The transfiguration means is this: there is no religion unless it comes from God and from Christ. There is only one true religion and that is the religion that comes from heaven and comes by way of the Son of God, the second person of the glorious Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Now this is contrary to all that is taught today. We are living in days when the idea is, there is something in every religion and there is something religious contained even in things that are not religions. This is the idea. You can get a sense of God and a bit of theology from looking at a painting if you know how to do it, they tell us. You can follow whatever religion you like and there are insights and truths and ideas which you can derive from all of them and put them together. People take this idea up like a tune, and they hear this and they retail it and they think it's a liberated way of thinking: to believe that there's something in every religion.
Just think about it before you pick up this nonsense too readily and retail it to somebody else. It is manifest nonsense. How can there be something in every religion when most religions are in head-on collision with each other, when religions flatly contradict one another? We must use our minds. We are talking about Almighty God, the God of all the earth. We are talking about the Creator of all worlds, who has such perfect order that he can design every little cell and make everything interlock and interact. We are talking about Almighty God and we are assuming that he is a Creator and that he has made us for a purpose. What is that purpose? To allow 101 religions to totally misrepresent him, contradict each other and create utter confusion, such as is not seen in the created world, so that a few men may grope diligently among them or come to different conclusions about the results and have some sort of religion. Does that make any sort of sense?
The notion that there is some truth in every religion and you have got to synthesize them is just so ludicrous as to not be worthy of your intellectual powers. Just as there is only one answer to biological problems, chemical problems, physical problems, so there’s only one answer to divine problems, to spiritual problems. There's only one God. There's only one way in which God has ordered and done every one of the myriad things he has done. There is only one true faith: one faith, one Lord, one baptism teaches the Scripture. Things cannot be equally true that are in flat contradiction with each other. ‘Hear him’, says the Scripture. ‘Hear him.’ There is only one religion and it is a revealed religion.
Most religions don't even claim to be revealed religions. They are the product of the imagination of man. We had an archbishop in this country a few years ago who once said that he expected to see atheists in heaven. Well, how did he know? Where did he get that from? He invented it. Now in fairness to him, he was not a believer in the inspired word of God. He thought he had a right to invent it. When you think about it, isn't that the most monumentally arrogant thing you've ever heard? A man deciding who's going to be in heaven when he has never been there and he doesn't know and it's something that he's just conjured up straight out of his own mind? It's a sad day when preachers abandon this book, which is the sole authority, which is given by revelation, which comes from the Holy Spirit of God. ‘I don't know anything about God or his ways, or his character, or the way of salvation, or who he has determined will be in heaven, except what he himself has said. So first of all, a Christian is a listener, not a self-opinionated person who exalts his own mind, his intellect, his imaginings and thoughts above revelation. The person who's going to seek and find Christ is someone who listens to these words and hears them.
And only the word of God will do. Only the word of Christ, his way of salvation, how he has unfolded and explained it, that alone will do. The transfiguration shows those watching that true religion was supernatural. Some people don't like that word. It reminds them of magicians and things of this kind, and ghosts and things that go bump in the night. Maybe it does rather, but they are not entitled to have that word. It's our word. True religion is supernatural. It's divine. It is of God. It cannot be explained in rational terms. If somebody has found true religion, something will have happened to them, which only God can do. True religion isn't merely belief. ‘Oh, I believe a thing, and I hope I am going to clutch onto it through life's journey, and I hope one day it will prove to be true.’ That's not true religion. True religion is believing a thing as the result of which I feel its power in my life and I am changed, and I come to know God and I walk with him and prove him. True religion actually achieves something. It isn't just ideas. It isn't just an ethical system. It's knowing and feeling God and walking with him and having his power. It's not believing in myths and abandoning reason. That is what the transfiguration teaches. These disciples saw something amazing, divine, and every true convert will have an encounter with the living God and that encounter will be such powerful evidence to them with regard to the reality of their faith that they will never look back.
Think of the incarnation. The incarnation just baffles the imagination: that the mighty God who is in every place, who is everywhere, who is all-powerful, who is spirit, infinite, all-pervading; that the second person of the Trinity, who is as infinite, as powerful, as eternal as the Father and the Holy Spirit could somehow come down from heaven and humble himself, and contract himself into a physical body, and be born as a babe, and could unite his divine personality with a human personality in order that he could become God-man. What for? So that he could be our representative, so that he could one day stand in our place, so that he could one day feel our punishment and take our sins and be our atoning, sin-bearing Saviour. What an amazing miracle, that God could become incarnate and could wed his very divine personality with a human nature.
Think of the young disciples. There they were gathered in an upper room afraid of going out, afraid of the Jews, looking to God and then God comes into that room in power and so energizes them and shakes them that within two centuries they turn the known world upside down. That is true religion. It changes people, transforms people, alters them entirely. It takes a Martin Luther in the middle of medieval Rome, and there in Germany, single-handed, he discovers the light of the gospel and is determined to preach it to his nation come what may. And with the whole power of Rome against him he prevails, and a great reformation is brought in and thousands upon thousands of people who before were in slavery to Rome – worshiping they knew not what, with no certainty about God, terrified of a great awesome God of judgment with no light and no spiritual life – hear the gospel, believe, and are truly converted.
Go to Christ first as a Saviour. Recognize your awful sinfulness. Recognize your state of heart. Not just the things you do, but the things you are. ‘I do sinful things, and I am a sinner. I do sinful deeds, and I am proud and self-sufficient and deceitful and sensual. What's more, I have seized life for myself, and I have spurned my God.’ Go to him and tell him. Let him bring you under conviction of sin, as we call it. If you don't feel the burden of your sin enough, ask him to help you to feel it, because you've got to go to him and repent of your sin and give him your life totally, so that you now come under his ownership and under his authority. When you do that, you will know the power and the blessing of Christian conversion. You will know the great change, and you will taste and see that the Lord is good. If you are a seeking soul, don't rest until you are sure that you have felt and tasted and known the power of God in your life.