Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but by Me” in John 14:6, yet and still, there are some who continue to water down the idea that Jesus is the one true God — and that continue to insist that all gods are the same, have the same origin stories, require the same things, and so on.

The Gospel of Inclusion, as it is called (known to many as universalism and inclusivism), is an old heresy repackaged under a different name masquerading as sound, “evangelical” theology today. But there is nothing evangelical about it. The Gospel of Inclusion ultimately says that all go to Heaven, including Judas, Satan, and the fallen angels that openly rebelled against the Lord of Hosts, and that all gods are valid paths to the Divine.

But Jesus Himself set up distinctions between Himself and other so-called false gods.

What are some of those distinctions?

Jesus distinguishes himself from all other gods

Some say that Jesus didn’t spend that much time focused on His being God. And yet, there are key things Jesus says that attest to His divinity and Lordship.

Such an example can be found in the Gospel of Matthew, where we see the Magi (the three wise men) refer to Jesus as “the King of the Jews” (Matthew 2:2), a statement that angered Herod and motivated him to attempt to kill Jesus (Matthew 2:13, 20). Herod considered himself to be the King of the Jews; anyone else trying to claim that same label was a threat to his political reign and had to be killed.

And King of the Jews was a title to Jesus’ future political reign. If that was enough to distinguish Him from King Herod, then imagine what statements the Scriptures show us to distinguish Jesus from all other gods!

jesus, god above all gods

What the Gospel of Inclusion intends to do is make all religions and “gods” equal; that is, there really is nothing superior to any of them. And those who hold to this position spend more time focused on how similar the various faiths are in the hopes of convincing others that the religions are the same, copied and pasted with different labels, names, and cultures in various countries. And sure, they may require adherents to do different things (for example, making pilgrimages to Mecca versus asking forgiveness for sin, etc.), but those are irrelevant distinctions.

Inclusionists want to include every faith and deity in God’s plan of salvation, so they focus on the similarities between the faiths. And in so doing, they want to convince you that you just “happened” to be where Jesus is preached, or where Buddha, Confucius, or Mohammed is preached. You are simply religious because of your geographical, cultural circumstances.

This is not true, but it is a point that inclusivists (or inclusionists) often make. Their goal is to make Jesus and Buddha synonymous (the same god but with two different names).

In Matthew 17 at the Mount of Transfiguration (also recorded in other places in Scripture), Jesus is shown talking with Moses and Elijah. Peter wanted to build altars to all three (Matthew 17:4), but God the Father responds from Heaven with the words “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” (v.5), distinguishing Jesus from Moses and Elijah. He wasn’t equal to these prophets, but greater than them; greater than all the prophets.

In Mark 5, with the healing of the Gerasene Demoniac, we see that his life was limited to the tombs, the graveyard, the cemetery, for “neither could any man tame him” (Mark 5:4). And yet, the Gerasene Demoniac’s demons recognize who Jesus is and tremble: “What have I to do with you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore You by God that You do not torment me” (Mark 5:7, NKJV). The demons knew Jesus by name and begged Jesus, “do not torment me.”

The Legion goes on to beg Jesus to “not send them out of the country.” They ask Jesus to send them out of the man to a particular place, acknowledging the power Jesus has over them. They are afraid of Him and beg Him to honor their request. The demons know who Jesus is and they know His power.

As if the miracles of Jesus don’t make enough of a case for His Deity, John’s Gospel tells us so: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3). It doesn’t get much clearer than this that Jesus is not just a prophet; He’s not just a good man on earth who did good deeds. Rather, He is Deity, God Himself, God incarnate, our “Immanuel,” God who took on flesh and dwelt among us, God with us (John 1:14; Matthew 1:23).

The Gospels and the New Testament as a whole affirm that Jesus is greater than any human that has ever walked this earth. For example, Hebrews tells us that Jesus is “the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person” (Hebrews 1:3), referring to Jesus being the Glory of God shown on the earth as well as being the embodiment of God Himself. He is God. To see Jesus is to see God. In Hebrews 1:4, Jesus is “so much better than the angels” because God gives Jesus a throne; the angels bow before the throne but they do not rule on a throne as Jesus does. They are subordinate to Him, neither equal to nor above the Son of God.

In Hebrews 3:3, we read that Jesus “has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses,” a reminder to Bible readers that the Mount of Transfiguration was designed to show Jesus’ superior nature to Moses and Elijah while also showing that Jesus could connect with the dead in a way that magicians and prophets cannot. Mohammed, Confucius, and any other prophets, even Moses and Elijah, are neither equal to nor above Jesus. They cannot compare to Him, for He, being God, is superior to them. Man can never be equal to God.

inclusionists: doing the serpent’s work

I could go on and on and on, but there aren’t enough pages to talk about what all of Scripture says about God and how superior God is to man. The only reason why inclusionists and proponents of the Gospel of Inclusion try to “water down” Jesus and make Him equal to every other human worshipped in the world is because they know that Jesus is superior to them all. You don’t “water down” something that isn’t greater than or superior to everything else.

The whole point of making something less than is to reduce what it is. And in reducing what it is, or pulling it down, you are implicitly acknowledging that the thing you are pulling down is “greater than” what you reduce it to. So in their efforts to water down Jesus, they are implicitly confessing Jesus’ superiority. And by actively fighting and suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, they are “doing the serpent’s work”: trying to convince mankind still that all the man-made religions are valid pathways to God. How can man-made religion be accepted by God when He has already told us the ONE VALID pathway to the Father?

Did inclusionists not learn from the serpent in the Garden, whose sole purpose was to make Adam and Eve think that they “could become gods” if they ate the forbidden fruit? The idea that man can ever be equal to God was quickly dispelled of in the Garden. It is the reason why sin entered the world, the reason why God gave His Son to die on behalf of the sins of mankind (for, as Romans 6:23 says, “the wages of sin is death”). And we as a human species should learn something from it. Mankind’s greatest desire has been to become god; all these millennia later, we’re still trying to grapple for divinity when we can never reach it because it is reserved for God alone.

And it is this means to make mankind “gods” that has driven the inclusionist message: for, it says that Buddha, Mohammed, and so many others are gods alongside of Jesus. However, that is false, and a message from Hell that should be sent back where it comes from. Jesus has stated clearly that “no man comes to the Father but by Me”; where in that statement does Jesus, who carried the Father’s message, affirm that Mohammed and others are equal to Jesus Himself?