Whenever I’m sitting next to someone on a plane, the conversation almost always turns from the weather to religion to Christ. A few years ago my wife and I were sitting together when I noticed that the woman across the aisle was wearing a cross necklace. Hoping to stimulate a discussion, I said, “Thanks for wearing that cross. We do have a wonderful Savior, don’t we?”
She rolled her eyes and responded, “Well, I don’t think of the cross like you do. just look at this.” She showed me that beneath the cross was the Jewish Star of David, and beneath that was a trinket that symbolized the Hindu god Om. “I’m in social work,” she told me. “I’ve discovered that people find God in different ways. Christianity is but one path to the divine.” She went on to say that she preferred spirituality to religion, the search for experience to specific beliefs. She believed in a pantheistic god, a force that need not be feared.
Conversations such as these reinforce my belief that spirituality is flourishing and with it a growing confidence that there are many ways to reach God. Creeds are out; feelings are in. Writing in Time, screenwriter and Hollywood producer Marty Kaplan says, “What attracted me to meditation was its apparent religious neutrality. You don’t have to believe anything; all you have to do is do it. I was worried that reaping its benefits would require some faith that I could only fake, but I was happy to learn that 90% of meditation was about showing up.”1 To be truly spiritual, we are told, a creed is not only unnecessary but unwanted. “Americans”, someone has said, “are busy inventing unorthodox ways of getting where they’re going.”
Christianity is being so redefined that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish it from Buddhism or other Eastern religious ideas. We can now be spiritual without God, without “beliefs.” And with this drift to pantheism, we also have growing intolerance toward historic Christianity. At a state university a sign read, “It is OK for you to think you are right. It is not OK for you to think someone else is wrong.” In the last decade sin has been defined out of existence, but if one sin still exists, it is thinking someone else is wrong. Truth, we are told, is not something to be discovered; it is something to be made up, something to be manufactured either individually or by consensus. One’s feelings are more important than, say, the words of Jesus.
Our pluralistic culture rejects outright the claim that God can be approached in only one way. All that the Southern Baptists have to do is ask their members to pray that their Jewish friends would recognize Christ as their Messiah, and a storm of protest erupts. The unity of all the world religions seems like such a worthy goal that those who oppose it are perceived as arrogant, bigoted and yes, intolerant.
When I was in college, belief in God among the intellectual elite was thought to be antiquated; students and faculty alike patronizingly referred to it as a relic of simpler, less sophisticated times. But the secularism that reigned at the time left a vacuum in the human soul, and thus our cultural pendulum has swung back toward spirituality, though now it’s a New Age one.
If secularism banished God from the heavens, spirituality has found God among us. In fact, according to current spiritual thought, He is in everything around us. The Creator is no longer sacred; the creature is. We are told our self is sacred, the earth is sacred, animals are sacred and so on. In his book Your Sacred Self, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer writes that he wants to introduce us to “that glowing celestial light and to let you know the wonder of having your sacred self triumph over the demands of the ego self, which wants more than anything to hold you back.”2 Such thinking attributes the glory that should be reserved for God to His creation, just as Paul described: “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (
Contemporary spirituality defines God as an equal-opportunity employer, the universal source of energy, waiting to be tapped by all of us. What we believe is not important; the challenge is to understand ourselves in light of this higher power that is already within us. If we need forgiveness, we must simply grant it to ourselves; we have broken the commands of no personal God. Since there is no God to offend, there is no God whose forgiveness we must seek. The craze is self-salvation by self-knowledge.
Imagine feeling guilty and yet being committed to a religion that teaches that good and evil do not exist! World War II veteran Glenn Tinder tells how his conscience was deeply troubled when he shot two Japanese soldiers in the war. Though he thought they were armed, he was wrong; the deed haunted him. But he had been brought up in the Christian Science religion, which has many resemblances to New Age thought: evil does not exist, sickness is an illusion and forgiveness from God is unnecessary. Prior to his war experience, Tinder thought of God as “merely the one who had created a good universe and then conveniently disappeared, leaving the human race to ‘know’ the truth about it and enjoy it.” But as he thought about the men he had killed, the word murder entered his mind. He knew he had committed an offense: “Now unexpectedly, an angry God — or at least a divine and implacable law, menacing and offended — towered over me. Christian Science gave me no help at all: denying evil, it had nothing to say about forgiveness.”3 For decades Tinder sought the truth and eventually embraced Christ who forgave his sin and cleared his conscience.
