“Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. 7 “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him.”
Most of us have heard the historical declaration that, “…‘all roads lead to Rome’, and in fact, they once did. The road system of the Ancient Romans was one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of its time, with over 50,000 miles of paved road radiating from their center at the miliarius aurem (a large golden column) in the Forum in the city of Rome.” ThinkQuest.org
The roads were originally built to facilitate troop movements, but of course they would also be used by people traveling to and from the most important city of its time. Rome was the place to go for commerce, for involvement in politics, even for holiday. So it was the center. Rome was the place that was moving and shaking, and it was the hub, so all the spokes led there.
Now, we don’t have to be historians in order to think about the history of mankind and realize that from the beginning mankind has been drawn to mankind. Hermits are considered out of the ordinary for a reason.
From the scattering at the Tower of Babel to the emergence of the internet, mankind has, as a whole, been engaged in a crazed scramble to undo that scattering; to come together by his own strength and machinations, but not in order to seek God, but to be god.
Paul declared to the Athenian philosophers that God created all mankind from one and appointed their times and the boundaries of their habitations so that they might seek Him. Instead, man has struggled to connect apart from the God they should have been seeking, attempting to make ‘all roads’ lead to whatever present focus of lust, pride and fleshly fulfillment has been placed before them.
Also through the course of history, man has demonstrated a proclivity for focusing on a person, a champion, searching for a savior; someone clever enough and powerful enough and charismatic enough to unite mankind and pull us up out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. It started with Nimrod and it will end with the Antichrist, and in between have been men who in one form or another either greatly helped or greatly hurt before they had their fall, but none of them has had the power, nor in most cases the desire, to usher men into the presence of God.
Let’s go to the Upper Room and hear from the one Man who both desires and can do that.
ASSURANCES
Jesus and His chosen ones have just finished the Passover meal, where He has explained that the unleavened bread typifies His body which would be broken and that the cup symbolized the blood He would shed to establish the new covenant.
Judas had gone out. The eleven did not yet understand where he was going but Jesus knew and in fact, sent him out with the words, ‘What you do, do quickly’. (Do not ever think that Jesus was not in complete control of circumstances and events, even on this night and the coming day – it was their hour and the power of darkness, but granted to them by Him)
So Jesus is now alone with His most trusted followers and the ones who would be His Apostles through whom He would birth His church. He begins now to speak to them with the sort of intimacy one would expect from someone going away for a long time, to those he loves dearly.
Now if you have your Bible open and you let your eyes just run down over the last eight or nine verses of chapter 13 you can see that He speaks of His pending reentrance into His glory with the Father, and He tells them that although they cannot immediately follow where He is going they will surely follow later. He exhorts them to love one another with the kind of love He has demonstrated and will demonstrate for them.
We can’t take the time to unpack all of this now, but just get the sense of assurance and encouragement He is imparting to them.
Once more, I want to remind you that Judas has left the assembly. Jesus could not have said the things He was saying here with Judas still present. He would have had to use qualifiers such as, ‘By this all men will know that some of you are My disciples’. He would have had to say ‘I go to prepare a place for most of you’.
There are many in the church who, like the disciples to this point, have followed Jesus at a distance, intellectually connected, often confused, sometimes amazed, not truly ready to follow the way of the cross.
We know that later in this evening, emotionally drained and in a state of confusion at this final discourse in the Upper Room, the disciples slept while Jesus suffered in the Garden. They were not yet ready. His words to them, His assurances, were for later. But He could not say them to Judas at all.
Where do you fit in this? No matter how long you have been a believer in Jesus Christ, no matter how long you have been in the church and perhaps very active in the church, is your heart truly encouraged when you consider that He has prepared a place for you? Do you really believe that there is a place for you where He has gone and from where He will return?
He said that they should not let their hearts be troubled; that they must not let themselves be distressed, knowing that very soon they would have plenty of reason to feel distressed more deeply than they ever could have imagined – and the lifeline He tossed for them to hold on to was faith. Not faith in general, but something very specific. ‘believe in God, believe also in Me’.
So where do you come into this? Is your faith in God and in Christ such that you enjoy a deep, abiding assurance that when He comes He comes for you? Does the thought of His return distress you because you’re not sure? Do thoughts of potential trouble and pain in your future distress you because you haven’t grasped on to this lifeline of faith?
Listen. This is God talking here. He is offering assurances of eternal significance, with eternal implications, to the one who puts his faith in God. “I am going away to prepare a place for you so it only makes sense that I will come back to get you and take you to that place. Why? Because I want you to be where I am.”
