also say this: 

“Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the Lord your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord, who makes you holy.” (Leviticus 20:7-8)

“Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family.” (Hebrews 2:11)

Religion can never make you as good as God. But God can make you as good as Himself. And you don’t have to do a thing to earn it. To understand, let’s go back to the beginning of time and take a trip from there to the present with God.

At the beginning of time, God made everything that exists, and He made it all good (see Genesis 1).[3] When He made the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, He made them “very good” (Genesis 1:31).[4] Life was perfect. The earth was perfect and never grew a single weed. The climate was perfect, so Adam and Eve didn’t need any clothes. There was no danger in the world, and people were as comfortable around lions as they were around dogs and cats. But best of all, friendship with God was perfect. In fact, God would take on human form and walk with Adam and Eve in their garden home.

Meanwhile, in another part of the universe, someone was challenging God. Lucifer, one of God’s angels, was starting to think that, as wonderful a life as God had given him, things could be better. He could be like God and do away with God. He convinced others of the angels that they could live without God, too, and heaven experienced rebellion. Of course, it was nothing but a delusion that any of God’s creations could ever be as great as God, and God threw Lucifer, whose name then became Satan, out of heaven.

Satan was ticked. He still wanted to be a ruler – of something. Heaven was out. Where else was there?

There was the earth. God owned it, but He had given authority over it to man (see “If God is such a good God, why is there so much evil in the world”). If Satan could get man to give him that authority, then Satan would have authority over the earth. So he came up with a plan. He approached Adam and Eve as a talking serpent and put forward to them the same idea he had come up with himself back in heaven. Did they really need God? They were good enough to be like God. Then Satan, knowing that the only thing God had told Adam and Eve not to do was to eat from one single tree in their garden home out of all the hundreds of trees there probably were, tempted them by saying that God was just trying to keep them from being all they could be. God knew that if they ate from that one tree, they would be like God, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5).[5] They didn’t really need God to live good enough lives; they could be good enough all on their own. Sounds like religion, doesn’t it? If you have ever wondered where the idea came from that people can be good enough for God – only without God – this is where it all started.

Unfortunately for us, Adam and Eve bought it and ate from that tree. What Satan had said partially came true. Now they knew evil and how to do all kinds of wrong things. Unfortunately, they couldn’t always figure out the good part, and world history has proven that over and over again. However, what God had told them would happen if they ate from that tree came perfectly true. God had said: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17). “Wait a minute”, you might say. “Adam lived 800 years and had children. He didn’t die when he ate the fruit; same for Eve.” Actually, Adam and Eve did die. They died in a very significant way. Oh, their bodies continued on, and their personalities remained intact. But their spirits died. That part of them which was like God, who is spirit (John 4:24),[6] and by which they related to God, died as a result of their sin. Then, when children were born to Adam and Eve, they were born in Adam’s likeness and his image (Genesis 5:3),[7] in other words, also spiritually dead. And so death entered the world through one man and passed to all men, and all have sinned ever since (Romans 5:12).[8]

Death is an interesting concept in the Scriptures. When we think of death, we think of that time when our body stops working, and our soul and spirit pass on to someplace else, hopefully heaven. But the Bible teaches that death is a two-step process. The first death is what we have just described – the separation of our inner person from our body, with the result that the body stops functioning. But there is a second death: “The lake of fire is the second death” (Revelation 20:14).[9] If that sounds ominous, it’s because it’s the scariest thing that could happen to a human being. The lake of fire is described elsewhere in the Bible as the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:14). Not only will the devil and his angels be thrown into this place for all eternity, but death and hell will be thrown in there as well: “Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death” (Revelation 20:14). Now think of spending eternity in a place where the devil, demons (the devil’s angels), death and hell are thrown. But in the judgment, at the end of time, God will say to some people: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels . . . Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:41 and 46).

So some people will experience the second death, and some won’t. Those who are cursed will, and those who are righteous won’t. But we started out by saying that no one is righteous, so how do some of us pass from this life into eternal life with God?

When Adam and Eve made the worst decision in the history of mankind and plunged us all into sin and death, God already had a plan to undo their tragic mistake. And He gave them a promise: One would come who would crush the head of Satan and undo everything Satan had just brought into the world – sin and death and cursing (Genesis 3:15).[10] God gave them a picture of what that would involve - He killed one of His animals and clothed Adam and Eve in its skin (Genesis 3:21).[11] It was a picture that the one who was coming would have to die (in the full meaning of that word) in order to make people holy.

