target

Yeah, it's true, I do work at this institution. To those friends of mine who like to smirk at my current place of employment, it's alright. I understand your jealousy concerning my oppertunity there to use a walkie talkie.

Anyways, today I was talking with a coworker who I just met, and we started talking about religion. He said he was "a Christian, I guess" and so naturally I wanted to know more. He grew up going to church, then eventually his family stopped going, and now he doesn't go, but believes in a higher power that oversees the world. He also explained how he felt all religions (Buddhism, Islam, etc) were all basically the same. He said that they all operate on a system of faith, and that's the most important thing.

Something that has always interested me is the distinction between my own faith and other faiths. So I talked about how other religions do appear similar to Christianity, however, their different views of Jesus make them distinguishable from it. He agreed, but saw this as a minor difference, and as he said: "That's true, but that's a detail. As a whole, the religions are pretty much the same."

This conversation reminded me of the candid nature of falsity in the world. Compromise can be so difficult to detect for myself, and the rest of society. Sure, you can numerically determine the hundreds of similarities between religions, causing that one percent of difference to seemingly fade away, uncrucial and undetected. But what lies within that one percent is beyond description: it is something so beautiful, necessary, and literally life-giving that it almost seems absurd that this world minimizes it. It should not surprise us that where Jesus' blood makes a difference, where it comes in contact with our sin to save us: it is here that the world works so hard to hide the truth.

So many religions in existence are determined to make Jesus someone other than who he was. He was God. Any other explanation strips him of everything.The last thing I want to do is criticize my friend from work. I want him to see the weight of that one percent, to know in his heart the importance of Jesus' identity. In this knowledge, there is so much hope.