(Welcome to Utopia) Jesus: The Way

Larry Kirkpatrick -- Mentone Church of Seventh-day Adventists -- 29 June 2002

Welcome to Utopia

I peeked out from under the smog-cap and I saw something. There is a reason why humanity has the word "salvation" in its vocabulary. Utopia this is not. What we have made is lacking in so many ways. A few miles up the road is a major mental hospital, a few miles down the road is a graveyard; if you go far enough, you'll come to a facility where nuclear weapons of mass destruction are stored. And there are hospitals and body-bags too. Welcome to utopia. But then perhaps this is why, as I said, the word "salvation" persists in our vocabulary. To speak of salvation is to, at the very least, imply that something needs saving; something's not right "as is."

As a race, we long for something more. Every tombstone protests that life matters and that the chains of the grave are unwelcome. Every life connected to the grave-marker reminds us that it is incomplete, not yet over, unsatisfied with final arrival at dissolution.

For the most advanced species known, we are a rather sorry lot. For every advance in technology there comes a new crisis. As a race we are getting better and better at blowing things up, not better and better at keeping them from being blown up.

Some will say 9-11 is the latest argument against religion. They will hold out the thousands of lives lost when Muslim extremists crashed two airliners filled with people into the twin towers of the world trade center, and make that claim. They will say, here was another example of religious fanaticism, war and suffering inflicted on others on behalf of religious belief. And I will say yes, 9-11 was evil but no, 9-11 was no argument against religion as a whole but against false religion. Since that act was evil, and there is no evil in a godless world that has no moral boundaries and no right or wrong, when you call it an atrocity you are agreeing with me. Behavior on this order has to go. And God has a plan for ending it.

Don't be so shallow. Yes, there have been wars and sufferings inflicted upon humanity for ages in the name of religion. But that has been but a small portion of the total of all the wars and sufferings that have been inflicted out of godlessness and a philosophy that takes the motto, "Survival of the fittest." In the evolutionary framework, predation is normal, expected, and justified. There is nothing wrong with a 9-11 terrorist attack.

Remember, in post-modernism, everyone gets to create their own reality, their own scale of moral values, and no one's are any better than any one else's. Then it is racist to say that there is anything about western Judeo-Christian values that is superior to the values held by a middle-eastern terrorist. The values of the west may generally be decadent, but the values of one who truly believes in God, truly makes His will his own will, do not include murder or terrorism or the infliction of like evils. God's way is the path of peace. Oh yes; many who have claimed to be His disciples have been guilty of embarrassing and uncountenancible behavior. But don't be overly quick to say that their behavior was what God had in mind. He might be as dismayed as you are.

I just saw where one atheist said "There is absolutely no evidence that God exists." His tired refrain was his repetition of the infamously misguided text of Epicurus:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.
Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

God is willing to prevent evil, but not at the expense of our autonomy. He has immense respect for us as unique, self-determining, self-aware individuals. He also is able to prevent evil, but again, He would rather help us learn to be human. That is, He told us not to put our hand on the hot stove, but He is going to let us put our hand on the hot stove so we learn why He said not to. We are designed with immense potential, made in His image. Thus, neither is it true that He is unable or unwilling; neither must we answer the question, "Then why call Him God?" He is both able and willing. And to Epicurus' query, "Then whence cometh evil?" we may say, if you will give Him a chance, God will answer!

Bankruptcy is what surrounds us -- intellectual bankruptcy. Belief in God is replaced by the philosophy, "just do what feels right." You who are listening, answer me -- do you think it will be safe to raise your son or your daughter in an environment where the adults that surround them are operating under the principle of do whatever feels right"?

Now let me ask you a question. The proponents of evolution tell us that there is next to no difference between people and animals. But did you know that animals have a very limited number of messages they can send and receive? The grasshopper can use six different sounds to communicate. That's it. Maximum. What about the super-intelligent dolphin, you ask. Well, although they can make a number if different whistles, clicks, and squawks, they seem only able to communicate the same things over and over again, for the clicks and squawks never expand into a broad lexicon. The most vocally dynamic animal we know of is the vervet monkey. He can make 36 distinct and separate sounds. But he is only able to repeat those same sounds over and over.

Yet none of these restrictions are found in human language. Our language is essentially creative. We can say something that has never been heard before, in the most unusual circumstances, and still be understood. We can put things together in virtually infinite combinations. There is something essentially different between animals and humans. The Bible tells us that man was made in the image of God. That is, 2000 years ago it proclaimed that humankind in particular was different. Before anyone counted the noises a vervet monkey could make.

And what does the world offer us philosophically? Relativism and her ugly younger sister, postmodernism. No absolutes but the absolute that there are no absolutes. No truth, no meaning, just the underlying hint that there is no ultimate truth. Humanity was a cosmic hiccup, a mathematically freakish development that should never have been, and that is all. Humanity owes its existence to some microscopic slime at the bottom of an acid puddle on a dead rock still cooling from spontaneous creation 4.6 Billion ago. You have as much moral value as does the overly large thistle in your front yard.

