And you have not His Word abiding in you; for Whom He has sent, Him you believe not.
Search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; it is they which testify of Me. And yet you will not come to Me, that you might have life. – John 5:38-40
There are cultures where reality can get pretty twisted, where they call good evil and evil good – I guess they do that in Washington, D. C., as well as in Hollywood these days. Yet all around the world there are people in whom the Word abides regardless of their upbringing or their education, or even their religion. A person has to have the Word abiding in them in order to respond to God at all.
Recently someone asked me if I believed in “once-saved-always-saved” which is a view sort of like Calvinism -- or Calvin-and-Hobbes-ism, or maybe Calvin-Ball-ism. My answer is, no – if the questioner means that by following some ritual or formula, however simple or complex, a person is somehow “saved”. That has always sounded too much like magic – recite the spell, uh, I mean, prayer and suddenly your shoes turn white and you’re Pat Boone. You walk out of church singing, “I got white shoes. I got Great. White. Shoes. I got white shoes.”
(Don’t worry. It’s an inside joke.)
I do believe, on the other hand, that once a person has a genuine encounter with God, in whatever form they receive, that person will never be able to get away. I haven’t been able to, and I’ve been trying for years. I mean, you can’t so much as get on the internet to look for graphic midget imagery without running across somebody talking about “One Cosmos Under God” or whatever. What’s the world coming to?
The more important question, then, is how does one have such an encounter? Obviously osmosis won’t get it. Jesus was walking around teaching, healing the sick, and raising the dead. People witnessed these things and did not believe Jesus. They sat down and ate bagels with the Lord Himself, got up and went away completely unchanged – except for being hardened in their rejection of Him.
Here Jesus pinpoints the problem. Unless a person has the truth in them, they will not accept it when they hear it. To embrace falsehood is to reject truth. If we decide to live the lie, to make ourselves at home in the deception, then the Word – which is truth – cannot abide in us. When we are offered life, we look at it like chopped liver and fail to recognize the inestimable value of it. We turn away.
The people to whom Jesus spoke knew the Scriptures by heart. They thought somehow this knowledge would lead them into a kind of immortality. People are no different today. They seek in science, technology, politics, art, and religion, and find only lies – not because there is no truth where they are seeking but because there is no truth in their hearts. The truth is all around them, all but shouted at them. Yet they do not hear.
It rings no bell. It does not resonate. There is no answering harmonious hum in the soul. It finds nothing to attach to. It does go in one ear and out the other. Jesus says later on in John, that the devil is coming but “he has nothing in Me.” The lie could not cling to the Lord for He had the Word fully abiding in Him – He is the Word. He is nothing but the Truth (So, help me, God). With too many of us, it is the other way around – Christ comes and He cannot take hold of us because He has nothing in us.
It sounds like a catch-22 – and genuinely Calvinistic – that we cannot respond to truth without having the truth abiding in us. There would seem to be nothing we can do.
Nothing? Hey, God can work with that.
For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17).
* See The World Famous Blog of JWM for information on the related "Jesus Willies".
