Religious and Moral Pursuits

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.  Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.” (Matthew 23:13-15 NIV)

In a conversation with a student recently, we were discussing others’ attitudes and viewpoints of Christianity.  He said one of his roommates viewed it as a “crutch” for people too weak to deal with life on their own. Another, he said, saw it as just one of many options from which to draw moral direction.  

The great challenge for those of us who truly know and follow Jesus is to explain Him to a world long infected with corrupted understandings of Christianity, and to make sure we don’t infuse our beliefs with the same corruptions.  Like the Pharisees, many see a relationship with God formed around following strict rules—the “thou shalts.”  Certain behaviors are required and when they are fulfilled, God is pleased and one is in good standing.  This was the Pharisees’ view and many have adopted it down through the ages.  Go to church, be a good and sincere person, and that is enough.  Jesus forcefully condemned this view.

Another view is that Jesus is on equal footing with other moral, religious teachers, such as Buddha and Muhammad, or, in modern times, Gandhi. People searching for moral meaning, then, should study the teachings of all these men in order to find their own ethical code by which to live.  But, as C.S. Lewis noted in his classic book, Mere Christianity, Jesus didn’t give us that choice.  As Lewis said, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 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 the 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, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Many view Jesus as a founder of a religion. He was nothing of the sort. He is the Son of God who came to earth for one reason—to make it possible for humans to reconcile with God.  Religion says we can do that through our own moral efforts.  The Scriptures, on the other hand, tell us there is nothing we can do, that we are helpless (Romans 3:23). And Jesus said He was the only possible way back to God (John 14:6). Following Him rather than rules, obeying Him rather than trying to carve out our own moral way is the only path to salvation.

That is why Jesus describes this path as narrow and one that few will find (Matthew 7:14). In our pride, we want to be in charge; we want to be the ones to achieve our own destiny.  And this is why religion and the pursuit of morality capture so many.  

Today, recognize that religion and moral pursuits lead in the exact opposite direction people think they are going. These will never be enough to bridge the gap between them and God.  Only Jesus can do that.  Anything else always will come up short. 

© Jim Musser 2017