And what about our entertainment? The more conventional forms of science fiction are becoming passe so now they are writing movies about digital worlds and people trapped in virtual-reality scenarios. But you know, they will wear those ideas out too. When for a culture the tendency to entertain oneself becomes unrestrained passion to entertain oneself, that culture is near its collapse.

Take a walk this evening and watch for the blue flickering light emanating from the residences. We could have seen the same thing years ago, but tonight it might be not only a movie or a mindless television program, but videogames or cable or porn movies by satellite. As the old cigarette ad chirped, "You've come a long way, baby."

I'm not identifying all those things as evil; but I'm pointing out that we have our own bread and circuses to turn away our thoughts from the sober things. From those we turn to the mindlessly sanguine after-burn of a world that has earnestly sought to forget God or even the notion of God, and replaced Him with a lesser world held together by toothpaste and tinsel. If there's something we need today it is an intellectual liposuction to trim away the broken ideas and see again whether there is another path, another road, some actual potential for the fulfillment of humankind and some possible arrival at a utopia.

How strange it is that so few remain unconvinced that they have given God as fair a shot as anything else at earning their fealty but that somehow He's come up short. Or to say that in the reverse, there are many who seem to hold that they've "tried" belief in God but that His way of doing business was unappealing to them and so rejected by them.

That's all well and good, but could it be that what you've rejected has been a caricature of God's way, a misrepresentation? And have you considered that whether you find His way appealing right now or not, you really don't have a say in the matter; if there is a God and He made this universe, then what are we to argue with His program? Shall the one made say of He who made him, why did you make me this way? Or have you really given God a fair chance to explain why things are the way they are, or to hint whether this is the way things shall always be? Have you given Him opportunity to tell you, if such is the case, that this is a short-duration learning experience for a young universe filled with beings granted free choice who have to get past some bad decisions they've been permitted to make by a very fair God?

The Way of Jesus

All the roads of the world lead in no particular direction. They criss-cross along the horizon, directionless, unmarked, no destination in evidence but hopelessness. The graves have no exits, for there is no resurrection for the one who falls in. And all fall in. But listener, I would like to discuss another way than this, a different outcome if you will. The way of Jesus.

There are things that we cannot know by looking at the natural world, things that the flowers and the rocks and the stars do not communicate to us. This human race is bound on the other side of the veil so to speak, locked in a twilight-zone of sin, cut-off from essential knowledge. We'll discuss that in the next talk, and learn why heaven gave us the Bible. But now let us turn our attention to one of the sayings of Jesus. For when asked where He was going, He said He would come again, and when asked whether the disciples knew the way He was going, He pronounced that they did. He said, "I [I Jesus], am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man cometh unto the Father but by Me."

Jesus here made a truth-claim. He claimed to be the way, specifically, the way to the Father. What is the meaning of this?

The literal word simply means a pathway or a road. Jesus said that He was the road. In the age in which lived our Lord, there were no railroads, no airports, no telephone, cell-phone, or internet. There were no telegraph wires strung across the range of His world. The only means of going from one place to another, was to take the road. You might take a ship for part of the journey, but you had to walk to the seaport, or ride a burro or something. Thus, the world of Christ was much different from our own. We might think of many different modes of travel. But in the light of the age when Jesus walked the dust of earth, He used the universal means of travel in His declaration. He said that He was the way.

His statement says much. It limits the way to one way, Himself. Knowing that He would die on the cross to take upon Himself the penalty for the sins of humankind, knowing that no other divine life but His own could be given to bear the guilt of the race, He came from the courts of heaven to our world.

He was born into the flesh of humankind, thus beset with our besetments, thus hindered by our hindrances, thus limited by our limitations. An infinite being would walk this sod that He had made and know personally the experience of the creatures He had made. He could make His exit at any time, but to do so would be to admit defeat, to agree with the devil's charge that even God is selfish. He would live amid men and women, and show them the way to the Father. He would enter our broken world, and point us again to His plan for our restoration and fulfillment. He would unite humanity with divinity, both in His own experience, and in the experience He would urge upon us.

He would ask us to exchange our utopia for His plan; exchange our experience on the road to the junkyard, with His experience, on the road to heaven. And most people would say "No, thank you." But He came anyway. And He offers eternal life.

Another Way exists than the one with which we are so familiar. We must peek out from under the edge of the smog-cap, look out past the fringes of the leaky ideas our world thinks it can live by. We must consider a different way. A different road. A different destination. A different end.

They say denial of reality is the first step in becoming mentally ill. Well, our world has denied the Way of Jesus for its own way. This is nothing new. This has been going on for years and years and years. How can it be that so few of us ever survey the greasy achievements of this world that man made, and reject the flim-flam of it all? Will we go on bowing and scraping to this version of reality until we drop into death?

