1 John 2:23: No one Who Denies the Son has the Father

1 John 2:23
[23] No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. (ESV)

There is a desire by so many people to believe the notion that all faiths are essentially the same.  As long as we believe in some kind of god that is all that matters.  People want to believe in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.  We are all to basically try to be kind to one another and God our Father is pleased with us. This is at the heart of what some would call the interfaith movement.

One of the things that I have discovered with any involvement with those who ascribe to an interfaith philosophy is that the one who ultimately suffers is Jesus Christ.  If you are going to blend faiths or religious ideas what do you do with Jesus?  Jesus made such bold claims that set him apart from all others that it is truly impossible to embrace other faiths and truly follow Him.

The false teachers were trying to embrace a faith that denied the deity of Jesus Christ.  The Apostle John rightly tells them that as a result of denying the Son (Jesus Christ) they have not only lost relationship with the Son, but they have no relationship with the Father either.  It is interesting to note that John was a Jew.  He knew that the Jews had rejected the deity of Jesus Christ and had him nailed to a tree.  John's indictment of the false teachers applied to his fellow Jews whom he loved.  The Jews claimed to have God as their father, but because they denied the Son, they had no relationship with either the Father or the Son.

We must be very careful with what we believe about Jesus.  You cannot be a Christian and deny the truth claims of Jesus Christ.  You cannot have a relationship with God the Father and reject the Son.  Interfaith fails at being any kind of true faith at all because it denies the Son.  Be careful that you do not align yourself with those who have no faith.

I will leave you today with some powerful words from the late C. S. Lewis concerning the unique truth claims of Jesus Christ:

“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.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity