“I could be on the road, but the wrong road if I get Jesus wrong.”
The modern person often believes that many roads lead up the mountain of religion and find God at the top. Many modern people believe that Jesus’ profession that “I am the road, the life, the truth” is narrow-minded and unfairly denies the validity of other roads up the mountain.
The assumption here is this: all roads lead up the mountain. And, of course, this concept ignores something important: roads could come down from the mountain. On the one hand, mankind makes all the roads; it’s about man’s search for God. On the other hand, what if the truth is that it’s always been about God’s search for a reunion with mankind?
If it’s only mankind’s search for God, C.S. Lewis says it best: “the mouse search(es) for the cat”. And if mankind did make roads up the mountain, it is quite arrogant to say that one road is superior to the others. We’d be claiming that we’d made a better religion than some other culture’s religion. It’s simply ridiculous to proclaim one manmade religion as superior to another one. That’s like saying one sports team is the absolute best-always in every season, the best. Or proclaiming that one poet is better than another or that one hairstyle is superior.
However, if God is in the business of making roads down the mountain, our job is to discern which roads, if any, are His. And what if He only made one? Then, as the Christian Apologist Peter Kreeft says, “the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God’s God-made one.”
Christianity’s message, as spoken through the life of Jesus, is that the second one is the truth: there is a road coming down from the mountain. God is searching for and pursuing us. We read throughout the Bible that mankind’s religion fails. The fact is that there is no successful human road up to the top of the mountain. There is only God’s triumphant road down to us. That road has a name and He is Jesus.