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A very legitimate response to the issue of Christ's exclusivity has been raised by skeptic and believer alike: Why not just have God force people to choose Christ, or have Him orchestrate their lives in such a way that they will eventually inevitably choose to commit to Christ?
Philosophers have dealt with this question by stepping back to think about 4 different worlds that might exist, 4 worlds that could have been created by God.
World #1 - no world at all. God decides to not create anything at all, there is no world. This obviously deals with the issue at hand but it also brings up a myriad of other issues, the primary being that no one ever exists. So we move on.
World #2 - a world with no right or wrong. In this world, there is no right or wrong and it is a place where all religions are essentially the same, they are all right, and the exclusive claims of Christ are no more exclusive than a person who creates his or her own religion. The issue with this option is that it flies in the face of logic and in the face of the nature of God. God is a rational being, a logical being, and a truthful being. That being the case, and it also being the case that truth is exclusive, God cannot create a world where truth does not matter, where right/wrong (or even correct/incorrect) do not exist. It is irrational and impossible.
World #3 - a world where people are obligated, forced to choose to follow and love Christ. The issue here is that of love. We read in the Scriptures that God's greatest command is to love Him with all we have, but coerced love is no love at all. No one would want to be loved by a robot merely because it was programmed to love. Likewise, most people would be offended if they found out that their spouse or significant other was "loving " him/her out of obligation versus loving by choice. That leads us to our fourth option.
World #4 - a world where people are given the dignity and freedom to choose to love and follow Christ. In this world, people can freely choose to commit to Christ, but of course that rationally means that people must therefore also have the option to not love Christ, and to choose to reject Him. This world maintains the dignity of the individual and holds to all the rational issues where the other worlds cannot.
The idea of obliging people to commit to Christ seems, at first, to deal with the issue of those who would otherwise reject Him, but as we can see it brings up even more fundamental issues thereby compounding the problem. The conclusion: the only way the love may remain intact and exist is if there is true freedom given to follow or reject Christ.
-tC
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