One Way Only
I am the way John 14:6
Way – The verse is so familiar that we no longer appreciate all that it implies. It has become a part of our spiritual wallpaper. Just there, hanging as a banner, fading into the background. If we could only have been there when Jesus spoke this truth. If we could only have experienced the shock, the majesty, the unbelievable blasphemy of it. Then, perhaps, we would be jolted out of our religious complacency and see that there is only one path, not two. There is no fork in the road. No point of reasoned assessment. There is only the way – Jesus.
The Greek is hodos but Jesus probably used the Aramaic word ‘arah. It means a path but also a manner of life. The Hebrew mind would associate it with derekh, a word we investigated on January 5. This is God’s way. And Jesus makes it crystal clear that he is God’s way when he uses the expression “I am”. Let’s get the picture straight. If you thought that salvation was the experience of coming to a fork in life’s road and making a decision to take the way of Jesus instead of another way, you are artistically confused. There is only one way. Everything else is death! Everything else is not a way at all. Everything else is utter destruction, chaos and hopelessness. You are either in the one and only way, or you are completely lost.
That, of course, is not how the world views this word. The world would have you think that there are many ways and that choosing the way of Jesus is just one of the options in life. Even if we view Jesus’ way as the only Christian alternative, many in the church still think that there are other ways. Not other ways to God but other ways of living with God. These poor souls are muddled. Jesus is the only way for all of life – for commerce, for education, for marriage, for family, for politics, for health – for all of it. Jesus did not come to just give us a spiritual alternative. He came to bring life in a dead world. His is the only path out of this place – and the only path of life while we are in this place. If we aren’t in His way in everything we do, think and say, we are walking in a graveyard.
Easy to say, isn’t it? But now comes the doing. Just how do you follow in the Way in everything? What does it mean to let Jesus be the only path? How does it affect living in an alien place?
Too much for this little space. But if you never asked the question, you certainly never realized that there is an answer – an answer that is nothing like the graveyard view.
Think about it. This is not an April Fool’s joke.
