Why all the alls then?

Consider these verses with me:

John 3:16

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

John 1:29

The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

1 Timothy 2:3-4

This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

And look these up too if you got the time:

1 John 2:2, John 4:42; 6:33, 51

Now, most people take these verses and a bagillion other similar verses to demonstrate how God loves and died for EVERYONE in the world ever and wants EVERYONE in the world to believe and be saved.

I don't :)

But this post is NOT an attempt to convince those who hold to the former view of why their view is illogical and wrong and what not.

The standard Reformed view of these verses (which i adhere to) is that the authors are emphasising that Jesus did not die to only save Israelites or to only save lower class people but to save all kinds of people (Revelation 5:9).

But what always bothered me about these types of verses is not the persistent proof-texting that free willers are dying to confront me with, but that there's just SO many of them. I mean, I get that Jesus died for all types of people, but why does every author in the new testament (slight exaggeration) seem to want to make that clear? Why is it such a big thing to emphasise? Why all the alls???

In fact if anything would persuade me to switch over to the typical Arminian interpretation of these verses, it would be the sheer amount of the verses like this that exist.

It would seem as if God is trying to make a really important point here.

And that's because He is.

I discovered the meaning behind this aggressive emphasis of Christ dying for all, during my study of our weekly bible reading.

We're up to Genesis 10 at the moment which is basically one of those genealogy chapters that everyone groans at and upon encountering it wonders why God would purposely make the bible seem boring; which is what I did at the start of the week.

But then I decided to shrug off that lethargic attitude and really sat down with the text to see what God was saying here.

So that's what I did. I got my study bible out and checked the cross references for the text. For those who have no idea what the text is about, I'll set the scene.

In Genesis 9, Noah and his crew just got out of the ark after the rainy days. Noah throws his own private party (literally), gets drunk and passes out, naked, in his tent. Now, Noah has three sons; Shem, Japheth and Ham. Ham has a laugh at his dad and shows disrespect towards his father, which if you've read the bible, you'll know God puts right up there with murder (Romans 1:28-32).

In response to this, after Shem and Japheth cover him up (and after he sobers up), Noah curses Ham, blesses Shem and kinda half blesses Japheth. We then see in Genesis 10 the descendants of each of these sons.

Now the key part of Genesis 10 is that God's chosen people would come through Shem's line (because he has been blessed) and the enemies of God's people would come through Ham (primarily) and also Japheth. So we get a nice list of all the major sons of each line, and we (hopefully) recognise some of Israel's major future enemies, like Babylon, Assyria, etc.

Now, get this.

After around half an hour (at the most) of studying through all these cross references, examining where each of these descendants get mentioned in the rest of the OT, I fell into a line of thinking that I never thought I would.

At one point I actually stopped and said to myself, "wait...am I in God's elect line? Am I part of his chosen people? What if I'm a descendant of Ham?? What does that mean for me? Am I destined for hell?" I froze and instantly went in search of where Sri Lanka's earliest ancestors originated from, hoping i would be able to somehow trace it back to Shem.

Now at this point you're probably laughing at me and thinking I'm being completely ridiculous (or you've probably stopped reading cos yes I agree, this post is crazy long, but I'm about to make my point) and in hindsight I would completely agree with you. Obviously, Christ died to redeem people from all nations (as I hope was made clear at the beginning of this post).

But here is my point:

I fell into this crazed line of thinking after 30 MINUTES of bible study.

Imagine living your WHOLE LIFE under this type of theology. Because this is basically what it was like for Israel in the OT. God clearly played favourites and had made it quite clear that Israel was "His people" as opposed to the other nations. A typical Jew grew up easily being able to make the mistake of believing that God loved HIM only and hated all other nations. That God would send a Messiah for HIS people and HIS people only.

Then one day, all of a sudden, the Messiah rocks up and some random dude cries out at Him, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"

This would have ROCKED the world of the average Jew.

That salvation was not merely for the Jew but now also for the Gentile (Romans 1:16) was an idea that had to be so repeatedly emphasised so as to override thousands of years of faulty doctrine. And this is precisely why the NT constantly stresses that indeed Christ died for ALL!

And after my 30 second panic attack today, I have a new found appreciation of this truth. Let's take a moment and think about the gravity of these texts that Arminian interpretations fail to capture.

Soli Deo Gloria

Peace