A Great Question and Its Answer

In 1909 Arthur James Balfour, the former Prime Minister of England, was speaking at the University of Edinburgh on “The Moral Values Which Unite Nations.” In his address, he discussed different ties that bind together the peoples of the world—ties of common knowledge, commerce, diplomatic relationships, and bonds of human friendship. When he was done, a Japanese student studying at the Scottish university got up and asked this question. “But, Mr. Balfour, what about Jesus Christ?” According to an American professor who was there, you could have heard a pin drop. There was dead silence, as those present felt the justice of the rebuke. A leading statesman of a Christian nation had been dealing with ties that are to unite men and had left out the one essential bond. And the reminder of his forgetfulness came from a student from a far off non-Christian land.

“What about Jesus Christ?” Today, when human problems are of a complexity and seriousness undreamed of in 1909, the question is still relevant. More than ever before, it needs to be asked. And it is wholly in keeping with this service in which in a special way the Bible is before our thoughts that we consider it, for to do so is to go to the very heart of the Bible’s message.

Our text is in John’s Gospel, the fourteenth chapter and the sixth verse, where Jesus says to Thomas: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.”

Have you ever been talking to a friend in regard to some book you have been reading—one that you have found especially interesting or significant? If so, you know that it was not long before your friend said to you something like this: “But what’s it about?” Or, he may have put it more pointedly and said: “What’s it all about?” So it is with the Bible. “What’s it about?” is a question that we not only have a right to ask, but also one that we are obligated to consider, if we think at all seriously regarding life.

Now there are many answers to the question as to what the Bible is about. From one point of view this Book is like a great tapestry into which are woven many symbols, many pictures, many precepts. The Bible is about history and morality, about human nature and sin. It tells not only about the past but also about the future, about heaven and hell. It is about God and his greatness and righteousness, his justice and his love, and what he requires of us men. The Bible is “about” these things. But when we come to the more particular question, “What is the Bible all about?” there is just one chief answer. It is this: above everything else, the Bible is all about Jesus Christ. In the deepest and most living way, its purpose is to tell us about him who, as our text says, is “the way, the truth, and the life.”

There is a tendency today to speak of this atomic age as the most important time in the history of the world. It is nothing of the kind. The most significant time in human history was the span of some 30 years that covered the life of one man in first-century Palestine. On a road in the Canadian West between Alberta and British Columbia there is a massive wooden arch on which is written in large letters, “The Great Divide.” It reminds travellers of the nearby Continental Divide, the place from which water flows west into the Pacific and east into Hudson Bay. But the dividing point of the ages is not a wooden arch; it is a wooden cross set up on a hill outside the city of Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. And the plain facts about Jesus Christ, such as the long preparation for his coming in the Old Testament, and the New Testament facts of his wonderful birth, his perfect life, his marvelous teaching, his atoning death in which he shed blood for our redemption, and his glorious resurrection—these are vastly more significant for mankind than anything else that has ever happened in the history of the world.

These are the things that the Bible is all about. Let us go on, then, to look at them through the lens, as it were, of our text. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It is significant that these words have recently been before the eyes of more people than have ever before looked at any Scripture text. For fifteen and a half weeks of the New York Crusade, this Scripture verse was on a great banner behind the platform, over the choir at Madison Square Garden, and facing crowds totaling two million. So also it was seen by multitudes in London, Glasgow, and other great cities here and abroad. But though the words are not emblazoned on a banner before us this morning, we may see them in our mind’s eye and hear them in our hearts.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Notice that this is not what some prophet or apostle or saint of old said about Christ. It is Jesus’ own words regarding himself, his own considered estimate of himself, a great declaration of self-witness. And it sets him apart from all other religious leaders with an awesome exclusiveness, as the second clause of our verse shows: “no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” It is plain, therefore, that he is not merely one of a number of equally good ways, but that he is in full reality the only way; and that those who would know the truth that makes men free and find the life more abundant, must do so through him.

‘Like Sheep Gone Astray’

Have you ever lost your way in the hills, on a desert, or in the dense bush of some forest? If you have, you know how terrifying an experience it may be with panic just around the corner. It’s not a pleasant feeling to be lost—if only for a few hours.

But there’s another kind of lostness. A few weeks ago a young man, referred to me by another headmaster, came to my office. He had gone to the University of Chicago, but had given up. He was all at sea emotionally. And the reason, in his own words, was simply this: “I have no purpose in life. There’s nothing to live for. What’s the use of going on?” That young man was really lost. What he needed was not to be told where to go to school and what to study. He needed to find the way; he needed to find it inside his heart and life, so that he might have a purpose. Every atheist knows the importance of having a purpose. Said Jean Paul Satré, the French existentialist: “There is no God, but everybody needs something to commit his life to, some philosophy. Find the philosophy, find the cause, find the movement and commit your life to it.” But philosophies, causes, movements, will never really find the lost.

The Bible makes it plain that we have all missed our way. In the fifty-third chapter of his prophecy which points so clearly to the Saviour, Isaiah says: “All we like sheep have gone astray: we have turned everyone to his own way.” But Christ is the true and living way, because he died to bring us back to God.