Counselors confirm that simply telling ourselves we are fine and need no forgiveness from God will not mute the stifling feelings of guilt. Medical researchers have long realized that people use much psychic energy to neutralize the troubled conscience and the distracted mind that come from the nagging suspicion that all is not well with us.
The German philosopher Nietzsche faced the implication of disbelieving in a transcendent God; indeed, he asserted that God was dead, killed at the hands of man. Therefore he asked: “How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was the holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe the blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we Ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?”4
To put this in modern context, we could say, “We have redefined God, we have stolen His transcendence, His personhood, and now there is no one left to tell us that we are forgiven!” And yet it is forgiveness we need. In his book What’s So Amazing about Grace? Philip Yancey tells the story of a prostitute who was homeless, sick and poor. Through sobs and tears she confessed that she had been renting out her two-year-old daughter to men who wanted kinky sex! She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit. When asked why she did not go to a church for help, she replied, “Why would I ever go there? I already feel terrible about myself They’d just make me feel worse.”5
Is it fair to say that the church would make her “feel worse?” Perhaps, for a time, but only that she might feel much better. Jesus would say that there is more hope for this woman than for those who think they have no reason to “feel worse.” The gods of pop culture have little to say to this poor woman, except perhaps that she should mend her ways and do better next time. Thankfully, the God of the Scriptures does more than that: He offers forgiveness, a clean conscience and the indwelling of His Spirit. Here is a woman who needs more than to be told that her self is sacred; she needs more than a God who will “affirm who she is.” She needs the transcendent God to say, “You are forgiven.”
Approaching God
The Bible has two warnings for us. First, it warns against remaking God according to our liking. “You shall have no other gods before Me” (
But, and this is important, it is not enough that we eschew idols and come before the true God; we must approach Him in the right way. Even in evangelical churches we often hear that it does not matter how we come to God, just that we come. But some people in the Bible learned otherwise.
Cain and Abel disagreed on how to worship God. Abel brought the sacrifice from the firstlings of his flock; Cain was more creative, thinking he could come to God in whatever way he pleased. But God cared little about how much his offering cost him; he did not bring the correct offering, so he was rejected (
Nadab and Abihu were Aaron’s sons and Moses’ nephews. They were consecrated to God, the seminary students of the day, training for “full-time ministry”. One day they offered to the Lord “unauthorized fire,” and God replied in kind: “So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord” (
We are tempted to charge God with overreacting. These were young men who deserved a second chance; furthermore, they were sons of Aaron, the high priest. We would expect a bit of leeway. But right there at the altar of God, Nadab and Abihu faced immediate annihilation — no trial, no second chance.
Why did God do this? God Himself explained: “Among those who approach Me I will show myself holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored” (
Not everything is sacred, but God is. Your self is important, but it isn’t sacred; the earth is important, but it isn’t sacred. The mistake of these men was not that they came to the wrong God; they just approached the right God in the wrong way. They thought they could dispense with the instruction book. They learned the hard way that just any way will not do.
If we approach God incorrectly, not much else matters. We might not be smitten down in this life, but in the end we will experience eternal judgment. Think of the surprise of those who expected to be in heaven, but find themselves on the wrong side of the celestial gates!
So how do we approach God? The good news is that the issue is not the greatness of our sin, but rather the value of God’s prescribed approach. We are invited to come into the “Most Holy Place,” but we cannot come alone. Keep in mind that God did not choose the attributes He has. His holiness, justice and power are a given; He must be true to Himself. We dare not fall into the error of emphasizing the compassion of God to the exclusion of His justice and holiness. Nor dare we emphasize His justice and holiness without balancing these at tributes with His love and mercy. The omnipotence of God without mercy is terrifying; the holiness of God without grace leads to despair.
“Don’t worry about me, because I am OK,” a man told me on a plane. I had explained that he needed a mediator between him and the Almighty, that apart from the proper sacrifice God would reject him. He thought he was in fine shape because he worshiped his own mental idol, a god who assured him that all was well. He could appear before the god of his own making with confidence; having never been confronted with the holiness of God, he, like other post-moderns, had lost the capacity to despise his sin.
