IS ETERNAL LIFE ONLY THROUGH JESUS?

This is the first installment (of many future installments) of my response to your questions (learn more here). My hope is to have this be a piece of larger, ongoing conversations, and not to be the last word. With this in mind, my hope is that this will propel conversation forward. As you will see, many of my responses are designed to do just this. My hope is to respond in a way that opens the questions wider, rather than narrow them. With this in mind …

Question:

Is eternal life with God is only limited to Christians through Jesus Christ? I don't know if I can say that God would condemn so many people to eternity apart from Him, just because they grew up in a different culture and religion and believe different things about Him. Does believing that God may work in bigger ways than we can comprehend across religions devalue the life and work of Jesus and discredit it all?

Response:

This question has often been asked, and as with any question, it is often asked within our framework, culture and context. Perhaps stepping out of our context for a moment would be helpful in considering this question.

Don Richardson does just this in his book Eternity in Their Hearts: Startling Evidence of Belief in the One True God in Hundreds of Cultures Throughout the World. He speaks toward this question from a variety of cultures and contexts. My favorite story from this book is about the Wa people. Known as a headhunting tribe, they would, each year, during planting season, plant human heads along with seeds. They believed this would appease the gods and give them a good crop.

In the midst of this culture, a prophet would occasionally rise up and call the Wa people to repentance. These men were prophets of the “true God” they called Siyeh. They condemned headhunting and the attempt to appease the gods. One of these prophets of Siyeh was named Pu Chan.

In the 1880’s he convinced his fellow tribesmen to stop their practices of headhunting as other prophets had done before him. In the tradition of the prophets of Siyeh he told the long-standing story of the “white brother with the a copy of the lost book.” Pu Chan told them if they did not stop the “white brother” would not come to the them for fear of being killed.

Thousands repented and ceased their practices. Then, one day Pu Chan saddled a pony and told his disciples, “Follow this pony. Siyeh told me last night that the white brother has finally come near! Siyeh will cause this pony to lead you to him. When you find the white brother, let him mount this pony. We would be an ungrateful people if we made him walk the last part of his journey toward us!”

The pony wandered more than 200 miles through the mountains, walked into a small town, walked toward a well and stopped. William Marcus Young, a white missionary, was in the well. He greeted the disciples of Pu Chan in their language, and, as you guessed, he had the "lost book of the true God."

They fell at Young’s feet and said, “This pony is saddled especially for you. Our people are all waiting. Fetch the book! We must be on our way!” This story that Richardson tells is one of many others that are just like it. These stories show us how far God will go to reach out to humanity. But it also says something about people. Why is it that over the centuries so many seem to know there is something (or someone) else? Where did the idea of Siyeh come from in the tradition of the Wa people?

And it raises more questions.

As the story goes Pu Chan, and more than 10,000 others from the Wa tribe were baptized, and chose to follow Jesus. But what about all those who lived before Pu Chan? What about the other prophets who heard from Siyeh, and called the Wa tribesmen to repentance? What about the Wa tribesmen who in the years before Pu Chan heard other prophets, and repented from their headhunting ways? They responded to the same revelation that Pu Chan and others did. The only difference is they never met the “white brother” or received the “lost book.” What about them?

Billy Graham once said there are some who “may not even know the name of Jesus, but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don't have, and they turn to the only light that they have, and I think they are saved, and that they're going to be with us in heaven … I've met people in various parts of the world in tribal situations, that they have never seen a Bible or heard about a Bible, and never heard of Jesus, but they've believed in their hearts that there was a God, and they've tried to live a life that was quite apart from the surrounding community in which they lived.”

And so, we are left to wonder, how high, long, wide and deep is the mercy of God? How far will he go so that all might know? Only God himself knows this for sure. But one thing we know is that God is one who constantly reveals himself to humanity. He has done this so that we might seek him, and perhaps reach out for him and find him. And the good news? He is not far from any of us …