Confession Time Again

I’ve never liked the Gospel of John very much. Don’t stone me, I know it’s beautiful. It does have lovely imagery and poetry that speak to my soul. But at times in Christian history it has been used like a hammer to crush those who believe differently than we do, and I really don’t like that.

People often quote John 3:16 as their favorite verse, “For God so love the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

So people say, “See, the bible says the Jesus is the ONLY way to eternal life… therefore everyone else is going to hell. “ What they leave out is the next few verses, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

What does that mean? Those who do not believe are “condemned already”?

We discussed this in my mission class last week. Professor Jones said that the general understanding is that John believes that we are already living in Hell.

Wow. What an eastern/Hindu worldview– life is misery – salvation is finding a way out of this misery to full life.

John seems to be saying that when we accept Jesus as the unique revealer of God we are lead out of the hell that we already inhabit.

What does that hell look like? A place filled with greed? A place where neighbors do not care for each other? A place where miracles are no longer longed for, because people no longer believe they can happen?

John was adamant that Jesus was God. Jesus was what God looked like in the flesh, and if you could see that, if you could glimpse God, if you could see Jesus' life, and know that God had been here, then your life would never be the same.

You would be saved. Not just in the future “by and by”, but right now.

Now that, I like.