Again, he is the truth. In the words of the text, Jesus said, “I am the truth.” Nothing shows more clearly his uniqueness than this declaration. Philosophy goes so far and no farther. Even the greatest thinkers can only point men to what they assume to be the truth. They can only say: “This seems to be the best explanation of the universe,” or, “This appears to be the right frame reference for life.” But no philosopher would dare point to himself and say, as Christ said with absolute and complete assurance: “I am the truth.”

“But wait a moment,” someone says. “How can one person be big enough to be the truth?” The answer is the great reality of the deity of Christ, the stupendous fact that, though fully man, he is at the same time God. Therefore, to ask whether Christ is big enough to be the truth is the same thing as to ask whether God is big enough to be the truth, a question that answers itself. A recent book by J. B. Phillips bears the title, Your God is Too Small. After showing the inadequacy of a dozen or so commonly held ideas of God, the author proves that God in Christ is alone big enough for the great issues of life and death and eternity.

Christ Is The Answer

But our text goes on to declare that Christ is also the life, for Jesus said: “I am … the life.” In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul uses this phrase, “Christ who is our life.” There are many today who confuse Christianity, which is the faith of the Bible, with certain related things. But Christianity is not the church, a vital part of it though the church is; it is not theology, essential though theology is; it is not worship, though worship is obligatory. Nor is it even doing good and loving one’s neighbor, although there is no true practice of Christianity without this. All these belong to Christianity and are indispensable to it, but they are not its very heart. Christianity is Christ. Like the hub of a wheel, he is its center. For without the life that is in him, there is no hope. Said St. Paul, in voicing his highest aspiration, “That I may know him.” And in his last letter he bore this witness: “I know whom I have believed.”

Summer before last I spent some time at Mount Robson, British Columbia, where I camped and climbed with fellow mountaineers of the Alpine Club of Canada. On a rainy day, a group of us were drinking tea in a tent. A discussion began and, as bull sessions so often do, it turned to religion. Not only that, but it became highly skeptical in tone. Finally the talk veered to Christ. At this point a young scientist turned to me with a rather patronizing air and said: “But you don’t really believe, do you, that Jesus is the Son of God?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I do.”

“But how can you prove it?” he said. “How do you know it is true?”

I shall never forget what followed. I simply did what any other convinced Christian would have done; I looked him straight in the eye and said: “How do I know that Jesus is the Son of God? I know it, because I know him personally.” For at least a half minute our eyes locked. Then he turned away. The argument was over. So it is that when Christ is really our life, we know him with an immediacy of personal knowledge that is unmistakable.

Long before the Japanese student asked that question of Lord Balfour, Jesus had asked it of the Pharisees when he said to them in public debate two days before his crucifixion, “What think you of Christ? Whose son is he?” He asked it for a decision, just as the Bible keeps on asking it for a decision of everyone who reads it. As A. M. Chirgwin said in discussing the origin of the New Testament, “The New Testament writers were not just writing history; they were writing for a verdict.” And that verdict is given in one way only—through believing in Him whom the Bible is all about.

In the words of St. John that are printed on the frontispiece of the Bibles presented this morning: “These are written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you might have life through his name.”

Dr. J. G. Paton, the great Scottish missionary to the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, was translating the New Testament into the dialect of the islanders. He was working on the sixteenth chapter of Acts which tells how, after Paul and Silas were released from prison in Philippi through an earthquake, the jailer asked how to be saved. Paton was hard put to find the precise translation of the all-important word “believe.” He overheard a native who was working on a ladder use a certain expression, and knew then and there that his problem was solved. Whereupon, Paton rendered the reply to the question of the Philippian jailer, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” with: “Lean your whole weight on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.”

The whole message of the Word of God, what it is all about, all its helpfulness and power, comes alive in us when we lean our whole weight—our sin, our need, our ability, our weakness and our strength, our hopes, the entire weight of our lives—upon Jesus Christ. Gentlemen, along with these Bibles goes the challenge to you who receive them and to all of us in this chapel to read the Scriptures regularly, daily, prayerfully that through them you may know more and more fully him who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”

E=Mc2

This is the theory of Relativity,

The most profound pronouncement of the human mind.

In South America birds can be taught to say

“Energy equals mass times squared velocity.”

What does it mean to them? To you and me?

To human kind?

Out of this net

We dropped a bomb on Hiroshima.

The Nations walk in fear of it today.

No man, no home, no city can forget.

Is this a formula to sum and doom

All science, progress, life, humanity?

This is the dead-end street of merely human plan.

This is the towering granite of a wall,

A flaming sword is turning every way

To guard a secret from the will of Man

Until in faith, humility, intelligence he comes to pray,

Drawn to a statement of sublime simplicity:

“Let not your hearts be troubled;

Ye believe in God,

Believe in Me.”

CATHERINE ALLER

A sermon preached on 15 September, 1957, in the chapel of the United States Military Academy, West Point, N. Y., at the annual presentation of Bibles by American Tract Society.

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