“Salvation” series (post #1)

“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14, N.K.J.V.)

There’s an old negro spiritual that contains the famous line: “Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t a goin’ there.” Incorrect grammar and spelling aside, that line gets it dead right. That’s why I want to use this post to begin a new series entitled “Salvation.”

According to a 2025 article published by The Center for the Study of Global Christianity, 32.3% (2.6 billion people) of the world’s total population profess to be Christians. The next largest religious group consists of Muslims, who make up 25.2% (2 billion people) of the population. So, despite the fact that in many places Islam is growing faster than Christianity, Christianity remains what it has been for centuries now: the largest religion in the world. 

But wait a minute. Didn’t Jesus say the way to life is narrow and few people find it? That certainly doesn’t sound like the makings for the world’s largest religion, does it? How, then, do we reconcile these contradictory facts? Well, that’s a really good question, one that I’ll try to answer.

For one thing, even if 32.3% of the world’s population truly are Christians, that means 67.7% are not. Consequently, there are more than two lost people to every one Christian. Proportionately speaking, that would have to make the gate that opens into life narrow in comparison to the gate that opens into destruction.

For another thing, though, we simply cannot overlook the Catholicism factor in regards to the reported number of Christians. Unfortunately, the world’s Catholics all get classified under the general heading “Christian” even though Catholicism isn’t the same as biblical Christianity. It is, instead, a bizarre mix of biblical Christianity and Roman paganism that was begun when Rome’s emperor Constantine set himself to the task of “Christianizing” his empire.

Constantine knew that him forcing his citizens to completely do away with their pagan practices would result in chaos and uprising, and so he skillfully enacted a plan by which he and his bishops, over the course of several years, took those practices and figuratively baptized them into Christianity. This baptizing extended to Rome’s pagan worship services as well as its pagan holiday celebrations. I won’t take the time here to say any more about all that, but under this site’s category labeled “Catholicism” you’ll find several posts where I delve into the topic much more extensively. Read those if you like. For the purposes of this post, however, suffice is to say that any study that automatically regards Catholics as Christians skews that study to a point of making its numbers useless.

To be clear, I’m not prepared to say that all Catholics are lost. Nevertheless, I do believe that most of them are. You see, Catholicism is a man-made, works-based religion that elevates Peter to the status of the first Pope, Mary to the status of perpetual virginity, and the Catholic church to the status of the “true” church. Not one of those doctrines holds up in the light of scripture, and that casts serious doubt on anyone who supposedly becomes a Christian via that religious system.

For this reason, I don’t hesitate to say that we can dismiss out of hand the nonsense that 32.3% of the world’s population are authentic Christians. How can that be when a 2022 report released by the Vatican showed that 1.36 billion of the world’s professing “Christians” are Catholics? That’s more than half the world’s supposed “Christians.”

As for how many genuine Christians there are in the world, only God knows the number. Undoubtedly, though, that number is relatively small in relation to the world’s reported population of 8.062 billion. Again, even if we give every Catholic automatic credit for being an authentic Christian — and we shouldn’t — the world’s Christian population would still only sit at 32.3% of the total population. Doing a bit of math then, if 32.3% claim to be Christians, but 50% of those are Catholic, I think we can reasonably assume that the true percentage of Christians around the world is no higher than 15%. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the number is much, much lower. I say that because it’s not like every person in all the other subcategories of Christianity — Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Episcopalians, etc. — is legitimately saved, either.

But, of course, the real question for you is: “Are you a genuine Christian?” That’s the question I want to help you answer over the course of this series. In order to find your answer, this series will focus on doctrine that is drawn directly from the Bible’s teachings. We have to make this a doctrinal series because, when it comes to the all-important subject of salvation, only the Bible’s teaching will do. So, I hope that you’ll take the time to read and seriously consider each of these upcoming posts, and even more than that I hope that you are right now on your way to heaven. If you aren’t, this series will explain to you how you can pass through that narrow gate and get on the way that leads to eternal life.