By: Tony Williams | February 12, 2022
One Good reason…
…to Believe in Jesus: One Way to God: Goodness
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6
Introduction
In my last writing, we discussed an issue that tends to cause a lot of people to struggle, or walk away from their faith. That is the idea that Jesus is the only way to know God and experience reconciliation with God. With statements attributed to Jesus Himself like, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), and “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25), it should be clear that Jesus claims to be the only way to God.
Objection
There are certainly many ways to frame an objection to this idea, but below are three common ways to argue against Jesus being the only way to Heaven:
● Intellectual: Jesus was just a man-who is he to make such a claim?
● Emotional: How could a good God not allow those who aren’t Christians to be punished?
● Volitional: I would never worship a God who would force His creation to worship Him.
Response
This paper will attempt to respond to the second objection asking, how could a good God allow those who aren’t Christians to be punished. It is more of an emotional response that questions God’s goodness. If you will grant my response to the first objection for a moment, that Jesus is God in the flesh, and that as creator has the authority to save and to condemn his creation, it naturally brings about this question. Isn’t God supposed to be love? How is it loving to allow your creation to suffer torment for failing to bend the knee to Him?
This is where we have to consider what it means to be good in the first place. What makes something “good” today is hotly debated, but at its core, I think we can agree that if something is objectively “good” it brings about pleasure and not pain, joy and not anger, growth and not decay, life and not death. Throughout the Bible, God’s goodness is proclaimed. He is the source of life, pleasure, joy and growth. If our definition of good fits, it only makes sense that we would say that God is good.
So when it comes to the bad stuff like pain and anger and decay and death, where does that come from? According to the Bible, those things are the natural (and supernatural) effects of being against God’s will. Being against God is being against His expressed will for our pleasure and joy and growth and life that He designed us to enjoy. These violations against God’s will are not a threat to His existence or His goodness. They are a threat to the lives of the violators who He loves enough to die for, even as they are in defiance of His mandates.
Analogy
You may recall the worm analogy in the last writing that describes worms (us) who tend to crawl on the concrete (sin) and get caught in the hot sun (judgment) after defying their inventor’s (God’s) repeated warnings not to crawl on the concrete (sin). What is the inventor to do with worms that refuse to heed his commands to stay off the concrete? These worms also convince other worms to leave their dirt home and go night crawling, and even convince other worms that there is no such thing as the sun despite the evidence of worm carcasses all over the driveway. They even convince themselves there isn’t an inventor, and that it’s not true that worms were designed for the dirt. Is the inventor guilty of the deaths of the worms who believe the night crawling lie because he invented them for dirt? Not to mention, the inventor himself came to the worms and suffered the horrible death of the sun for any worm who is willing to crawl under his shadow back to the safe dirt they were created for. That’s Jesus in the analogy in case you didn’t get it.
Application
Is God required to allow people into His kingdom who are ardently and unapologetically at war with Him, and actively trying to recruit allies from among His subjects? It is said that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. Sin is a bad idea. If God is the Creator of pleasure and joy and growth and love, man is the cause of pain, anger decay and death. This is because man has chosen to go against the created order ever since the first
temptation in the garden and still fails to acknowledge his own responsibility in the ever-worsening consequences. I encourage you to escape judgment by fleeing sin on the journey home in the merciful shadow of our Creator.
About the Author
Tony Williams is currently serving in his 20th year as a police officer in a city in Southern Illinois. He has been studying apologetics in his spare time for two decades, since a crisis of faith led him to the discovery of vast and ever-increasing evidence for his faith. Tony received a bachelor’s degree in University Studies from Southern Illinois University in 2019. His career in law enforcement has provided valuable insight into the concepts of truth, evidence, confession, testimony, cultural competency, morality, and most of all, the compelling need for Christ in the lives of the lost. Tony plans to pursue postgraduate studies in apologetics in the near future to sharpen his understanding of the various facets of Christian apologetics.
Check Out Other Resources Like This One by the Author
Tony Williams, “One Good Reason to Believe in Jesus’s Authority,” BellatorChristi.com (January 30, 2022), https://bellatorchristi.com/2022/01/30/one-good-reason-to-believe-in-jesuss-authority/
© 2022. BellatorChristi.com.
Thanks for taking the time to read the article, Barry. I must say, if I understand your point correctly about the character of a judge being secondary to the existence of the judge, I completely agree with you! If there is no ultimate judge, I have no need to worry about that judge’s judgement.
For me, after I came to accept the totality of evidence for God’s existence, I struggled with this question, and embracing mystery is not something I am good at. However, as I considered the idea more fully, I came to realize that the only way there can be any righteous judgement of anything at all is if there is one who orders things in the physical universe where man and machine live, as well ass the immaterial universe where mathematics and morality live to work in a certain, ordered way.
I don’t blame you for dismissing this question if you answered no to the first question of God’s existence, but I would certainly have to encourage you to continue to engage with the ideas in your doubts. The more I tried to conform the world to not need a designer, the more I found the world made no rational sense. However, as I progressed in my studies and thoughts on God, it was like the tumblers of many locks falling into their respective places to allow me to see things more clearly. I came to see the world in a light that I didn’t know I was missing before.
Thank you again for your thoughts!
Tony Williams
I would argue that the objection “how could a good God allow those who aren’t Christians to be punished” does more harm than good since all it does it encourage the Christian to listen to themselves talk about God’s mysterious ways.
As an atheist and counterapologist myself, i claim that it is illogical and unreasonable to challenge the justice of a judge, until that judge’s existence and relation to the case is first established.
if there remain reasonable justifications to either a) deny the judge exists, or b) deny that he/she/it intends to punish certain classes of people, then the question of “how could a good God allow those who aren’t Christians to be punished” remains moot.
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