These words are for you, believer! They weren’t for Judas and they aren’t for the unbelieving masses – they are for the one who has heard His words and believed in the One who sent Him, and His words cannot fail!
There is a day fixed when all the Redeemed of the Lord will stand before the Throne rejoicing in His glory, and He wants to share His special day with us.
We don’t tend to think in these terms often, do we? We talk about how eager we are for His coming and to all be standing before His throne singing praises and rejoicing, and that’s all good. But we don’t even have the capacity for the kind of rejoicing that will fill His great heart on that special day He has fixed.
Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let the days of this earthly walk drag you down. He has prepared a place…for YOU! Your name is on the door! A setting at the table bears your name!
DOUBTS
Well in sharp contrast to His assurances, come Thomas’ contradictory expressions of doubt.
Jesus said, “You know the way where I am going” {way = ‘road’, ‘path’, etc}
Have you ever had someone say to you, ‘I’m going ahead and you come later’ and then start out the door as you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Hey, I don’t know how to get there’, and you yell, ‘Wait! Give me some directions! I don’t know!’
I get the sense that is how Thomas and the others were feeling.
But see, Jesus rightfully expected them to know because He had been teaching them and showing them for over three years. Hadn’t they been witness to all the miracles? Hadn’t He taught them with many words and stories what the Kingdom of Heaven is like? Hadn’t He successfully refuted the false teachings and faulty assumptions of men who did not have the truth?
Hadn’t He just told them that faith is the key to His Father’s house?
Thomas wasn’t getting it. In fact, the wording of his remonstration indicates that in his mind he not only did not know, but could not know.
“Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?
In other words, ‘We not only don’t know the destination, we don’t even know what road to take’.
Here Jesus could have rebuked Thomas for his lack of faith, but instead He makes the most positive and significant statement of all time for all mankind. That’s a strong claim to make, isn’t it? But my friends, all roads do not lead to God. There is only One. And if you miss the gravity of this statement, this answer Jesus gives to Thomas, you miss the whole thing.
J.B. Phillips translates Jesus’ response this way, “I myself am the road”.
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one approaches the Father except through Me”
Now let’s park right here for a while and absorb what has been said.
THE WAY
He is the way. The Way. Not A way, but the way.
Merrill Tenney wrote, “Between the present of man’s failure, and the future of God’s design for him is a gulf which seems unbridgeable. Thomas recognized it, and so despaired.”
Paul quotes the Psalmist in Romans chapter three, and he says there is NONE who seeks for God.
“...all have turned aside, together they have become useless.” There is no one who seeks for God in his own nature; by his own desire.
But even archeology proves that man was created for God, to worship God. Every culture in history has had its gods and its religious rituals.
Therefore, when man is Godless, he gropes for a god (small ‘g’) to fill that void in his life. Remember the old Country song, “Lookin’ for Love in all the Wrong Places”? Well, just substitute ‘God’ for ‘Love’ in that title, and you’ve written the history of the human race.
The problem mankind faces though, is that since they are not seeking the one True God what they eventually find is empty and dead and useless and pointless… and if the day ever comes that they recognize the deception they have been under they despair. For man was created,- you and I were created,- to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, and the most helpless feeling in life is to understand on some level that God is out there but not know how to find the road to Him.
Here I return to the point I was making in the opening statements of this sermon.
The mindset of ‘global community’ that has always been around in some degree or another, but in these last days is growing in its intensity, crosses the line into religion and brings about the relativism of the past 4 decades that says “Many faiths are but different paths leading to one reality, God”
“…religious relativism has become such a consensus in America that most people uncritically accept it”. Gary DeLashmutt, Can There Be Only One Way to God?
No traveler receiving contradictory directions to his destination, eg., take Hwy 550 North to Grand Junction, or take Hwy 550 South to Grand Junction, is going to say, ‘Well, both must be true so it doesn’t matter what direction I drive in’.
Yet this same ill-logic applied to the way to get to Heaven is accepted as wise and sensible and expressive of tolerance and open-mindedness.
If we all stand shoulder to shoulder and agree that as long as we are as good as we can be and faithfully practice one of the world’s accepted religions, God will be obligated and even overjoyed to let us all into Heaven.
If there is occasion to grieve together we’ll share a moment of silence in lieu of a public prayer so no one needs to be offended and we can each silently pray to whatever sort of god resides in our imagination.
No. None of this makes sense at all!
There is ample, documented, eyewitness testimony to the miracles at the birth of Christ attesting to His divine origins.
