THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

The cross and other religions

In the booklets With So Many Religions, Why Christianity? and What Is Truth and Does It Matter? I have outlined the main differences between Christianity and other religions. In the first of those booklets I have given personal examples from people of Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim backgrounds who have found something in the cross of Christ they have not found elsewhere. Here I will focus briefly on that, the most significant of differences.

No other religion believes in a God whose justice demands that evil is given its due penalty and yet whose love is prepared to take that penalty upon himself. And there is no other God who is prepared to give his created beings freedom to rebel against him, and yet personally enter into the sufferings and pain that is the consequence of that disobedience. Other religions which have some kind of belief in a personal god or gods (aspects of Buddhism tend to deny this), either do not accept the reality of good and evil, or do not consider evil is serious enough to present a problem that simply cannot be solved by God’s mercy alone.

Muslims have an awareness of the justice of God, but they have no teaching of the love of God as it comes to us in the New Testament. John Stott, in The Cross of Christ, has this to say:

One of the saddest features of Islam is that it rejects the cross, declaring it inappropriate that a major prophet of God should come to such an ignominious end. The Koran sees no need for the sin-bearing death of a Saviour. At least five times it declares categorically that ‘no soul shall bear another’s burden.’[49] Indeed, ‘if a laden soul cries out for help, not even a near relation shall share its burden.’ Why is this? It is because ‘each man shall reap the fruits of his own deeds’, even though Allah is merciful and forgives those who repent and do good. Denying the need for the cross, the Koran goes on to deny the fact. The Jews ‘uttered a monstrous falsehood’ when they declared ‘we have put to death the Messiah Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of Allah’, for ‘they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did’.

[49] liii.38; xxv.18; xvii.15; xxxix.7 and vi.164.

The Koran does speak of God’s love, but only for those who in some measure deserve it. The cross, however, reveals the love of God for those who don’t deserve it and never could. Also, in the light it throws on the nature of the Trinity, the cross gives us a basis for believing John’s statement that indeed “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love must exist in relationships, and from eternity that love has existed between the three persons of the Trinity. It is revealed and made available to us supremely through the cross.

This revelation that is given through the cross that God is indeed love, was something quite new in the ancient world. The thought of a loving God was foreign in the Greek and Roman world. Love, it was argued, was born out of need. To link the gods with love would suggest that they lacked something in and of themselves and so, by implication, were imperfect and vulnerable. Zeus was the ultimate god of power, and even though Plato mistrusted the idea that the gods were arbitrarily violent, his writings reinforced the generally held opinion that they were invulnerable. They can do anything to anyone, but no one can affect them or cause them pain.

Of course, though the cross reveals the love of God as nothing else could, it also lays bare our desperate need. Emil Brunner, the prominent Swiss theologian, said in his classic book, The Mediator:


All other forms of religion, not to mention philosophy, deal with the problem of guilt apart from the intervention of God and they therefore come to a cheap conclusion. In other religions human beings are spared the final humiliation of knowing that the mediator must bear the punishment instead of us. They are not stripped absolutely naked.

The gospel does strip us naked, and declares us bankrupt before God. However, it also provides the perfect solution to our need, and through it we can enter into the kind of intimate relationship with him, through our adoption into his family and the indwelling Spirit within, such as no other religion has to offer. We can also be fully assured of a future that is more certain and more real than is on offer anywhere else, when the whole of creation will be renewed.

It is also in the area of suffering in this world where the gospel has so much to offer. In the booklet If There Is a God, Why Is There So Much Suffering? I have looked at the question of suffering in some detail. It is particularly the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus that gives us some hope in dealing with all the questions that the problem of suffering raises. Jurgen Moltmann made a very relevant point when he wrote:

Christ was a suffering Saviour. Statues and pictures of the Buddha show him sitting fat and contented, eyes closed in the lotus position, detached and blinded to the pain of this world. Mohammed is admired as he rides, sword in hand, inflicting wounds on the world through Jihad or ‘Holy War’ against ‘the Infidel’. But Christ alone suffered and was wounded for that world. He is the only Saviour with wounds. He is ‘The Crucified God!’

In Jesus we have a God who personally understands the very worst suffering that this world can deliver. And because he understands, he can share it with us and see us through it. If we have pledged our personal allegiance to him, he will provide the motivation and strength to relieve suffering wherever that is possible. And through the victory he has achieved, he can offer the sure hope that one day it will end. Though it may not satisfy all the questions we may have about suffering, I know of no other philosophy or religion which can offer that kind of encouragement and hope.

G. Studdert-Kennedy was an army chaplain who witnessed the senseless slaughter of thousands of troops on the battlefields of France during the First World War. He was known affectionately to many of the soldiers as “Woodbine Willie”. He found the cross was the only symbol which made any sense about God in the middle of that pointless suffering. In his poem, The Comrade God, he compares two ways we can think of God:

Dost Thou not heed the helpless sparrow’s falling?
Canst Thou not see the tears that women weep?
Canst Thou not hear Thy little children calling?
Dost Thou not watch them as they sleep?

Then, O my God, Thou art too great to love me,
Since Thou dost reign beyond the reach of tears,
Calm and serene as the cruel stars above me,
High and remote from human hope and fears.

Only in Him can I find a home to hide me,
Who on the cross was slain to rise again;
Only with Him, my Comrade God, beside me,
Can I go forth to war with sin and pain.

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