Posted on 06/12/2013 11:25:22 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck
OK, this is very much a theological vanity. But I don't think it is in vain.
John 3:16-17. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
Very familiar passage of Christian scripture, though John 3:17 is somewhat less often quoted.
Notice something here, however. "God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world."
Turns out this has some very important spiritual/psychological consequences, for anyone willing to believe.
There's a joke about fundamentalists (and indeed I am a fundamentalist) that accuses them of being "no fun, all damn, and very little mental."
I won't address the fun and mental parts, but I'd like to point out that a very large problem with the whole unsaved world is that it in fact IS "all damn." (Not knowing God it can't bless; all it knows is sin, and sin is the damning of God's desirous will.) And many Christians are "mostly damn" because their faith is not deeply radical; they don't appreciate the fact that John 3:17 brings a hiatus to damnation.
Well, damning, while it can help contain sin, has a steep spiritual cost. Damning means wishing a spiritual death. Psychologically it freezes thoughts, forbidding one to even visit certain areas of thought.
So if we could stop damning, we could unfreeze many thoughts... worth thinking about so to speak?
Now wait, you say, if we stop damning then we have no means to motivate anyone, even Christians, to avoid what's sin... turns out that is not so. There is another means: God's love, and the fear of violating it.
Let me ask you, how often have you reflexively said "God damn" this or that?
If John 3:17 is on the level, could that be wrong? (This is not the time to damn?)
If damning now is wrong, and I am convinced that it is wrong, then many helpful consequences follow.
I don't have time to elaborate on this. But I think it is worth considering for Christians. It could help open their minds to more possibilities of effective usage of the gospel if they make some kind of conscious effort to stop damning, even if with imperfect success. It does not mean that they refrain from calling wrong things wrong, or refrain from being angry at wrongs, but it means that they do so with grace and perspective. That the enemy is not (now) humans; it is Satan, and we want as many humans saved as possible.
I mean independent of Jesus’ current temporal role in the world.
Please explain how it would falsify, not just supplement, a stand alone view of 3:17.
(I believe your cavil is on the order of “quarrels about words.” In this case we do not have a mystical statement whose parts do not make any sense except as a gestalt. We have a compound statement of clauses each of which is clear and true as a unit. The part of the statement in 3:18 does not assert that Jesus is actually damning anybody, only that Jesus is warning that some are damned. To assume that Jesus is also the one doing that damning in the present time is to assert “facts not in evidence” and as I pointed out, there is good reason to believe that is not the case.)
I apologize, however, if my attitude has been wrong towards you (and maybe it was, as I was letting myself get anxious). I might agree to disagree with you about the meaning of the part of the statement in 3:17, but I don’t need to be getting “angry with my brother” about it. (The Lord’s servant must be able to teach, not resentful)
I think we can draw a broader point from the whole scripture and it still agrees with my general tenor of grace. Jesus came into the world to warn it that it was damned unless it accepted Him, and also conversely to tell the world that the good news of being able to accept Him had an upside beyond their wildest dreams. However I’m asserting that He wasn’t going to put any limitations during life on who might accept Him. If Jesus actually DID damn any specific people at the current time (before their personal death at any rate), then he would be putting limitations on it. So I assert that the clause in 3:17 is in fact true of itself, as a necessity in order to enable the maximum outreach of grace possible.
And yes, I know this probably doesn’t sit well with Calvinists, at least some Calvinists. Now that the Lord has been doing wonders in my own life, and I have seen a little about how He does that, I am inclined, I suppose, to be “Calminian.” But Calvinist and Arminian are human categories. The Bible never said “Choose whether you are to be a Calvinist or an Arminian.” People did.
But in other contexts we see that Jesus is not always furnished with complete details in certain times by His Father. God reserves that information to the person of the Father. So a certain agnosticism as to who can be saved would, at least, be demonstrable as possible. At any rate, WE do not know from outward appearances; all we can see is who is sailing briskly towards hell NOW. Not whether in fact Jesus is poised to make a dramatic save in that person’s eternal life.
And as regards to us Christians it is unambiguous... there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. All for us is grace; even God’s pointings out of our wrongdoing (however bad our wrongdoing gets) and our chastisements by Him (however bewildering at the time) are imbued with His grace. Grace says that the sooner you stop worrying, the better. The thoughts we need to take are thoughts of love, and not just some generalized love, but love that has a distinct purpose.
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