#32.

The Lord's Supper Proclaims The Impossibility of Salvation by Another

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Acts 4:12 And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that
has been given among men by which we must be saved.
We have been reviewing how it is that the Lord's Supper shows us there can only be one way of
salvation, and that by faith in the finished work of Christ. We saw that the shedding of blood is
essential - a life must be given up if a life that has been forfeited through sin is to be saved. Next
we saw that to save a countless multitude required that the life given up must be pure and sinless
and of infinite value. Only Christ had such a life, so His sacrifice was the only possible means to
save people from sin, death and hell.
This time, we are stepping back from the whole scene and surveying the life of Christ from
30,000 feet. We are going to ask ourselves, if indeed there was any number of alternative and
equally effective ways of finding salvation and arriving in heaven, why did God the Father put
His Son through such a life and such a death?
700 years before He was born, God gave Jesus the name, "Man of Sorrows", "Acquainted with
Grief". Look at some of the things He faced during His 33 years on earth:

When He came into the world, only a few worshiped Him and some tried to kill Him
He dwelt as a sinless soul among people who were thoroughly corrupted by sin. If Lot
was tormented when living in Sodom and Gomorrah, what must this have been like for
Jesus?
Most of the people He lived with did not truly believe and trust in His Father in heaven
Even His disciples were frequently slow of heart to believe what He was teaching them
He witnessed the money changers and traders turning His Father's house into a den of
robbers
He was despised and rejected first by the crowds, then by His hometown and His earthly
brothers. He was betrayed by Judas, deserted by His disciples and finally was forsaken by
His heavenly Father on the cross. No one has ever been so alone as Jesus was.
He wept over the hardness of heart of the Jews, wept angry tears at the tomb of Lazarus
because of what sin had done, was often weeping and crying aloud in prayer to God. His
anguish in Gethsemane was so great that He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood
He was tempted - not just in the wilderness, but at every opportune moment, and He
resisted those temptations to the point of shedding His blood.

Most of the points above have to do with the sorrow and grief of the life of Jesus, but these pale
in comparison with what took place on the cross. In the garden, Jesus asked the Father that He
might be spared what He was about to endure if it was possible - in other words, if there was
another way to save the people of God, that the Father might not put Jesus through such agony as
He was about to face. Yet Jesus went to the cross.
Read Psalm 22 for a first hand account of what Jesus went through. We leave on one side the
scourging, spitting, beating and even the excruciating (a word itself derived from crucifixion)

physical pain of hanging on the cross by nails. Infinitely worse was the breach of fellowship that
the man Christ Jesus experienced with His Father, and the full force of God's anger and wrath
that He bore in His soul in the place of those He would save, which their sins richly merited. He
endured hell on the cross for a countless number of people.
We could never fully plumb the depths of Christ's sorrow, grief and suffering, and certainly not
in the few short words we have given here, but hopefully this will serve to make our point. If
any other way to God was good enough and would work out just fine for those who sincerely
followed it, would God put His infinitely precious Son (His "Beloved") through all of
this? Would He do this so He could offer Jesus as just one more path to heaven, of equal
efficacy as any number of other possibilities? Would He hear His own Son cry to Him in
anguish to be spared the cross if it were possible, and then send Him there anyway, knowing that
there were plenty of other ways to salvation? The thought is both monstrous and absurd.
For all these reasons, then, and because Jesus and Peter are recorded as confirming this in the
Scriptures, we contend that Jesus is the only Savior, and that all religions, philosophies and
ideologies that put the crucifixion of the God-man Christ Jesus on one side to offer an alternative
path to heaven are false - they must be false for all the reasons we have seen.
So now, believer, when you come to the Table, treasure it! Treasure it because it points to this
only way of salvation, and to a Savior Whose love for His people is such that He came to provide
that way at a cost that we will never fathom throughout all eternity!
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