One of the most offensive beliefs of the Christian faith to those who are not followers of Christ is our affirmation that Jesus is the only way to the God.  I was reminded of that a couple days ago while listening to an NPR interview with Lisa Miller, senior editor with Newsweek.  Lisa has just published a book titled Heaven: Our Fascination With the Afterlife.

After the interview a Christian caller sought to make this point with Lisa, who responded by saying that she was very sympathetic with this belief, but, being Jewish, she just could not affirm it herself.  That’s understandable: Jesus is always the stumbling block that creates the divide between Judaism and Christianity.

But why do Christians insist that Jesus is the only way? I believe that one aspect of our “apologetic” for the faith that we often fail to offer when asked why we believe Jesus is the “only way” is the fact that comes from the context of John 14: that Jesus is actually God in the flesh (a truth profoundly exclaimed in John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1).  This means, then, what one of my old favorite spiritual songs proclaims : “The great Creator became my Savior, and all God’s fullness dwelleth in Him ”(“Down From His Glory” to the tune of the old opera song “O Solo Mio”).

The apologetic question that comes from this is: “How could it be possible to be made right with our Creator unless we follow the way the Creator offers us?”  The Christian faith holds that Jesus was not just another prophet; He was God in the flesh (“I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” said Jesus).  This means, then, that adherents to a faith that does not claim Jesus as the way are rejecting the only way God has provided. We are made right with God the Father by believing in and committing ourselves to God the Son who then sends God the Holy Spirit to dwell in us and empower us.  God has offered us Himself as the way to Him

Christians throughout the centuries have voiced this biblical affirmation of hope in Jesus for every man and woman.  However, many of us have missed another key implication of Jesus’ defeat of sin on the cross for the rest of the creation.  It is this:  All of creation has hope because of what Jesus accomplished in His death and resurrection.

On the cross Jesus wore a crown of thorns.  Thorns are the symbol of the curse that was placed on the natural world to discipline a sinful, disobedient, and rebellious humanity.  The great joy for the natural world is that Jesus’ suffering was also effective in procuring the end of that curse.  Revelation 22:3 tells us that there will be no more curse.  So the creation itself shares the hope we have for ultimate redemption, reconciliation, and reunification (Romans 8:18-27).  N. T. Wright highlights this in his book Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.  The Bible does not tell us the significance of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns other than to compound His suffering.  But since His death and resurrection did provide redemption and reconciliation for the cursed earth, it is indeed possible that the crown of thorns was a sign pointing back to the curse and forward to the end of the curse.

The ultimate meaning of this truth is that we really have more affinity with the creation (nature) than we do with rebellious humanity and the sinful world system that will be destroyed—destroyed in part so that harmony would return between us and God and between us and the creation.  Francis Schaeffer made this clear in his seminal book on the Christian view of ecology: Pollution and the Death of Man.

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then.  It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling.  God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature—just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality—is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now, between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

In Novum Organon Francis Bacon wrote this: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over nature.  Both of these losses, however, even in this life, can in some part be repaired; the former by religion and faith, the later by the arts and sciences.”  It is a tragedy that the Church, including the orthodox, evangelical Church, has not always remembered that.  Here, in this present life, it is possible for the Christian to have some share, through sciences and the arts, in returning nature to its proper place.

It is this affirmation that helped me see the light about the importance of our relationship to the natural world: The creation shares with us the same hope of redemption that will be fully realized when Jesus returns.  This kinship with the natural world, then, should cause us grief over its suffering and compel us to do what we can to, as Schaeffer says, return “nature to its proper place.” That’s a foundational understanding of the Wonder of Creation feature here on the RBC website.

Jesus is the only way to reconciliation with God the Father for sinful mankind.  He is also the only way that His creation will ultimately be reconciled to the Father (Colossians 1:15-20).  No one and no thing in God’s creation comes to the Father except through Jesus.  How fitting it is, then, that Easter comes in the spring when the creation itself celebrates new life.  The gospel that followers of Christ proclaim should not be seen as a threat to adherents of other faiths; it is the most glorious and hopeful “good news” the earth and all its inhabitants have ever received.