All religions do not point to God. All religions do not say that all religions are the same. At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not and accordingly, of defining life’s purpose.
Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of all religions but also a caricatured view of even the best-known ones. Every religion at its core is exclusive.
But the concept of “many ways” was absorbed subliminally in one’s life as a youngster. One is conditioned into that way of thinking before he or she had found out its smuggled prejudices. It takes years to find out that the cry for openness is never what it purports to be. What the person means by saying, “ you must be open to everything” is really, “You must be open to everything that I am open to, and anything that I disagree with, you must disagree with too. “
Indian culture has that veneer of openness, but it is highly critical of anything that hints at a challenge to it. It is no accident that within that so-called tolerant culture was birthed the caste system. All-inclusive philosophies can only come at the cost of truth. And no religion denies its core beliefs.
Jesus on the other hand:
Historians, poets, philosophers-and a host of others have regarded Him as the centrepiece of history. He himself made a statement that was very dramatic and daring when He said to the apostle Thomas, “ I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me “ (J 14:6). Every word of that statement challenges the fundamental beliefs of the Indian culture, and in reality, actually stands against an entire world today.
Just look at the implicit claims in that statement. First and foremost, He asserted that there is only one way to God. That shocks post-modern moods and mind-sets. Hinduism and Bahaism have long challenged the concept of a single way to God. The Hindu religion, with its multifaceted belief system, vociferously attacks such exclusivity.
Jesus also unequivocally stated that God is the Author of life and that meaning in life lies in coming to Him. This assert would be categorically denied by Buddhism which is a nontheistic if not atheistic religion.
Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God who led the way to the Father.
Islam considers that claim to be blasphemous. How can God have a Son?
Jesus claimed that we can personally know God and the absolute nature of His truth. Agnostics deny that possibility.
One can go down the line and see that every claim that Jesus made of Himself challenges every culture’s most basic assumptions about life and meaning. (It is important to remember, of course, that these basic religions within the Indian framework are also not in concert with each other. Buddha was a Hindu before he rejected some of Hinduism’s fundamental doctrines and conceived in their place the Buddhist way. Islam radically differs from Hinduism.)
Now - this is the truth - the non Christian really has no logical alternative but to accept that Jesus is God:
“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. “
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form,
Col 2:9 (NIV)