If my doctor gives me a diagnosis with “bad news” and recommends a particularly difficult treatment or radical surgery, I’m free to seek a second opinion. Some doctors will often recommend that you get a second opinion because they realize their own fallibility and want to be sure they haven’t missed something. That’s admirable. The Bible makes it clear that every human being will die. Not today, thankfully, but one day, you and I will die. No need to seek a second opinion on that one. It’s been the experience since Adam and Eve took from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The greatest physician has given each of us a diagnosis. He says the “wages of sin is death.” He says that you and I have sinned. It is “appointed to man once to die…” There is a time for everything; “a time to be born and a time to die.” Our diagnosis is fairly settled.
But this great physician came to heal the sick. He didn’t come for the healthy. They don’t need a physician. He came to heal sinners. Those who are righteous in their own eyes don’t need to be healed. The great physician brought the balm of Gilead, which heals the sins of the world and brings eternal life to all who will allow Him to treat them. Luke records Peter telling the world, in his sermon recorded in Acts 4:12, “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” We may not like what the Great Physician tells us about ourselves and our sin. But where else can we go? Peter learned this from Jesus firsthand. When many people were deserting Jesus, He asked Peter if he, too, would leave. In John’s Gospel, Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.” Peter had no need for a second opinion because Jesus was the one and only way to the Father and eternal life. Only Jesus had the “words of life.” Like Peter, I don’t need a second opinion. I know I’m a sinner, and physical death will be the wages of my sin. But Jesus brings a saving message to the sin-sick and dying.
I’ve read many testimonies of men and women who have spent their lives seeking a second opinion. They travel the many roads offered by many religions, all promising some kind of “salvation” from life’s situation. None of them have the words of life. There is a very narrow road that leads to eternal life. Few find it. Jesus is that one and only road. While many religions profess their own kinds of salvation and prescribe a particular treatment, there is none that offers what Jesus offered. They teach a wide variety of rituals and practices designed to help us live a healthy, happy, and moral life. They also deal at great lengths with the rituals associated with death and burial. They all fall short of what Jesus offers. R. A. Torrey wrote, “What men need is not morality, but life; not to make death respectable, but to receive the gift of eternal life; not decent interment, but a pathway out of the realm of death. Many men have brought forward their schemes for the “uplift of humanity” (though the results thereof are not yet discernible), but there is only One Man who makes, or ever made, the offer of eternal life. None other has ever said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on Me though he were dead yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth on Me shall never die” (John 11:25, 26). He only claims to be the “Fountain of Living Waters” (Jer. 2:13; John 4:14; 7:37) and says to all who are suffering the thirst of death, “Come unto Me and drink” (John 7:37). Peter understood it well, there is none other that offers the gift of eternal life.