One science-fiction television show had an episode where a traveling spaceship visits a planet that is at war with another planet. As the ship is orbiting that planet, it is declared a casualty in the war by a computer program on one of the worlds. It seems the two civilizations had stopped using real weapons because they had grown so destructive. Instead, they replaced real war with a computer simulation. Each planet had incineration chambers, and when the computers declared that X number of citizens had been killed in a fictional attack by the other civilization, the citizens so-designated calmly made their way to the incineration chambers to become real casualties. Thus both civilizations survived but their populations were continuously afflicted by this fictional war, which without destroying the infrastructure of the societies had been going on for 500 years!

Well, what a lot of us have been doing is not much different. We have let attention to spiritual things become just one more option alongside possibly taking up basket-weaving. So our civilization persists but in the meantime one by one we drop into the mortuary with no positive expectation of the life to come. There are neither heavens nor hells for us, just the present heaven or hell. So the one who dies with the most toys wins. But I say again, is that the road you want to select for yourself and your children?

Jesus is the Way. He has a different program for us. It is not otherworldly, but this-worldly. That is, it is a plan for how we can live here and now in this world, and have meaning, and attain to something higher than we've been trending to.

Whereas our culture offers us materialism and experience now and eternal death hopefully a bit later, that isn't much more than the grasshopper or the housefly gets. Jesus came so that we might have life as He designed for it to be, and that we might have that more abundantly. He became poor so that we might become rich. He even took our punishment so that we might receive the good that accrues to Him. He came to show us unselfishness at work. He came to heal. He came to show us the way to the Father.

Yes, "The Way" is the way home to the Father's house. We have roots; we have a Father. We are the product of intelligent design. Sin, which we'll talk more about in our next presentation, has thrown us into disarray. Our behaviors and even our desires are not what they were meant to be, but God has a program to put that back in order. Part of that program is very simple. It means first, being willing to admit that there could be another way, a different way than the road we've been on. So today we've offered critique of "the way" of the world. We've focused on where that way leads. And it leads straight into the mouse-trap of nothingness. Follow the cheese until the bar comes crashing down on your tail and you are pinned to final doom. See where it gets you.

So then you might say, I'll try shintoism, Islam, New Age, snake-handling, or the charismatic yuppy religious wave. Leave me alone. Don't stick this thing in my ear about there being but one way, about how Jesus as you understand Him is the only road to hope. And I will say back to you that Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by Me." In the end, the argument against religious exclusivism founders on its own non-negotiable and exclusivist claim that there is no single pathway to God. Why so dogmatic, friend? At least the Christian has the philosophical foundation to make that claim. Our Lord did. And He did it on the basis of the fact that Jesus alone died to save the human race. His unselfish sacrifice for a very guilty race is either truth or untruth. Either He died for me -- and you -- or He did not.

God is not waiting to cast down vengeance upon you if you've taken a different path. If, responding to the best light you've had, you've tried some things or even thrown your own little tiny thunderbolts at God as you thought Him to be, may I say to you, don't worry. Our Father loves you. He has been waiting for you. He is anxious for you to locate the way, the road, and to come home. He sent Jesus, God in human flesh, for this very purpose.

To show you the Way.

There is something better for you than you've known. There is something more than the slop of mainstream Christianity. There is a place for you in your Father's house if you are willing to try the Way.

Conclusion

The main thrust of this talk has been to offer an all-too brief and overly optimistic critique of the way of the world, and to point out that Jesus offers another, different pathway to be explored. There are some positive features about our world too, but the overwhelming reality of what happens at the end of life, namely death, shows us that all the frenetic activity of humanity the world over through all the ages remains unable to conquer the grave. We were designed for something more than this, something higher, something eternal. And God has reached out, into the twilight zone in which we dwell, and placed before us a pathway. He has given His Son, Jesus as our Way, our road home.

Where will you learn the most about Jesus? Skip the esoteric stuff. Bypass the chaff. Avoid the mainstream version of Christianity as the plague it is. Go to the best source we have. We'll give serious consideration to this in our next talk, but for now, may I invite you to find a Bible, and read about Jesus and His way. Turn through the pages of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Acts, and Romans, not necessarily in that order. But seek out the Way.

It may be that along the road, you'll find your way home to the Father's house, where really you've been wanting to go all along.

Pastor Larry Kirkpatrick is an ordained minister of the gospel. Since 1994 he has served in the American Southwest as pastor to several churches. He received his BA in Religion from Southern Adventist University in 1994 and a Master of Divinity from Andrews University in 1999 with a specialization in Adventist Studies. More important than his scholastic preparation however, has been his love for Scripture. He is author of the 2003 book Real Grace for Real People. Presently he serves as Pastor near Loma Linda, California. Larry is married to Pamela. The couple presently live in Highland, California along with their two children, Etienne and Melinda.