P128_041125 Book Publishing Appeal (5)

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

The most common objection to the salvation of all is, well, people make a choice, salvation is a choice, some people choose to go to heaven, others choose to go to hell. That is not so. The fact is, the Bible reveals, especially the New Testament, that we have lost the power of choice, that we are not free anymore, that we are under bondage to sin. Salvation isn’t a choice of man, it is a deliverance by God. What do you think the meaning of deliverance is, if we had a choice in the first place? The fact is, once we sinned in Adam, we lost all freedom of choice in regard to spiritual things. We are in bondage to sin. Sin is not something we do simply, it is something that does us. And that’s one of the major teachings that I show in my book that I’m talking about and requesting you to help me publish, because the salvation of all comes about by a gift from God, the gift of Jesus Christ, but also the gift to believe in Jesus Christ. You say, well, what about the hardened, those people hardened of heart? Well, what I’m going to do now, I started it yesterday, but I couldn’t finish it because of time. I’m going to read a section from my book, my manuscript that is not yet published, but will be. The publishing house has accepted it for publication. And this gives you not only a feel for how the reading comes across and whether it will be good for your mind and heart, whether you’ll be able to understand it or not, of course you will, but also it gives you an insight into how God uses even the hardened heart to bring people to himself. Now, of course, I’m starting in the middle, so it’ll take you a few lines to catch the thought, but Remembering the Significance of Hardening Here is yet another juncture where most Christians find the salvation of all humanity beyond the pale. The division we see in the Gospels between those who believe in Jesus and those who are bent on destroying him is so searing—Jesus himself made it clear that the both in his day and persisting through history, is believed to seal the fate of his opponents forever, and therefore humanity’s wholesale salvation not worth giving a second thought. But contexts are jumping up and down to get a word in. They reveal two things. Hardening, that division between those who have received mercy and those who are threatened by it, is divinely intentional. Take another look at the paralyzed man by the pool. Right off the bat, an argument starts among the crowd after Jesus heals him. The dividing lines were certainly no accident. Jesus had commanded the man to take up your bed and walk. A simple command, but like a spark on gasoline because that day was the Sabbath. The bed was a mere small mat that he would roll up and tuck under his arm as he sprinted back home on his new legs. But to the killjoy Jews of Jesus’ day, it was the carrying of a burden on the Sabbath, and that was against the law. So, for this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought—hang on, what?—to kill him, because he had done these things on the Sabbath. Now, what insane thing would Jesus have had in mind in stirring up such a hotbed of enemies? He knew they opposed him in the first place. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? After all, he could have healed the paralytic at another time. It wasn’t as if the man was going anywhere. Surely, for Jesus to lie low, heal quietly as he did on other occasions, would have given him more freedom of movement to preach the message of the kingdom. But his actions were clearly intentional, highly provocative. The aim? Look at the lamb again. He’s also a lion. His passionate love, while protecting the humble, hunts for the proud. His eye is fixed on the ones who are too well for their own good, as well as the one who needs healing. His obvious purpose in the miracle in question was to create the awe of healing and the shock of offense, and more precisely to create the shock of offense by means of the awe of healing. And on the Sabbath of all days, once again it’s context that explains why Jesus was so intent on upsetting the apple cart. In a grand sweep of biblical history, Paul describes that divine dividing line in terms of believers and the hardened. There’s no neutral ground. All mankind is in a state of hardened suppression of God, whether conscious or unconscious, until they come to believe. So Paul puts it this way. God has mercy on whom he wills and whom he wills he hardens. And at all times, then, God’s loving stealth is in the thick of it. The Redemptive Purpose of Hardening Recall what our exploration uncovered in chapters 9 through 11 of Romans. God interlocks his grace with the precise antagonism going on between those who have received mercy and those who are being hardened by it. The debacle leads to the emergence of the crucified one. That hardened state, bent on muzzling Jesus, is the exact force that causes his voice to echo around the world as the one they kill comes back from the dead. Thus, hardened resistance to the Messiah, bent on slamming the door in his face, blasts it wide open for all humanity as the one they destroyed becomes God’s agent for the salvation of all the world. This is the behind-the-scenes context revealing the meaning of Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Properly read within the contexts we have explored, the gospel accounts of Christ’s life on earth are not to be understood necessarily As his saving some, while in the process accepting the inevitable collateral damage of the loss of billions of others, Jesus’ work on earth