I talked openly about my faith several times in my 12th-grade English class. My teacher talked to me about the gospel at some length when I stopped by for a visit about a year later. I don’t remember a lot of what we said, but she said one thing that burned into my brain like words from a branding iron:
“Well, I believe we may be on different paths, but we’re all going to the same place.”
I was convinced she was mistaken, but I did not know what to say.
Later, it occurred to me that she was describing a mountaintop. People might start from a hundred different places at the bottom of a mountain, and as long as they keep going up, everyone will eventually meet at the same place—the peak.
But that’s a false analogy because it fails to consider the role of sin. Life is not like a mountain. A better analogy is the Grand Canyon. Sin separates us from God. It’s as though He is on one cliff, and humanity is staring across at Him from a facing cliff some two miles away. In fact, one translation of the Bible says it just that way:
“God is on one side and all the people on the other side, and Christ Jesus, Himself man, is between them, to bring them together” 1 Timothy 3:5-6.
As seductive as the mountaintop analogy is, we have to reject it because it is not scriptural. Remember, if it was possible to reach God without Jesus, then Jesus would not have had to die. But He chose to die because it was the only way that we could be saved from our sins.
There really is a chasm, a grand canyon, between man and God.
But with two wooden beams, a hammer, and three nails, the Romans built a cross that is our BRIDGE TO LIFE.
ΑΩ
I am indebted to the “Bridge to Life” Tract published by the Navigators. https://www.navigators.org/resource/the-bridge-to-life/
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