{"id":5256,"date":"2026-02-27T09:09:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T14:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5256"},"modified":"2026-02-27T09:09:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T14:09:17","slug":"his-only-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/27\/his-only-son\/","title":{"rendered":"His Only Son"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
\u00a0
Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.<\/em>
\u00a0
A few years ago, I came up behind a car driven by a teenage girl.\u00a0It was turning into the parking lot of our local high school.
\u00a0
I noticed its bumper sticker:\u00a0Galileo was wrong; the world revolves around ME.\u00a0<\/em>
\u00a0
In today’s world that makes laughably perfect sense.\u00a0If there is nothing outside myself that is eternally valid or true, then the question of where I will get my rules for living is easy to resolve: Everything that means anything begins and ends with me<\/em>.\u00a0
\u00a0
“Truth” is what turns out to suit my appetites.\u00a0My feelings, my perspectives, and my take on reality become Reality itself.
\u00a0
The cereal aisle in the grocery store, fully stocked with scores of colorful options, is a compelling metaphor for current spiritual decision-making.\u00a0Individuals insist on limitless choices.\u00a0As author Mike Starkey puts it, “If theology is the study of God (from the Greek word Theos<\/em>), then most contemporary spirituality is \u2018me-ology,\u2019 the art of taking my own tastes, preferences and moods and creating a customized religion just for me.\u201d
\u00a0
No wonder it\u2019s so hard for so many 21st<\/sup> century people to embrace the Apostles\u2019 Creed.
\u00a0
According to the New Testament (which is foundational for the Creed), there is only one God. Who has only one Son. Who provides \u2013 by his life, death, and resurrection \u2013 the only path to that only God. \u201cI believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son<\/strong> our Lord.\u201d
\u00a0
That\u2019s a whole lot of \u201conly\u2019s\u201d to swallow in a single gulp.
\u00a0
The earliest Christian missionaries, in their journeys around the Mediterranean world, insisted that Jesus was not just the latest item on the take-your-pick buffet of Olympian deities. Today\u2019s Christian witnesses in south Asia have to clarify that he is not to be confused with the more than 300 million<\/em> \u201clocal\u201d gods and goddesses that are part of the religious scene in India.
\u00a0
According to the Bible, Jesus stands alone. All other powers and authorities are pretenders.
\u00a0
That \u201conly-ness\u201d is quite possibly the most counter-cultural aspect of what it means to follow Jesus, no matter when or where we happen to live. \u00a0
\u00a0
From time to time I\u2019ve heard skeptics suggest that Jesus, apart from a verse here and a comment there, rarely went out of his way to declare that he was God\u2019s one-and-only Son, and seemed hesitant to present himself as the centerpiece of God\u2019s efforts to heal this broken world.
\u00a0
We can only say that\u2019s not how he was perceived by his fellow Jewish citizens. There was little doubt in their minds that Jesus was presenting himself as Someone Special.
\u00a0
Consider, for instance, his Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey. Throngs of people were waving\u00a0branches in a messianic frenzy.\u00a0Some of them\u00a0began to ask out loud:
\u00a0
Who is this?<\/em>
\u00a0
That’s the kind of question we ask all the time about other people.\u00a0When someone joins our workplace team, or\u00a0a new person moves in next door, or we encounter a stranger at a gathering, we almost immediately\u00a0begin to categorize them.\u00a0Is this someone I should pay attention to?\u00a0Is this a person\u00a0I should fear, respect, or ignore?\u00a0Is she more likely to become my rival or my friend?
\u00a0
Putting people into categories helps us define them.\u00a0Figure them out.\u00a0Make them small enough that we can predict their moods, their decisions, and the\u00a0potential roles\u00a0they might play in our lives.\u00a0
\u00a0
This is a typically human thing to do.\u00a0 It is, of course, exceedingly\u00a0costly.\u00a0 More often than not, by quickly dropping\u00a0men and women into the preexisting categories of our limited experience, we miss the chance to hear them, meet them, and actually\u00a0find out who they really are.
\u00a0
The crowd lining the road to Jerusalem seems to have had a\u00a0difficult time finding the right pigeonhole in which to place Jesus.
\u00a0\u00a0
Their question, “Who is this?” appears to have\u00a0the\u00a0force of “Who does he\u00a0think he is, anyways?\u00a0The prophets told us\u00a0that God’s Messiah would appear riding a donkey.\u00a0Is this man trying to present himself as the answer to our prayers and the solution to our problems?”
\u00a0
In the days following Palm Sunday, Jesus would quickly demonstrate that he didn’t fit anyone’s\u00a0preexisting categories for God’s Chosen One.\u00a0So the question remains:
\u00a0
Who is this?\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0
\u00a0
Even after twenty centuries, it’s impossible to be neutral about him.\u00a0He delights and he infuriates.\u00a0He inspires and he irritates.\u00a0He answers life’s deepest questions even while raising a host of new ones.
\u00a0\u00a0
Within the past 100 years, some of the world’s superpowers have made it their mission to dump Jesus.\u00a0During the early days of the Soviet Union, an ideological group called the League of the Militant Godless openly ridiculed him.\u00a0The 1929\u00a0Soviet magazine cover that appears above\u00a0shows two factory workers\u00a0literally dumping Jesus out of a wheelbarrow.\u00a0
\u00a0
But the League found their task considerably tougher than they thought. “Christianity is like a nail,” said Yemelian Yaroslasky, their leader.\u00a0“The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.”\u00a0
\u00a0
When the USSR\u00a0collapsed in 1991, polls revealed that two-thirds of the Russian people still believed in Christ, even after eight decades of state-sponsored atheism.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
Who is this person?<\/em>
\u00a0
Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan has written:\u00a0“Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus has been the dominant figure in the history of Western Culture…\u00a0 If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?”\u00a0
\u00a0
The answer, of course, is not very much.\u00a0The man who entered Jerusalem on a donkey, apparently quite aware of the forces aligned\u00a0to destroy him in a few days, has seemingly left his fingerprints on everything.
\u00a0
Which brings us to the key question of our time: Does the world revolve around me<\/u><\/em>, or does it revolve around someone else? And who is qualified to be that someone else?
\u00a0
In 2016 Richard Hays, one of the world\u2019s leading New Testament scholars, completed his book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels<\/em>.\u00a0
\u00a0
A panel of fellow scholars gave his work favorable reviews at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature that year in San Antonio.\u00a0The author himself was present for the Q&A that followed, even though he was in the midst of treatments for pancreatic cancer.
\u00a0
One of the reviewers thought Hays might have gone a bit too far in his conclusions \u2013 especially when he asserted that the early church had unequivocally taught that Jesus was the world\u2019s only Savior, and that Christians today should do the same.\u00a0Why had he expressed himself so strongly?\u00a0
\u00a0
Hays began to weep. \u00a0
\u00a0
He admitted to the audience, \u201cI thought that these were going to be the last words I was ever going to write.\u201d
\u00a0
A man who had spent most of his life studying Scripture could think of nothing more important, at the end of his life, than to affirm the only-ness of Jesus Christ.
\u00a0
He is the only Son.<\/em>
The only Way.<\/em>
And our only Hope.<\/em>

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.\u00a0A few years ago, I came up behind a car driven by a teenage girl.\u00a0It was turning into the parking lot of our local… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5257,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080,1083],"class_list":["post-5256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed","tag-uniqueness-of-jesus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5258,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256\/revisions\/5258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}