Fans of the groundbreaking TV series "Lost" have been texting and e-mailing and tweeting and Facebooking like mad the last couple of days...ever since their much-talked about show's final episode Sunday night. I only caught a few minutes here and there of the brain-teasing events on that island where a plane crash started it all. But my friends who've followed "Lost" have sure been talking about how it all ended.
I confess that I recorded the last 30 minutes, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of solidarity with my "island" friends. Some found the ending a nice "happily ever after" cap to a story that was laced with spiritual themes. Others found it disturbing. I can understand that.
Whether you know anything about "Lost" or not, the spiritual resolution of the final episode is very reflective of the times we live in. Many of the prominent characters from the series are all together in a chapel somewhere on the other side of death. The chapel displays symbols of all the world's major religions. It appears to be an intermediate stop on the way to an eternity that is suggested by a door opening to blazing light. Wherever they are, it's all good. One character says, "You all built this by working together."
I confess I don't know more than the broad outlines of "Lost"'s complex story, but I think I recognize their concept of life after death. Simply put, all spiritual roads end up the same place. A good place, whatever you call it.
What's positive about "Lost"'s evident spirituality is that it has people talking about what comes after our last breath. That's a conversation that gives me as a Jesus-follower a wonderful opportunity to listen to a friend's ideas, and then share my personal hope story of the eternal assurance a living Christ has given me.
What's troubling about "Lost"'s final destination is how it beautifully, but wrongfully, contradicts the eternity described by the only person who's been there and back. That would be Jesus Christ. All of this world's other religious leaders are in their graves. Only Jesus - according to the testimony of six contemporary historians - walked out of His grave after He died. All the historical evidence is on one side of the scale. There's not one ounce of evidence that Jesus didn't rise from the dead - only evidence that He did.
Jesus is the only one who can speak with authority on what's on the other side of death. Everyone else is just guessing. I'm not willing to stake my soul on somebody's guess, no matter how good it makes me feel or how many believe it. Jesus made this audacious statement about how to access "the good place" after we die: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). Not a way - the way. Not a truth - the truth.
Our "open-minded" culture immediately bridles and says, "How can you say that all the other religions are wrong and Christianity is the only one that's right?" Actually, Jesus isn't saying that at all. He never came to start a religion. He came to pay for our sins, because there's no way we could. The Bible says, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23). There's only one way a death penalty can be paid. Someone has to die. Someone did. The Bible declares, "Christ died for our sins" (1 Corinthians 1:4). No one else even claimed to do the dying for our sins.
If we need a religion to make it to heaven, there are several with paths of human goodness to choose from. Take your pick. But no religion, no good life is good enough to satisfy a perfect God. Besides, good doesn't cancel out bad. No matter how good I am, all the selfish, or angry, or dirty, or hurting, or God-ignoring things I've ever done are still there. The Bible's picture of the pain-free, evil-free beauty of heaven includes this warning: "Nothing impure will ever enter it" (Revelation 21:27). I've got too much "impure" over the years to ever get in...like the rest of my fellow humans.
If there had been any other way for us to be with God in heaven, God would have never allowed His Son to go through the hell of that brutal death on the cross. The story of our spiritual rescue is the story of the most amazing love in history: "This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 John 4:10). Jesus has paid the price to promise: "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life" (John 3:36). And we have every reason to believe Him when He says, "Whoever believes in the Son is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because He has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" (John 3:18).
I can understand why we want a "feel good" ending where everyone lives happily ever after, but God is God and I'm not. He can't change who He is: holy, sinless, loving to a degree that is humanly unfathomable. How else can we explain how the very God we've sinned against would sacrifice His beloved Son to pay for that sin? So we could be forgiven of the sin that would keep us out of His heaven. The God who cannot overlook sin and the God who loves us too much to lose us are there for all the world to see, suspended by three nails, dying on a cross.
It never was and it never will be about which religion you are. It's all about the only One who could or would die for our sins: A Rescuer - not a religion. If we miss Him, we are, in a word, "lost."
We all have the God-given right to take our chances on a noble path we hope will end up where we want to go. Or we can place all our trust in the One who claimed to be "the way" and proved it...with an empty tomb.