There is documented testimony of reliable witnesses to audible approval declared by God at several very public points in His ministry, witnesses to His miraculous healings, His power over nature, His resurrection and His bodily ascension into Heaven.
There is one way to the Father. Jesus is the Way, the path, the road. No one approaches the Father, no one enters Heaven, no one will stand welcome before the Throne apart from Jesus.
Now Christians, I don’t want to carry the analogy to the point of being ridiculous, but let me point out that you don’t get somewhere by sitting in the road. Jesus used this particular language for a reason. It is not enough to come to Jesus and sit down.
Jesus calls us to keep up and keep moving forward in Him, in our relationship with Him, in our pursuit of God in our lives.
Will Rogers said, “Even if you’re on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there”. Christianity is a journey to Heaven and Jesus is the road. Think about that please as we move on to the next term Jesus used.
THE TRUTH
I have actually had this said to me, “Well, that’s your truth, but I have my truth and it’s just as valid to me”.
How absurd is that kind of thinking? If what each of us believes contradicts the other, either we are both wrong or only one of us is right! We can’t both be right!
Islam teaches that Allah is one person and that Mohammed was his only prophet. We believe in a three Person Godhead, Jesus Christ being the only begotten Son of the Father who was conceived through a virgin by the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity. We can’t both be right.
Hindus believe in reincarnation, we believe it is appointed for man to die once and then comes the judgment. We can’t both be right.
Jesus said to Pilate, ‘Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice’. (Jn 18:37)
By that statement He invalidated every philosophy, every religion, every thought of man that comes short of hearing and following Him as the one way to the Father, the One who Himself is Truth, as the One who is the Life and the Light of men (Jn 1:4).
‘Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice’, means that only those who hear His voice know or are of the truth. There is not one exception; He did not go on to qualify His statement.
Who hears His voice? His sheep. Who are His sheep? Those who have heard and responded to His call. Who is rejected from being His sheep? All who would sarcastically ask, “What is truth?” then turn and walk away in rejection of Truth, Himself!
Have you heard and responded to His voice? What does that mean, you may ask?
It is a call that goes out perpetually from God, to turn to Him. To turn away from a life that walks away from the Truth, toward the Truth, toward the One who by His Spirit and by His Word and through His followers, His chosen vessels in this world, says, ‘Come’.
You may even have answered that call in your past but somewhere along the road you stopped following, stopped listening, and stopped hearing. He still says to you, ‘Hear’. ‘Turn’. ‘Come’.
Because friend, there is no other voice to hear that is the Way and the Truth leading to Life.
Acts 4:12
“And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
There is an old story, I have told it before, of a man who was walking in the jungle with his young son. Hearing cries for help they turned aside from the path and found that a man had fallen into a deep pit which had been dug to trap lions.
The man said he had been trying to climb the sides of the pit all day but was near exhaustion, and was afraid for night was about to fall.
The father of the boy looked around and he could see that high in a tree overhanging the pit there were vines. The problem was that someone would have to climb up and cut a vine loose so it would hang down into the pit for the man to pull himself up, but the limbs of the tree did not look strong enough for a grown man.
The boy quickly volunteered to climb, feeling confident that he was light enough for the branches to support. The father was hesitant, but could not leave the stranger in the pit to die, so he gave his consent.
The boy climbed high into the tree with his pocket knife and cut the appropriate vine, which snaked down into the hole within the man’s reach. Suddenly there was the sound of limbs cracking and the father looked back up just in time to see his son falling from high in the tree to the hard ground below. He rushed to the boy’s side but to no avail, his son was dead.
Some time went by while he held the broken body of his boy and wept, then he heard a voice from the pit. The man was saying, ‘Sir, I’m very sorry about your son, but as I look up into the tree where this vine is anchored I am afraid the limbs will not hold my weight. You must find another way to help me.
The father walked back to the edge of the pit and said, ‘Sir, my boy gave his life to provide a way out for you, and the only way you’re going to live today is if you come up by that vine.’
God sent His only begotten Son, the fullness of Deity in a body, to the cross of Calvary to pour out His blood and die, taking to His bosom all the fiery wrath of God against sin and bearing it away forever for all who will believe; and you need to know and understand today that the only way you’re going to get to Heaven is by way of that cross!
There is no other way, there is no other truth. There are a lot of pointless, dead end paths, there are a lot of empty, deceptive voices, but the end of them is only destruction and eternal separation from God.
THE LIFE
Well, Jesus said, ‘the Life’. I am the way, and the truth and the life.
The connotation is not merely that of a conscious existence, but of the life that God gives; a spiritual life that is eternal in quality as well as duration.
