Christians are often accused of being narrow-minded for their conviction that Jesus is the only way to God. Are Christians intolerant for believing this? In this sermon, R.C. Sproul warns us against adopting the false belief that all religions lead to heaven, exhorting us to hold fast to the biblical truth that Jesus Christ is the only name by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).

Before we proceed to reading from the book of Acts, which we have been following the last several weeks, I need to put a warning label on the bottle, as it were. There are some things in this passage that some might find jarring or even offensive.

If you come to the text assuming what you are about to hear involves simply the ancient opinions of first-century Christians, which may indeed be biased, slanted, and unworthy of your consideration, you may easily dismiss these jarring portions. If, on the other hand, you come to the hearing of this text already persuaded that what you are about to hear is nothing less than the unvarnished Word of God, and you still find offense with it, then that would mean something quite different. It would be time for an urgent glance at the state of your own soul. If we are offended by what the Lord God Almighty speaks, then the problem is not with Him, but with us.

Having given that warning, now I will proceed to read from Acts 4:1–12:

Now as they spoke to the people, the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees came upon them, being greatly disturbed that they taught the people and preached in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them, and put them in custody until the next day, for it was already evening. However, many of those who heard the word believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.

And it came to pass, on the next day, that their rulers, elders, and scribes, as well as Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the family of the high priest, were gathered together at Jerusalem. And when they had set them in the midst, they asked, “By what power or by what name have you done this?”

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders of Israel: If we this day are judged for a good deed done to a helpless man, by what means he has been made well, let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole. This is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.’ Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

He who has ears to hear to hear the Word of God, let them hear. Let us pray.

Father, as we contemplate this third address of the Apostle Peter recorded for us in the New Testament, we pray that You will give us hearts that are open to hear the tremendously important truth he declared that day before the highest court of the land. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Secular Religion

It seems that every month or so, a poll is released by Gallup or George Barna that tells us what contemporary Christians believe and practice present time. I must tell you, by way of preface, that I am not always that impressed by these polls because the way people are identified as evangelical or “born-again Christians” is usually quite loose and ambiguous. Also, the way the inquiries are worded is given to various forms of answer and reply. So, these polls, in my estimation, are not bathed in precision. Nevertheless, the general trends they indicate are of some interest to me.

The latest of these surveys involved asking questions to people who identified themselves as evangelical Christians with respect to their understanding of Scripture, spiritual things, the authority of the Bible, and so on. The net result of the survey was that the vast majority of people who call themselves evangelical Christians in our society do not embrace a Christian worldview. They have a religious inclination toward Jesus, but their thinking is not informed by what Jesus or the Apostles taught. Rather, their thinking, as well as their behavior, has been saturated in the tenets of secularism.

There is no tenet more basic to the secular culture we live in than that of religious tolerance. Our country was based on the principle that people of all religious creeds and backgrounds were welcomed on our shores and were to be accorded the freedom of expressing that religion, so that all religions were equally tolerated under the law. That is what it used to be. Now, the assumption of the secularist is that all religions are not only equally tolerated under the law, but they are equally valid—or invalid.

The American truth, which is as American as apple pie, is that it does not matter what you believe, so long as you are sincere. There are many roads that go to heaven. Some go directly, some by a more circuitous route, but in the final analysis, all God is concerned about is that you be people of faith. You can have your faith in Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, Jesus, Dao, whomever. Yet I cannot think of any principle that is more plainly and categorically opposed to the universal teaching of sacred Scripture, both in the Old and New Testaments, than this secularist idea.

If I know anything about the nature of God from the Scriptures, it is this: God hates religion, if we mean by “religion” those systems and practices that we invent with our own minds. The primary sin of fallen humanity, as Paul tells us in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, is that we universally take the plain, manifest revelation of God Himself and distort it, twist it, exchange it for a lie, and turn our attention to idols. For that sin, we expose ourselves to God’s unmitigated and just wrath, because to trade His glory for an idol is the supreme insult to His holiness. The only other insult that comes close is to mention the name of His only-begotten Son in the same breath with that of Buddha, Confucius, or Muhammad, who are idols and not sons of the living God.

The Intolerable Idea of Exclusivity

There is nothing people find more intolerable than exclusivity, than to meet with the Christian assertion that there is only one way to God. I would say that only a handful of professing Christians in our culture today will stand up publicly and say there is only one way to God through Christ. The rest, by denying that principle, are guilty of nothing less than treason to the Son of God.

I once had an uncomfortable experience when I was in college. I had an English teacher who was tough. She had been a war correspondent, she was openly hostile against Christianity, and she knew that I was a Christian. One day, in the middle of class, she said to me, “Mr. Sproul, do you think that Jesus is the only way to God?”

You could hear a pin drop in the room. Everybody turned and looked at me, and they could not wait to hear what I was going to say. I gulped and thought: “What do I do now? If I say, ‘No, I don’t believe He’s the only way,’ that would be to publicly deny Him. If I say, ‘Yes, He is the only way,’ then the wrath of this teacher is going to be on my head and the scorn of my classmates will be with me as well.”

So, cleverly, I answered, with my hand in front of my mouth, “Yes.” I mumbled my reply, hardly like Luther at the Diet of Worms. She said: “Speak up. I didn’t hear what you said. Do you believe that Jesus is the only way to God?” I had to face the music. I said, “Yes ma’am, I do.”