Because God is holy, sin is a personal affront to His beauty, His holiness and His character. If we think we can approach Him directly, it is because we do not understand Him or ourselves. Augustine was right when he said, “He who understands the holiness of God despairs in trying to appease Him.” Making a similar point, Donald McCullough writes, “One may appear before other gods with a sense of confidence, with no sense of being threatened. They will stay put; they don’t stray from the places assigned to them by human egos desperately trying to maintain control. But the God revealed in Jesus Christ is holy, and a holy God cannot be contained or tamed. This sort of God is ‘wholly other.'”6
Following Protocol
I’m told that when visitors have an audience with a king or queen, they are briefed on expected procedures. It would be strange indeed if God could be approached directly, without any thought given to the infinite chasm that exists between us and His holiness. The more unlike us God is, the more attention we must pay to how we approach Him.
God has meticulously spelled out the proper way for us to come into His presence. Let us review a bit of data from the Old Testament. In those times, the high priest went into the Holy of Holies one day a year — the Day of Atonement. The Holy of Holies, you will recall, was a small room in which God localized His presence. True, God exists everywhere, but this was the place where He chose to reveal His glory on earth. When a priest prepared to enter the holiest room, according to the historian Josephus, a rope was tied around his ankle. That way, if he failed to follow procedure and God struck him down, the other priests could pull him out without having to go into the room themselves. Yes, you follow the prescribed path.
I’ve had the privilege of leading tours to the sites of the Reformation. At least four times I have stood behind the table in Erfurt where Martin Luther offered his first Mass. I always relate how midway through, he froze. Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead. Paralysis struck him as he began to say the words, “We offer unto thee, the living, the true, eternal God …” Later he explained: “At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable pygmy say, ‘I want this, I ask for that?’ For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God.”7
Such words are strange to the modern ear. We hear people prattle on about God as if there is no reason to fear, no reason to feel unworthy. Such audacity only proves that those who are truly blind cannot appreciate the light; those who are dead do not feel the weight of sin that resides in their souls. When Moses longed to see the glory of God, the word was, “No man can see Me and live.” Today, modern man self-confidently trapezes into the presence of God without the slightest thought that it might be a bad idea.
Why do we need to follow the rules? First, because the moral distance between us and God is infinite. When it comes to matters of purity, God and man share no common ground. The seraphim cried, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory” (
Then there is the gap between us and God’s majesty and greatness. His purposes are beyond us; His intentions are hidden, except insofar as He reveals them. Our first question is not whether He agrees with us, but whether we come to Him in a way that agrees with Him. It is not we who must be pleased; it is He.
How, then, do we reach Him? The consistent teaching of the Bible is that we cannot reach up to Him if He does not first reach down to us. The Old Testament prescribed a ritual by which man was to approach God. The ritual’s purpose was to teach the people about God’s holiness and the need to approach Him as specified. In the New Testament that Mediator has come.
An Acceptable Mediator
All entrance into the presence of God is mediated; that is, we need someone who can represent our interests as well as those of the offended party, who in this case is God. Similarly, it is practically impossible for an ordinary citizen to get the ear of the president of the United States on his own. He needs someone who knows the president, someone who has an inside track, to make the connection. God, of course, is the President of the universe, and we have offended His justice.
In Old Testament times the priests were chosen to serve as mediators, but because they were sinners their work was ineffective for final absolution of sin. They represented Christ, who would eventually “take away the sin of the world,” as John the Baptist put it. Listen to this passage, keeping in mind the contrast between the priests of the Old Testament and Christ. “Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest [Christ] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time He waits for His enemies to be made His footstool, because by one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (
In the Old Testament many priests offered sacrifices; in fact, they worked in shifts. But Christ, who lives forever, offered one sacrifice for all time. The previous sacrifices could take care of only past sins, which is why they had to be re-offered. But we read of Christ, “By one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (
When Job was struggling in the heat of the arguments with his friends, he blurted out that he would desperately like to speak directly to God, not just pray, but dialogue with God face to face. In despair he cried, “He is not a man like me that I might answer Him, that we might confront each other in court. If only there were someone to arbitrate between us, to lay his hand upon us both, someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that His terror would frighten me no more” (
A visitor in church told me, “I try to get through to God but am not sure whether the connection is actually made.” Think of how wonderful it would be if we had someone who would “make the connection” — someone who was like us but sinless, someone who would represent us to God and represent God back to us. Candidates for the position must have the attributes of God so that the moral and spiritual gap between God and us could be confidently bridged. Christ alone has these qualifications. “Such a high priest meets our need — one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens” (
Christ is like us, fully man; He also is fully God. Indeed, someone has said, “A savior not quite God would be like a bridge broken at the farthest end.” Not only does Christ represent us in heaven, but we are already there with Him, legally speaking: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (
Perhaps now we understand why there are not many ways into God’s presence. Only one Person is able to meet God’s requirements for a mediator. Only one Person can give us the perfection we need to stand with confidence in the presence of the Almighty: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (
I know you’ve heard someone say, “I have not left Christianity but just moved beyond it into spirituality.” This is a popular “progression” these days. But strictly speaking, if you move “beyond” Christianity, you must abandon it. Whenever you try to add to it, you subtract from it. Those who surrender the uniqueness of Christ do not simply abandon a part of the gospel message; they abandon the whole of it. Mathematics, like all truth, reminds us that there is only one way to be right, but many ways to be wrong.
If our faith is in Christ, we can expect no complications at the border when we make the journey from earth to heaven. Our Representative is already there, seated in our stead, assuring that we have a safe arrival. God does business with us by doing business with Christ. To stand in the presence of God without representation would be like standing a hundred yards from the sun; God’s holiness would liquefy us. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all men — the testimony given in its proper time” (
An Acceptable Sacrifice
Why is a sacrifice necessary for the atonement of sin? Justice demands it. A simple traffic ticket cannot be forgiven without a payment. We are guilty of serious infractions of God’s law; indeed, we are an offense to His holiness. Thus we cannot enter unless God’s wrath is turned away. “By one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (
There are some sacrifices God will not accept. One is the gift of sincerity; some think God should receive them because they mean well. Another is the gift of service; some remember all the good they have done and think God owes them acceptance for their basic decency. A third is the gift of their own spiritual quest. And many bring the gift of guilt; they flagellate themselves, believing that if they feel sorry enough, they will pay for their own sins and God will accept them.
Martin Luther has a word for such people: “What makes you think that God is more pleased with your good deeds than He is with His blessed Son?” Yes, we must bring an offering, a sacrifice to God, but it cannot be of our own making if we are to win His approval. It must be the sacrifice He Himself made for us.
A sacrifice must be equal to the offense committed. Because our sin is against an infinite God, we need a sacrifice of infinite value. It follows that only God can supply the sacrifice that He Himself demands. That is the meaning of the gospel: God met His own requirements for us. Remember the story of the defendant who stood in the presence of a judge for a speeding violation, and the judge himself came down from his chair and paid the fine? That is the story of what God did for us.
Christ’s death on the cross repaired the irreparable. “Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (
The prostitute I referred to, the rapist who wrote me from prison asking whether he, too, could be forgiven — both of these and a host of others can be accepted as fully by God as anyone else. The reason is obvious: since God has promised to receive all who trust in His Son, they all receive the same gift of righteousness; they all become members of the same family.
Augustus Toplady had it right:
Not the labors of my hands
Can fulfill thy laws’ demands
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save and Thou alone.
(Rock of Ages)
Recently several from our church staff were riding in a cab, telling a man who was a Muslim why he should accept Christ not just as a prophet but as the only qualified Savior. He said, “No, I have to pay for my sin. I’m not supposed to get drunk, but I have; I was not supposed to sleep with women, but I have. So justice requires that I suffer in hell for my sins, and after I have paid for them, I will go to heaven.”
We told him how glad we were that he was wrong. For one thing, he cannot pay for his sins, even in hell; those who are unforgiven by God are eternally guilty. For another, the good news is that Jesus already paid the debt for those who choose to believe in Him. With all due respect, Muhammad was not able to make such a payment, nor was Krishna, Gandhi, or Zoroaster. You can’t put Christ on the same shelf as these other teachers. Only in Christianity do we find that the mediator and the sacrifice are the same person. With Him at our side, we dare to “draw near to God.”
