Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
From the very beginning of the early days of Christianity, there have been conflicts about how good the Good News is. The Letter to the Galatians is evidence. The early converts from the Jews had to wrestle against a deep mind-set idea that no one could be saved except Jews, that Gentiles were automatically excluded from the benefits of Christ's sacrifice.
Remember how Peter had to overcome that prejudice in Acts 10:28 when he was sent to Cornelius? And how "certain [ones] came from James" to Galatia to enforce the ideas at the Jerusalem headquarters of the Christian church that Gentiles must first become ceremonial-law Jews (see Gal. 2:11-21)? How Peter "and the other Jews dissembled" when they "withdrew and separated" themselves from Paul and his Gentile converts to the gospel?
Deeply laid prejudices seemed almost ineradicable. The "faithful" Jewish Christians just felt in their bones that the gates of the New Jerusalem had to be shut against Gentiles, that Christ was Messiah and Savior only to themselves, that their work as apostles was to go to all the Jews in the Diaspora scattered around the world.
But Paul's mind had been enlightened with a far brighter view of how good the Good News is! "God ... will have all men to be saved," the Messiah is already "the Savior of all men, especially of those that believe," He has "abolished death [the second!] and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel," and has become the new or second Adam for the entire human race and has given, not merely offered, the "gift" of salvation to "all men" just as Adam gave "condemnation" to them.
These "big ideas" (all from Paul) stretched the minds and hearts of the early Jewish Christians, and they still challenge our thinking today. Does the Son of God merely "offer" justification to "all men" with the initiative in their hands, or has He on His own initiative given it freely by grace as a "gift" to "all men"? Does He open the gates of the New Jerusalem to "all men" so that in the end the only ones who are outside are those who themselves refuse by unbelief to enter? Could the Good News be that good??
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: May 29, 2000.
Copyright © 2013 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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