There are only Two Religions

INTRODUCTION

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Ask how many religions there are, and the honest answer seems to be: a great many. Count the names, the holy books, the temples and festivals and family traditions, and you will be counting for a long time. But there is another way to count — a deeper one. Stop asking what each religion looks like, and ask instead which way it runs. Don't ask “what does it wear?” but “which direction does it face?” Do that, and the long list folds in on itself until at last only two remain. For underneath all the variety, the world has only ever had two religions.

 

To claim there are only two is a bold thing to say of so vast and varied a world — so let us be clear about our meaning here. We are not trying to catalogue the world's faiths, nor to weigh the sincerity of the souls within them — there is well-meaning devotion everywhere. We are looking for the common threads among them to ask only one thing: which way does it run?

 

For a religion, once all its colour is set aside, is a road between two places — God and man — and a road can run in only one of two directions. 

 

In this discussion we will look at:

• The one dividing line between all religions

• Why Scripture presents only two spiritual families

• The tower of human ascent

• Where the self finds itself in this process

• The one God like no other

 

Section One:

THE ONE DIVIDING LINE

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Imagine all the religions of the world laid out before us, in all their colour and difference. Now draw a single line through them with one question: What is it reaching towards?

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On one side fall all the faiths — and there are very many — that run upward. However far apart they stand from one another, they share a single instinct: that the human being must ascend. Whether by good works, by ritual, by knowledge, by discipline, by enlightenment, by keeping the law, by quieting the self until the self vanishes — the movement is always the same. Man does something, and by it climbs nearer to the divine. The road runs from earth up toward heaven: the better we climb, the closer we come to reaching it. Isn't that the most natural and obvious truth — the man who improves himself becomes a better man — not so?

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On the other side stands the biblical faith which runs the other way entirely. Man is a fallen creature, corrupted, and utterly unable to redeem himself. So in His mercy God comes down to save him, to do what man cannot do for himself. So here man does not climb, God descends. And that single difference of direction changes everything else.

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But there is a further reason why a thousand religions, sprung up in a thousand places among peoples who never met, will sort themselves so cleanly into two opposite pools. 

 

Section Two:

 THE TWO FATHERS

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Begin with what the Scriptures plainly claim. They do not present God as one option among many, politely taking His place on a shelf of deities. They make a far narrower and more startling claim: that there is one God, who has provided one way home.

 

“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” — 1 Timothy 2:5

 

One God. One mediator. One means of reaching Heaven. If that is true — and our whole faith stands or falls on it — then every other road, however sincerely walked, does not arrive at the same destination. But the Bible says something further, and here the whole picture clicks into place. It tells us there is an adversary to this one God — a deceiver, who from the beginning has worked against mankind to lead us away from the true path by offering subtle counterfeits of it:

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“…He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him… for he is a liar, and the father of it.” — John 8:44

 

So Scripture gives us not only two roads, but two spiritual sources. There is a true God who fathers the one true way, and an adversary who fathers the multitude of counterfeits. It is not strange then that the religions of the world fall into exactly two families — since they have two different fathers. And we should expect each family to carry the unmistakable likeness of its father, the way a child carries his father’s features. So the question becomes simpler: what does each father look like? Tell me the character of the two fathers, and I will tell you the character of their two religions. And here Scripture tells us what the adversary’s character is — the very first words of pride ever spoken, the fountainhead of his own corruption:

 

“…I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.” — Isaiah 14:13-14

 

Read those five “I wills” and you are reading the whole spirit of the upward religion. I will ascend. I will exalt. I will make myself like God. This is the father’s fingerprint, I will take unto myself — and it is pressed into every faith that has man climbing toward heaven by his own effort — pressed, in fact, into the heart of fallen mankind itself. It was this same sentence translated into bricks, that men spoke on the plain of Shinar: let us build a tower to heaven and make us a name (Genesis 11:4). Self lifted up, by self, for self’s own glory. That is the family likeness, and once you have seen it you will see it everywhere.

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The adversary’s whole being says I will ascend and be like God. The other Father could not be more different. He says I am humble of heart and lowly in spirit and I will offer Myself, I will descend and become a servant for their good. Two fathers. Two fingerprints. Two currents running opposite ways.

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But we should add a note of clarity here. To say the adversary fathers the counterfeit religions is not to speak against the people in them. The deceiver is the enemy — not the deceived. The men and women walking those upward roads are precious to God. They are exactly whom He came down to rescue. Let us never forget that every one of us was born on that upward road ourselves, climbing and striving, until we discovered we could never save ourselves and found grace had already come down to save us. We were once the deceived but we point to the truth so that those still caught in the deception may recognise it for what it is and find the true hope Christ offers.

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Section Three:

THE TOWER

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So the upward religion is as old as Satan's first rebellion. And it need not look “religious” at all. Strip away the incense and the scriptures and you will find its purest form sitting quietly in the human heart, in instincts every one of us knows. It is the instinct that it is within my power to make myself into a better, worthier version of me. It is the inner ledger: that quiet arithmetic where I tally my good deeds against my bad and hope to come out ahead, trusting that if I am good enough, it will surely go well with me in the end. It is the expectation of a reward earned — that the universe owes a decent person a decent outcome. None of these wears a religious robe, and yet every one of them is the upward religion in miniature: I will ascend; I will make myself worthy; I will earn my place. It is the most natural faith in the world, and it is preached on every self-help shelf and whispered in every resolution to become “my best self.” And — let this sting where it should — it is preached inside the church, too. 