was a purposeful ministry of saving and dividing, and the saving and dividing both lead to redemption. With the Romans letter context close at hand then, here is yet again concrete confirmation that Jesus’ hardening of his opponents is full of purpose. He plainly wanted to rile the Jewish leadership. Not because he hated them or had given up on them. He loved them. God so loved the world. But because for the invisibility of faith to become visible, it must stand in stark contrast to resistance. Hardening reveals its true colors in the presence of faith. So, in his ardent love, Jesus, while healing a needy person, was, by that very healing, pushing the Jewish leaders to the wall. He was cornering them in their own stubbornness, forcing them to see the irrationality of their fury in the face of his mercy to sinners. Jesus knew they weren’t ready for him, but leaving them alone would accomplish nothing. Souls cannot be left in neutral. Jesus would rather they be cold or hot. Not that they were really neutral in the first place. A man’s enemies will be those of his own household. Only by first increasing their hardness could he begin to dislodge it. Offending them would create the first crack in their obstinacy. Steering it to its inevitable end would shock them by laying bare what they were capable of. We remember that God did the same thing with Israel hundreds of years before, when, prior to the Babylonian captivity, he made them desolate, in quotes there from the book of Ezekiel, by allowing their horrifying pagan behavior to sprout, that they might know that God is the Lord. In time then, Jesus’ opponents would realize whose side they were on. For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind. Jesus was purposely making people blind, and in the meantime God would use their blind hardness, astonishingly, as an instrument of his love. Through the vehicle of their hardness he would sacrifice his Son for their sins and for the sins of the world. This is the profound significance of Jesus’ prayer, Father, forgive them while they were banging in the nails. So look again at the man trapped in blindness. Why did Jesus do that particular thing, peculiar thing of spitting on the ground and mixing his spit with the dirt on the road and smearing it on the blind man’s eyes? He could just as easily have issued a simple command as he did on other occasions, and the man’s world would have come ablaze with colour. But Jesus was engaged in arson of another kind. I have come to set the earth on fire. Luke 12. He’s about to divide again. If we didn’t know his heart, we might easily think he was a foolhardy troublemaker. The masked Jesus of Mark, where he’s described as regularly healing people discreetly, was for another day. This day, incitement was the name of the game. There he was, engaged in a mini-building project, making that clay with his spit and smearing it on the blind man’s eyes on the Sabbath of old days. Nothing mystical about the spit and the clay, nothing symbolic, just a little job. a simple bit of elbow grease, and the Jewish leaders were apoplectic with rage. In the middle of this dust-up, with the Pharisees and Sadducees, recall the secret weapon Jesus had access to. That weapon was locked inside the minds of every one of his opponents, that enmity between the serpent and the woman. and Jesus had the power to unlock it. We give too much credence to a soul’s supposed ability to hold out forever against the internal conflicts that hardening unavoidably produces. If it manages to do so in this life, the soul will eventually cave to its force in the final judgment with weeping and gnashing of teeth. When humans are given over or hardened because of willful unbelief, an inevitable theater of operations comes into play. Stony indifference to all things spiritual goes only so deep. Below it, a mind resistant to God’s comforts spots terrors everywhere and makes demons out of shadows. It would have been impossible for the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’ day to sleep well at night. What are they to do with this Jesus man? There they are, in great fear where no fear was, the psalmist says. Psalm 53 Hardening is hard work. A ceaseless mental dogfight erupts between the mind’s guilt and its dread. Frequent attempts to take cover from their ever-present savagery by whatever distractions are at hand eventually prove useless. The soul, pummeled and numb, reaches its dead end, naked, cold and shapeless before unbent reality, the reality of Jesus. There, in the final judgment, the great division over the singular issue of the mercy of the Lamb of God toward sinners is revealed to mankind, out for blood. Now, I can’t read all this, but you see what Jesus is doing with hardening. He’s not casting people off. He’s bringing them to a crisis, a hardened state which they cannot psychologically sustain. And in the revelation of God’s glory in the judgment and their sinfulness, they will finally break. That is the way God brings salvation to most of the world who have not yet believed. Well, thank you for listening to this reading of my manuscript, which is due for publishing. But as I have pointed out before and the last few days, I need the help. This is a specialized publisher that prints books, even though they may have a short run and not much economic value to the publisher. So they ask for the author to help with the editing and the text editing. texting. So that costs money. And if you would like to help, we would so appreciate it. Send your donation to Faith Quest, P.O. Box 366, Littleton, Colorado, 80160. I’ll see you next time. Cheerio and God bless.