John opened this gospel with the declaration that in the beginning, meaning always existing and having no beginning Himself, the Word, a Person who was with God and was Himself God, as the Word of God spoke all things into existence. John tells his readers that nothing has come into being apart from the Word of His power, and his very next phrase is ‘in Him was life’.
There is no life apart from Him. In Him is Life.
Jesus, the ultimate Authority, from His own mouth confirmed this indispensable truth. “If any one hears My words and believes in Him who sent me, he has eternal life and shall not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life” John 5:24
Jesus said to Martha, standing before her brother’s tomb, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?” John 11:25-26
Do you believe this? Really? Do you enjoy a settled, confident conviction deep in your heart that Jesus Christ is the Resurrection and that because He lives you too shall live? Do you really believe that He is coming back with you on His mind?
THE DESTINATION
Listen again to what is being said in our text. Thomas has claimed for himself and the others with him that they know neither the way to where Jesus is going, nor the destination.
In His response, Jesus tells Thomas the answer to both questions. Jesus is the road, the Father is the destination.
That is what it has all been about. Jesus came to glorify the Father and to accomplish all that the Father sent Him to do. And every thing the Father sent Him to do had as its ultimate goal, its ultimate purpose, the gathering in of the elect to His very presence there to glorify and enjoy Him forever.
Do you know that God wants your fellowship? That He yearns for your company? You are not abandoned. If you have never come to Him in faith he calls you to come; if you have come then He is with you now and you will be with Him forever. God desires your company. Meditate on that for a while!
Jesus makes this amazing claim in verse 7.
“If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him.”
Now we have to step slightly out of our text to explain that statement, as He does in verse 9. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father”.
I just want to call this to your frontal lobe today for conscious consideration.
I think that largely when we think specifically of God the Father we get sort of a Sistine Chapel image in our mind. He is the white headed, white bearded muscular, scowling figure leaning forward from His towering throne to watch in case we get out of line.
At the same time, we hear the name of Jesus and we picture the mild-mannered friend of children and little lambs, who healed the sick, raised the dead and fed the masses.
We are in error when we make these distinctions in our thinking.
Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father”. He wasn’t talking about physical seeing. It might help our understanding to change the wording to “He who has known Me has known the Father”.
We need not ever dread the moment we will finally stand before Him, if we are believers. Apply all that you know of Jesus, that is, all that the Gospels reveal of Jesus, to the Father, because they are one.
If Jesus says ‘Anyone who comes to me I will never cast away’, then so says the Father.
If Jesus says ‘Come to Me all who are weary and heavily burdened and I will give you rest’, then so says the Father.
If you have ever read or heard the story of Esther from the Old Testament, you may remember that the tradition of approaching royalty was that a person would stand in the doorway of the throne room. If the king held out his scepter, a wand carried by royalty as a symbol of authority and power, if he held it out toward the visitor it was a signal that he or she was welcome to approach the throne. If he did not extend that scepter, that person had better not enter the room for danger of being killed.
God’s royal scepter is held out to you in welcome, believer, and in His presence there will be no fear, no trepidation, no mourning. You may approach confidently, ushered in by the risen and glorified Christ, and find peace and joy and everlasting love.
Because He wants you there.
Listen to these passages from Hebrews and from Revelation, and listen for the language pertaining to this point I’m making.
“For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings. 11 For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, 12 saying, “I WILL PROCLAIM YOUR NAME TO MY BRETHREN, IN THE MIDST OF THE CONGREGATION I WILL SING YOUR PRAISE.” 13 And again, “I WILL PUT MY TRUST IN HIM.” And again, “BEHOLD, I AND THE CHILDREN WHOM GOD HAS GIVEN ME.” Heb 2:10-13
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. 2 And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, 4 and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” Rev 21:1-4
CONCLUSION:
Jesus didn’t come and do all that He did and then just go away, folks. He did it all so you could be with Him and He’s coming back for you.
But you need to be very clear on this today.
“Without the Way there is no going, without the Truth there is no knowing, without the Life there is no living” Merrill C. Tenney “JOHN: THE GOSPEL OF BELIEF” Eerdman’s 1948
There’s no other offer out there. No other plan. No other truth pertaining to eternal life in the presence of God. Heaven and the Father are the destination but Jesus is the only road. It’s not Christ or, it’s not Christ and, it is Christ alone.
But it is a straight road, true and sure, and it leads to the Celestial City and the Throne room of the Father, and none that come to Him will ever be cast out.
Because… He wants you there!
