If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority. (John 7:17)
Jesus spoke these words after his own brothers expressed their skepticism about who Jesus appeared to be suggesting he was, the long awaited Messiah from God. (John 7:2-5) He spoke these words to a crowd that was also largely skeptical, wondering who he really was. Some were saying he was a good man, but others were claiming that he was leading people astray. (John 7:12)
I keep coming back to this verse (John 7:17) since I heard Dr. Rosaria Butterfield give her testimony of her journey from liberal, lesbian professor who was highly critical of Christians and Christianity to becoming a believer and later a pastor’s wife and having a ministry of her own.
In her world of academia, she was used to doing research and coming to conclusions before being willing to put her faith in a proposition. That is the academic process.
As she was listening to a sermon after having spent many months becoming friends with a pastor and his wife, reading the Bible, and considering the evidence for Christianity, she made a life changing realization. She was approaching Christianity academically. She was not willing to believe until all of the facts were lined up and could be reduced to a certain answer.
“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide….” (John 15:16)
That seems to settle it. We did not choose Jesus. Jesus chose us. He also appointed us that we should go and bear much fruit and determined that our fruit should “abide”. There doesn’t seem much for us to do. God, the vinedresser, will do His work and cause us to beat fruit. Right?
But then, why did Jesus direct his followers, “Abide in me”? That is a command, and a command requires a response. A response requires volition. Volition requires the exercise of the will, and that suggests we have a choice to make.
So whose choice is it?
So let’s be clear about this. We didn’t choose Jesus. He chose us, and he chose us to bear fruit… but then He asks us to do something. He says that we must abide. We don’t bear fruit if we don’t abide:
“As the branch cannot bear fruit but itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:4-5)
We can’t bear fruit apart from Jesus; we can only bear fruit if we abide in him.
But lest we think that we are left to our own devices, now that Jesus has chosen us, He makes it clear our abiding in Him isn’t enough! He must abide also in us.
Clearly, the relationship is reciprocal.
This is all well and good, but how do we abide in Jesus?
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Fathers commandments….” (John 15:10)
Taking it a step further, Jesus adds:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (John 15:12-13)
After God chooses us and appoints us to bear fruit, we must abide in Him and allow Him and His word to abide in us. This requires doing on our part. We are not passive in this process. We must keep God’s commands, and that means loving others by laying down (laying aside) our own lives.
We must do all of this to beat fruit, which is what God appointed us to do.
And here is the kicker: if we don’t abide in Jesus, we die because a branch can’t live apart from the vine. It withers and dies when it is disconnected from the vine. It’s good for nothing but to be burned. (John 15:6)
So – Jesus chooses us out of the world, but we have to engage Him in that choice by exercising our own choice to abide in Him, by exercising our own choice of letting His word abide in us, by exercising our own choice to abide in love, which means following His example of laying down our lives for others.
Yes, Jesus chooses us … so that we can choose Him.
Jesus said, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my father.” (John 15:22-24)
These words convey a stark reality that is not pleasant to consider. We might assume that Jesus was speaking of the Jews when He spoke these words, but we would be wrong. Jesus was speaking of the “world”. Just before Jesus spoke the words quoted above, He said:
“If the world[1] hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:18-19)
These are curious things coming from Jesus. The import of what Jesus says here is that the world is ordered in opposition to Jesus and God the Father. And even when people reject Jesus, God’s purpose is fulfilled.
In other places, we see Jesus saying very different things. For instance, Jesus said elsewhere, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17) So, we might be confused when we see Jesus implying that he came to hold people accountable for their sins.
How many people have experienced reading the Bible, or trying to read the Bible, before “becoming a Christian”? I did.
I took a World Religion class as a freshman in college. In that class I read the Bible for the first time, and I have distinct memories of of some of my initial impressions.
I am not unintelligent. I was second in my law school class. I say that not to boast, but to make a point. Human intelligence is limited, and in particular, it is limited by our perspective. What I mean by that is that the human perspective is that of a finite being who lives a very, very short amount of time and, then, dies.
What can we really know of an infinite God?
On our own, given our limited perspective, on a very small planet, in a small solar system, in a vast universe, what can we understand of the Maker of it all?
In our 80 some years of life, if we are fortunate to live that long, what we can we really know and understand of the 13.7 billion years of the existence of the universe? Over the combined lifetimes of all the human beings that have lived on this planet, we have learned a great deal, but compared to what?
We have only to compare to ourselves – other people with limited perspectives in common!
If there be a God of this incredibly vast universe, this God would have to be greater still. He would have to be “other” than the universe to have created it. Things don’t create themselves. This material universe filled with matter and space and existing in time would have to have been created by a timeless, space-less, matter-less (immaterial) God who exists on a “plane” or realm or dimension other, outside of, and beyond the material world we live in.
The words and thoughts we have to define what that other existence might be like are wholly inadequate to describe it because it is completely unfamiliar to us. We can only describe it in terms of our experience that is bounded by time, space and matter.
Still, we have some sense of transcendent reality, something beyond us. Like prisoner who spent his whole life in a small cell, who sees the sunlight streaming in through the bars of the window above him, but has never seen the sun, we “know” that something lies “out there” beyond us.
So what does this have to do with reading the Bible?
I realized as I read the Bible for the first time in that World Religion class in college that, if God did exist, He would have to reveal Himself to us. We could not reason or research or experiment our way to knowledge of God. That would be like trying to find a painter in the canvass of a painting.
God would have to reveal Himself to us.
And, if God made us, He would know how to communicate Himself to us in a way that we could understand. I sensed this “possibility” as I read the Bible for the first time.
My backstory is that I tried to find the truth in everything I read. I tried to find God or what reality there might be in everything. From the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible, I looked for evidence of truth and evidence for God – whatever “God” or truth might look like.
I am not going to recount my impressions of the various holy books of the major world religions that we studied in that class in this article. That isn’t the point of it. I have done a little bit of that elsewhere. Really the point of this article is my before and after experience with the Bible.
A fellow blogger has written on Paul’s writing in Romans 11:1-6 and The Remnant of Israel where Paul says that “God did not reject His people, whom he foreknew”. Rather, God “reserved” for Himself “seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal” in the time of Elijah, and Paul says similarly of his time when he wrote the letter to the Romans, “there is a remnant chosen by grace”.
This “dialogue” Paul has with himself in the letter to the Romans continues the theme I have been writing on lately: God’s choosing us (before the foundation of the world) and the choices God gives us. How can they both fit into our theology? How can it be that God chooses us and we choose God at the same time?
Paul’s brief summary of God’s interaction with the nation of Israel has evidence both of God’s choice and the choices He allows men to make. God chose Abraham and His descendants who became the nation of Israel. The history of the nation of Israel is a history of rejecting God and choosing other things, but for some outliers – some of the prophets, a few kings and other nonconformists.
Most of the people were continually running after other gods and failing or simply refusing to love God and His commands. Most of them rejected God, but Paul says God did not reject them – not all of them anyway. God reserved[1] for Himself a number – a remnant.
Is this God responding to the choices made by the people of Israel? Or has God carved out (reserved for Himself) a number of the people who would not turn from Him because He reserved them for Himself? Were the remnant chosen by God? Or did God choose the remnant?
Navigating by Faith 