You have come to put your trust in Jesus as your Saviour and Lord. You know your sins have been forgiven, and you want to follow Jesus in every part of your life. You are all excited about this, and as you begin to tell your friends what the Lord has done in your life, you meet with mockery, ridicule, scepticism, etc., because according to your friends you are following some stories cooked up by religious fanatics. For example, they tell you that science has shown that all that you are and see are just a random collection of molecules. Some of them tell you that Jesus never died, let alone rose from the dead, and the disciples took Him away from the cross and hid Him somewhere till He recovered. They say they can point out so many errors in the Bible that it is only old people who still believe in it. Some say that all religions are essentially the same, telling people to be good, even though they call God by different names and describe different paths to reach Him. Questions like these rattle you, because they hit at the core of your beliefs and you don't have any valid answers. Some older believers just tell you to stop thinking about such things and only believe!

But you need answers, and there are answers. God has created us in His image, and His ways must make sense for us. Our faith in God must be based on facts, and not on blind assumptions. God who has created us as thinking creatures knows that we need real answers. So here is an attempt to address these basic, core issues. Once you are convinced about these fundamental truths, you know you are on the right path even if there are a million things which you don't understand, because you know you have the major issues clear.

It is not a sin if we don't know everything. Only God is omniscient, knowing all. As creatures with many limitations, we will never have all the answers, otherwise we will be God. But once we have the knowledge of the core matters, and as we experience more of reality as time goes on, they will give us the stability to face new questions. One major mistake people make when they try to 'deconstruct' their faith is to expect to find all the answers, and they conclude they cannot trust in God if something seems to be wrong according to their understanding.

Question: Are all religions the same?>

The plain answer is "No"! This is clear because Jesus Himself said so. "Jesus *said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.'" So even though it looks very 'inclusive' and therefore appealing to say that all ways finally lead to the same God, just as different rivers run down to the same ocean, the facts point to the opposite. All religions are not talking about the same God, and so, the paths they describe will also not lead to the true God. What we want to do here is to look at how there is no one like Jesus, and how there is no other way except through Him to know God. This is quite different from making a detailed study of all the different religious beliefs and then concluding from there which one is true. Others have taken that kind of studies, and I would recommend the well-researched book called "The universe next door" by Dr. James W. Sire which methodically examines the different worldviews based on certain common criteria.

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis popularised the "Trilemma" argument regarding Jesus’s identity. Lewis argued that because Jesus claimed to be God, we cannot simply call Him a "great moral teacher"; He must be one of three things:

Lunatic: He was sincerely deluded and insane.

Liar: He intentionally deceived people for power or personal gain.

Lord: He is exactly who He said He was.

Anyone who has studied the life of Jesus with an open and honest mind will agree that Jesus was not a liar or a mad man. But then many people are willing to accept Him as a good teacher. But if a mere man, even one who is a good teacher, makes a claim to be God, he cannot be a good teacher. God is the Creator and we are only created beings. But Jesus did make that claim, and proved it by the miracles that He did and by coming back from the dead. His miracles were not sleight-of-the-hand tricks or hypnotic delusions. When five thousand men, apart from women and children, were fed starting from five loaves of bread and two fish, the twelve basket full of leftovers proved that it was not a delusion. When He walked on water or turned water into wine, He demonstrated that He had authority over the laws of nature. When He raised Lazarus from the dead after having been in the tomb for four days, He showed Himself as the source of life itself. Demons who met Him identified Him as the Son of God and trembled before Him before He cast them out of people they had possessed. Jesus said to those who did not believe in Him, "If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father" (Jn.10:37,38).

The Pharisees were a group of Jews in those days who thought that there were nobody else who knew God's laws like they did. When Jesus taught His disciples and the multitudes in a way that exposed their hollowness, they sent officers to bring Jesus in. They returned and said, "Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks" (Jn.7:46). Jesus did not speak of rituals or ceremonies. He spoke of the life of God, His character, and said how He had come to give us that same life. He spoke of forgiveness and how we needed to love even our enemies. He spoke of inner peace that would protect us from committing murder and inner holiness that would prevent us from committing adultery. He knew that we were incapable in ourselves to come to have this kind of life, and so He came with grace to help us, "Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Heb.4:16). His teaching went to the core of our character. He was certainly not a "religious teacher" who taught people what rituals and ceremonies to follow in order to find favour with God.

Finally Jesus allowed Himself to be caught and crucified by the false religious leaders of that day, because He had come to offer Himself as the Lamb of God whose sacrifice would pay for the sins of mankind. The Jews of Israel had been prepared to receive the Messiah (Masiah in Hebrew), or the Anointed One, or Christ (in Greek) who would deliver them according to prophecy. They mistakenly assumed that He would be a political deliverer from the rule of the Romans, and did not understand how He was to deliver them from sin.

The whole Bible is about this, how God created the whole universe for man to live in, how man turned away from Him, and how God came after fallen man, took his punishment on Himself, and offered man forgiveness and a way to get back to a relationship with God. That is the miracle of the Bible, how 40 different authors wrote down books as they were inspired by God, and when those books were all put together, they narrate this big story from the beginning to the end. In this Bible we find the narration of the whole history of man from creation to the cross of Jesus, and also what God has planned for our future.

The greatest miracle reported in the Bible is that of the resurrection of Jesus after He was crucified and remained dead in the tomb for three days with guards watching the tomb, and how His body came alive. This proves that Jesus was indeed the Son of God as He had claimed, and death could not hold Him down. His disciples and hundreds of people saw Him after this before He went back to heaven from where He had come. When the disciples brought out the story of the resurrection in the four gospel books, many eye witnesses were still alive, and could verify that what was written was indeed true. Atheistic and agnostic people of our days have investigated this piece of history to try and prove that it was not true but cooked up by the disciples. But they became believers in Jesus after they could no longer resist the evidence. One fact that turned these unbelieving investigators to become believers is the fact that the eleven disciples of Jesus who were afraid for their lives and locked themselves up in rooms suddenly became confident when they saw the resurrected Jesus. They went on to become martyrs for their faith which they would not have been willing to face, had it not been the fact that they had actually seen Jesus in His resurrected body. The apostle Paul was initially a Jewish scholar one who was persecuting the new group of people called Christians, who was radically converted when he met with Jesus. He too gave his life as a martyr for Christ.

Countless number of people still 'meet with Jesus' and get converted. Hard core criminals or hopeless drug addicts experience life changing salvation by coming to Jesus, confessing their sins and asking for mercy. Jesus stands with arms wide open, willing to welcome anyone and everyone who comes to Him in this way, "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt.11:28). Surely, He is the only Way.