Here it came, full bore. She looked at me, raised her voice, and said, “That’s the most bigoted, outrageous, narrow-minded, arrogant”—she used a few more adjectival qualifiers that I do not remember—“of anything I’ve ever heard in my life.” I sank down into the chair trying to find some protection.

The Only Way

The teacher moved on and finished the class, and as we were leaving, she stood at the door. She had mellowed a little bit since she had publicly humiliated me, and she said: “I guess I was a little rough on you there today. It wasn’t nice to do.” I said, “Yes ma’am, you were.” She said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t believe how any intelligent person could be so narrow and bigoted as you are.”

I asked her, “Well, do you think it’s possible that Jesus Christ is one way to God?” She answered, “Yes, I suppose that’s possible.” I asked another question: “Can you believe that I could be foolish enough, even though I’m educated, to come to the conviction that Jesus is at least one way to God?” She answered again, “Yes, I can understand that.”

Then I said, “What happens if I come to the place where I am convinced that Christ is one way to God, and I then see that Jesus says: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’ (John 14:6)? Then I look further at what Jesus taught, and I hear Him say, ‘I am the door through which men must enter,’ and then talk about being the good shepherd, the only way, and that all the rest are thieves and robbers (John 10:9–16). Then I hear the testimony of Peter in Acts 4:12: ‘There is no other name under heaven given by which we must be saved.’ Don’t you see that if Jesus is one way, and He says He’s the only way, and He’s lying about that, He couldn’t even be one way? But if He does say He’s the only way, and I say, ‘I’m a Christian, but Jesus was wrong about this,’ then I would possess unmitigated arrogance. What could be more arrogant than a disciple of Jesus challenging his Lord’s teaching about the way of salvation?”

That is why I plead with you, brothers and sisters. Be careful about this. Be careful what you embrace from the secular world as a Christian.

I said to her: “If I believe that Jesus is the only way because He’s my way, and the unspoken premise is that anything R.C. Sproul believes must be the only way. Then, I would be guilty of all these things you are saying. But don’t you see? I believe it because He says it.”

The Narrow, Merciful God

My English teacher said: “I can see what you’re saying, but I still don’t understand how you can believe in a God who is so narrow.” I answered: “For the sake of argument, suppose that once upon a time, there was nothing, no universe. The only thing that existed was God Himself, and God created all that is. Of all the creatures God made, He took one creature—man—and stamped them with His own divine image, saying, ‘You shall be holy even as I am holy.’ He gave them the highest privilege He could give and called them to mirror and reflect His righteousness. Suppose that they quickly abandoned the calling the Lord had given them and instead followed the way of the Serpent, who promised them that they would be as great as God. They were involved in cosmic revolt from the outset. Now, if that were true, wouldn’t God have been perfectly just to have simply destroyed us all?”

She answered, “I suppose so.”

I continued: “But He didn’t do that. Instead, He clothed His creatures, covered their nakedness, and gave them a promise of mercy and forgiveness. He promised a Messiah who would come and bear their sins for them. God called them out of darkness. Later, He called a particular people out of slavery, the people through whom His promised Messiah would come. They had become impotent before the mightiest ruler in the world, the pharaoh. God delivered them, made them His people, and gave them His Law, the first of which is exclusive: ‘Thou shall have no other gods before Me.’ After God rescued them from slavery, they still had many other gods before Him. They bowed before Baal, Ashtoreth, and the other pagan deities of their day. Still, He did not destroy them. Instead, God sent them His prophets and called them to come back to Him, as a father calls a wayward child, but they killed His prophets by stoning them. Then, finally, to show His great love, God said: “I’m going to send the eternal second person of the Trinity, My only-begotten Son, and let Him take upon Himself the cloak of human flesh. He will live in the midst of this corruption and take upon Himself the entire punishment that all the world deserves on the cross. I am going to offer Him to the same people who are hostile towards Me.’ Then suppose that they killed Him. But God still said: ‘If you put your trust in My only-begotten Son and honor Him, I will forgive every sin you’ve ever committed. I will give you everlasting life in a place where death is exiled, where there is no night, no sin, no pain, and no harm. I will give you joy and happiness like no creature has ever contemplated, and all you must do is honor My Son and Him alone.’”

God Has Done Enough

Once I had told all of that to my teacher, I asked her: “After all of that, would you still stand before God and say: ‘God, that’s a very nice story, but why give us only Jesus? You haven’t done enough. Why didn’t You give us twenty saviors? Why should it bother You whether I put my trust, devotion, admiration, and adoration in Your Son, Christ, or Muhammad?’”

Would any of us ever dare to say before almighty God, “You haven’t done enough”? This is what Peter’s speech was about that day at the temple, when the highest court of Israel sat in judgment on the Apostles and said, “By what authority, by what power, by what name did you heal this man?”

Peter answered: “It wasn’t Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, or David”—and we could add to that list that it wasn’t Buddha, Muhammad, or Confucius. Rather, Peter said: “It was by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, and whom God has raised from the dead. That’s by whose authority, power, and name this man was made whole, that you and all Israel might know His is the only name under heaven through which men may be saved.”

Beloved, if you are a Christian, you should be prepared to die for that affirmation. If you are not, you are playing at religion, and you have missed the Son of God.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.