All of history is rift with man’s search for God. With this in mind, Blaise Pascal wrote, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself”

Airing earlier this year on the National Geographic Channel was “The Story of God.” Morgan Freeman, who played God in several movies, traveled around the world to find God in all the world’s religions. When interviewed by FOX411, Freeman said, “”What we’ve done is go around the world asking, observing, trying to get that sense of what binds us all together. We came away with the idea that we’re much more the same than we are different. Every religion is after the same thing.”  One writer correctly observed that, “The end goal of ‘The Story of God’ is to open an interfaith dialogue about ideas and values that we all share, not that we disagree on.”

In my opinion, what Freeman discovered was that all humans have the same hunger for God. The human condition as Pascal describes is universal. But the various attempts to address that hunger for God as expressed in the many world religions is anything but “the same thing.” Jesus was presented in this series as just another option for approaching God. But I would argue that Jesus did not come to set up another “religion” but to destroy all religions and to give restless man rest in his search for God. In Matthew 11:27, Jesus said, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” I agree with Michael Green’s observation in his commentary on this verse. He writes, “Whatever revelation there may be, dispersed in human intellect and values, in virtuous action, in nature and in the history of humankind, the center of all God’s self-disclosure is Jesus of Nazareth. He fulfills all the hopes of the Old Testament, and is the heart of all revelation. In a dark world lit by candles and lamps, he comes as a searchlight.”