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It comes in quietly, wearing the clothes of devotion. It is there when we measure our performance and hope, somewhere underneath, that God is impressed. It is there when obedience curdles into a ledger — when we have served, and given, and denied ourselves, and begin to feel that God now owes us a smooth road in return. It is there, subtlest of all, in the slow assumption that the whole of faith exists for our benefit — that God is the means and we are the end, that He is the power source and our flourishing is the point. None of this is ever said aloud. It does not need to be. It is simply the old climbing instinct, come in through the church door wearing a Sunday coat: the self, quietly back on the throne, with God repositioned as the one who serves it.

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And here is the weight of it, once it is seen plainly: it has turned the entire order of things upside down. It has taken the God too vast for the heavens to contain and made Him a genie to our wishes; it has taken the creature formed from dust and seated him at the centre, with the Most High in orbit around his needs. Laid bare like that, the thing is staggering — and we do not say so from a safe distance, for there is not one of us who has not done it. We have all, in a hundred unnoticed ways, asked God to become smaller so that our will might be done.

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Section Four:

THE STOOP

 

God has patience with our error, giving our hearts the time to discover what we have done — and then to turn, and lower ourselves to the pattern of our Lord. For He is not a god who waits at the top of the tower for the strongest climbers to arrive, but a humble King who stoops down to where we are: who washes our feet, and lays His life down, and teaches us to do the same:

 

“…[He] made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men… He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” — Philippians 2:7-8

 

Read it slowly. The upward religion is full of men trying to become gods. Our faith tells of the God who became a servant. There is the fingerprint of the other Father — the exact reverse of I will ascend. This is not merely one beautiful moment in the Christian story. It is the whole direction of the gospel. God knows we cannot reach Him, He is too high, too holy, but still He loves us enough to come down to the weak, the guilty, the blind, and the lost. 

 

Section Five:

THE SELF

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Now we come to the heart of the matter. Every upward religion, however much the self is disciplined, denied, even dissolved, the self remains the agent and the project. The whole enterprise exists to arrive, by their own doing, at a better self — a purer self, a freed self, an enlightened self, a self that has at last earned its place. The self may be starved and beaten along the way, but it is still the self that is working and the self that is being served, because it is the self that stands to gain at the end of the road. The ladder is climbed by me, for me. This is only what we should expect — for it is the father’s own sentence: I will exalt my throne.

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The gospel does not improve the self; it removes it, crucifies it.

 

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me…” — Galatians 2:20

 

Hear what Paul does and does not say. Not “I have become a better me.” Not “I have reached my highest self.” But “yet not I” — the self has been taken to a cross, and what now lives is Christ in its place. This is why the truest voice our faith has ever raised is not “behold what I have become,” but rather:

 

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” — John 3:30

 

Do you feel how strange this is against everything the world calls religion? The whole machinery of the upward faiths is built to make the self more. The gospel is the one road on earth whose destination is the self made nothing, so that God may be all. We are not asked to climb until we are worthy. We are asked to come down, empty-handed and unworthy, and let Him make us worthy — which

He alone can do, and which He delights to do.

 

Section Six:

THE TWO GODS

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Look last at the gods themselves, for the two religions do not worship the same kind of being.

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The counterfeit gods cannot save anyone. Some of them are too far. They are vague — a force, a fate, an impersonal absolute, a distant first-cause that set the world spinning and wandered off. You may admire such a god, or fear it, but you can never know it, for there is no face there to turn toward you, and no intention to meet your need. And others fail at the opposite end: they are too small. They are gods you can fully grasp, gods you can carry in your hand, bargain with, flatter, and manage. A god made of men's hands, small enough to be carved, powerless enough to need to be carried cannot help you.

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Here is the whole tragedy of the counterfeit gods in one line — man is left to save himself, because his god cannot do it. And how can a drowning man save himself?

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But the God of the Bible is not only able to save; it is His very heart to come searching for the ones who cannot save themselves — to move toward us before we ever move toward Him.

 

"…doth [He] not leave the ninety and nine… and go after that which is lost, until he find it?" — Luke 15:4

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Hear what kind of God this is. Not a distant absolute to be admired from below, nor a small thing to be carried in the hand — but a Shepherd who rises and goes out into the dark after one stray, and will not stop until He has found it. No other religion has ever dared to imagine a God like this, because no other religion has a God who would stoop to it — to leave His glory and come, at cost to Himself, for people who were not even looking for Him. The counterfeit gods must be carried. This God carries:

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"I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you." — Isaiah 46:4

 

From Knowing About to Entering In:

WHICH ROAD ARE YOU ON?

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So the thousands collapse into two, the two trace back to two fathers, and the two fathers come down at last to a single posture of the heart. Either:

• I will climb, I will achieve, I will make myself worthy, I will build my tower and make my name (it wears a thousand costumes).

• Or I cannot — please save me.

And the wonder of the gospel is that He already has. You do not have to climb, friend, for the long and exhausting reason that no one ever could; and you do not have to climb for the joyful reason that the high and lofty One has already come all the way down to where you are.

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“Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.”
— Matthew 11:28–30

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It does us little good merely to know about the two religions, as though we were standing safely outside them both, marking a scorecard. There is no outside. Every one of us is, at this moment, in one of these two families — striving up, or kneeling down; bearing the likeness of the father of pride, or being remade into the likeness of the One who is humble. And the gospel is precisely the good news that you are not chained to the family you were born into. You can be born again into the other.​

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And this brings us to a searching question for the days ahead. If the upward religion always seeks a way to preserve the self — to protect its comfort, its safety, its own chosen road — what happens when even our end-times hope begins to rest, not on Christ Himself, but on the promise that we will be spared the fire?

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That is where we must look next: not to win an argument about timetables, but to ask what Scripture prepares the people of God for.

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