09 January 2025
If your passion is pursuing a vision of what ought to be, then you are not following Christ.
Christ is a person, not a body of ideas. Knowing about Christ is not the same as knowing Him. If you feel driven by some objective sense of reality, then it's far too easy to push people away because they don't meet your standard of truth. The whole purpose of following Christ is to call people home.
The glory of Christ is His compassion for the world. Yes, we know most of the world will not receive Him. We know this because He said it. Divine Election is reality. But the path to following Him is primarily a matter of showing His compassion for those outside the Covenant, and a deep abiding commitment to those within.
In the Old Testament, election was defined as living within the Covenant. There's a good reason for that. The Hebrew mind, as indeed the whole of the Ancient Near East, assumed that if you could abide by the Covenant, it was because God made you able. The concept was functional; you did because you could. Only God could make it possible. There were plenty of Israelis who did not abide by the Covenant. Whether or not they were able wasn't the question; they didn't. It wasn't a matter of cause and effect, but they were outside God's favor.
It fell on Paul in dealing with a Hellenized audience to enunciate a logic of election. He provided an analysis that Hellenized minds could recognize. It was not a definitive explanation, only a Hellenized approach to the issue. It never was a question of stating objective truth; it was a question of putting truth within reach of a particular audience. The whole point of enunciating truth was to draw people to the Source. Revelation ("truth") has always been an expression of God's character.
Thus, the term "election" is merely a conceptualization of His favor. Romans 8 & 9 hammer out the idea that His favor is His alone. There is no explaining it on our level; it is ineffable. God favors whomever He favors; deal with it. There is no way to register any claims to that favor. What matters is the results of that favor.
That we are wired to desire more people to be a part of His family is something we must take for granted. It is self-evident. If you don't sense that desire, then you don't know God's favor. The only question is how we go about the task of calling home the rest of His family. Over and over again, the emphasis in Scripture was to demonstrate how His love works in His family as the primary means of making that call.
By the same token, that love means nothing at all if it does not exclude those who won't come home. That love has boundaries. Without boundaries, it has no meaning. If you won't enter into that love, then you cannot have it. At the same time, there's no way to prevent that love spilling out onto others. They can't bathe in it, but they do get splashed a little.
But we are driven by the longing to have more treasure, and that longing in itself recognizes people as the treasure. It's the only thing in this world worthy anything at all. The sole task of the church is teaching and cultivating that love. That's the whole mission. That's what it means to follow Christ.
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