An Acceptable Attitude
Let’s read carefully our invitation into God’s presence: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, His body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water” (
We come with our mediator and our sacrifice; we come with the knowledge that we belong to Him and He belongs to us. We come with a sincere heart, that is, with truthfulness and honesty. We come with openness, though we have much that we would prefer to hide. We come fully known, completely exposed, totally understood. We come without trying to put the best spin on our sins and the lives we lived.
We also come with “full assurance,” confident that we will be received. Christ is fully accepted, and therefore, we are too. Here we join hands with other sinners: the religious zealot stands with the prostitute; the righteous churchgoer finds himself alongside the murderer. Rather than driving us away from God, our guilt has driven us toward Him. The more clearly we see our Sin, the more clearly we must see the wonder of Christ’s sacrifice and intercession.
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand” (
Many years ago two of my daughters and I were in Washington, D.C., where I spoke at a church retreat. Present for the weekend was a member of President Bush’s secret-service detail. He asked us whether we wanted to visit the Oval Office the next day since the president was out of town. We were honored to accept.
The next morning we met at one of the gates at the White House. When we stopped at the first guard station, one of my daughters offered her purse to the officer for inspection, but he waved her on. “You are with him,” he said, nodding to the agent, “go on in.”
Then, as we entered the White House, we met another assembly of guards. They looked at the agent, glanced at us, and said, “You are with him. Go on in.” In the hallway we met more guards. Again they looked at the agent, glanced at us, and said, “You are with him…. Go on in.”
By now we were nearing the Oval Office; I could already see the open door. One more guard stood at the entrance. Glancing at the agent, he, too, waved us on toward the door with the understanding, You are with him. Go on in. Then we set foot in the Oval Office, though we were not allowed to walk far beyond the doorway.
Now imagine that all believers in Christ were to die together. When we arrive on the other side of the gate called death, Jesus comes to join us on our journey enroute to our heavenly home. We go past one sentry of angels standing guard on the path to the New Jerusalem. They look at Christ, then glance at us and say, “You’re with Him. Go on in.”
Then we pass another band of angels and yet another. Each time, they look at Christ and then glance at us and say, “You’re with Him. Go on in.”
Finally, we near the very dwelling place of God. We are almost blinded by what the Scriptures call “unapproachable light.” For a moment we have a flashback, remembering our sins and failures. Among us are women who had abortions; the prostitute referred to earlier is there with us. Former adulterers stand with homosexuals, thieves with the covetous; all of these were redeemed and cleansed by Christ’s blood.
Among the group also are many who were spared such evils, though they struggled with similar sins in their minds. The flashback is so powerful, so real, each of us protests, “I can’t go in! I can’t go in!”
But the angels at the gate of the dwelling place of God look at Jesus, then they glance at us and say, “You’re with Him…. Go on in!” And so it is that Christ ushers us into the presence of Almighty God. Don’t ever think that there are many ways to the divine. Jesus is the one qualified mediator, the only qualified sacrifice and the only qualified Savior.
A Personal Response
If our trust is in Christ, we will share His triumph in heaven. There is only one Man at the center of the universe, one Man who is able to bring us into God’s presence. John’s Book of Revelation records the praise offered this man: ‘”You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because You were slain, and with Your blood You purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.’ Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: ‘Worthy is the Lamb, who was Slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!'” (
Let us thank Him for introducing us to the Father and inviting us to the table for fellowship with Him.
Taken from: Ten Lies About God: And How You Might Already Be Deceived by Erwin W. Lutzer, (c) 2000, Word Publishing, Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved.
1Marty Kaplan, “Ambushed by Spirituality,” Time, 24 June 1996, 62.
2Wayne Dyer, Your Sacred Self (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), xii.
3Glenn Tinder, “Birth of a Troubled Conscience,” Christianity Today, 26 April 1999, 33.
4Quoted in Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1994), 18-19.
5Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997), 11.
6Donald W. McCullough, The Trivialization of God (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1995), 86.
7Roland Bainton, Here I Stand (New York: New American Library, 1950), 30.