Why would this person have to die? Because sin, which means trying to live without God and usually results in doing things that are wrong (which the Bible calls “sins”), pays wages. God had told Adam and Eve that if they chose sin they would die. To every person born since, He says the same thing: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Those wages have to be paid. Either to us who sin, or to someone else who dies on our behalf. But who could die on our behalf? Certainly no other human being – they all have their own wages to contend with. Someone, then, without sin, who has earned no wages of their own, and who will die, not just for a few people, but for everyone who has ever lived and will ever live. But is there anyone in the universe that good? Just one – God Himself.

There is just one God, according to the Bible, but He is three persons. Don’t try too hard to understand that one. Three but one is not something people seem to be able to understand too easily. Some of us who know the Bible or remember some of the traditional wedding service realize that when a man and a woman marry, they are said to become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The two people become one. But if we’re honest, most of us don’t understand that very well, either. But accepting, even without understanding, that the one God is three persons, one of those persons was the one who would rescue mankind. He became a man called Jesus, so that He could save men from death. He suffered the first death when He was crucified. He suffered the second death of total separation from God the Father when the Father left Him in His last hours on the cross (Matthew 27:46).[12] Three days following His death, Jesus came alive again, proving that He had, in fact, paid the full price of sin and thus did not have to suffer death forever. The unique thing about Jesus’ death is that He died with the sins of the whole world on Him (John 1:29)[13] – He paid for everyone. Why? So a wonderful exchange could take place in every life.

Because of what Jesus did, every person has a chance to exchange his or her sin for the righteousness of God. Remember, only being as holy as God is good enough for God. Since we can’t make ourselves that righteous, the only way we can be that good is if God makes us that good. Remember, too, that the Bible says God can make us holy. Now we’re close to finding out how He does that.

The Bible says: “God made him who had no sin [Jesus] to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). We become the righteousness of God “in Jesus”. “In Jesus”, a divine exchange takes place: Jesus gets our sin, and we get His righteousness. Too good to be true, but in fact true. God simply gives us His righteousness: “For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17). So the only remaining question is: What does being “in Jesus” mean, and how does it happen?

Being “in Jesus” means that Jesus and we are joined so the two of us become one (that hard to understand concept again: two and separate, yet one): “[H]e who unites himself with the Lord [Jesus] is one with him in spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17). That being true, everything that Jesus did to pay for sin happened to us and, since He paid all there was to pay, so did we. The wages of sin were paid out to Jesus, and we are free from death, including the second death. We are good enough for God. We can be sure that, when our body stops functioning, we will go to be with God.

If being in Jesus sounds like a wonderful thing – and it is, for more reasons than just to escape eternal death, as wonderful as that is – then you may be wondering how that can happen for you. It’s really quite simple. If you believe all that you have read here about who Jesus is and about what His death and resurrection can do for you, you are ready for the exchange. The exchange goes beyond sin for righteousness, though. It is life for life. You give Him your life, and He gives you His. It is choosing to live totally differently than you ever have before. Now, instead of living life on your own and doing the best you can, you choose to live life together with God - always, every moment of every day. Is that possible? Yes. It’s a learning experience, but entirely possible. And entirely wonderful. To have an intimate relationship with the best and the strongest and the kindest person in the universe is a great privilege. But it is an exchange. You give up being master of your life. Your life belongs to God from the moment you decide this is what you want. Will He make your life miserable? Someone as good as God would never do that. Will your life be a challenge? Sometimes, yes. But there are others who have also made the exchange who can help you. They’re all around you in Christian churches of various kinds.

If you want to join your life to God’s through Jesus, tell Him that. This is called “receiving Jesus”. It’s admitting that you can’t ever be good enough on your own, but you understand that, because of what Jesus did, you can be good enough for God. Give Him your life – lock, stock and barrel. He’ll take good care of you. The moment you give your life, He gives you things it will take you a while to discover: forgiveness for all your sins, His righteousness, His Spirit, eternal life, peace, blessing, a new nature, and so on, and so on.

So don’t all religions lead to the same place? Yes, but not to God. All religions teach that you can earn your way to God by living a good enough life. But if the assumption that you can be good enough for God is wrong, then all religion is worse than useless. It is a deception that leads straight to eternal damnation. On the other hand, if the truth is that you can never be good enough on your own, then you need Jesus.

Sharon Currens