Jesus and "All"

When I was in middle school, I had a teacher who was from Oklahoma and had the accent to prove it. One time she mentioned her brother who worked on 'all wells,' and it took us awhile to figure out she meant 'oil wells'! The same kind of misunderstanding can happen when people read the 'all' scriptures in the Bible and assume it means something less than 'all.' And that reading
has a lot to do with how we view God's love, his offer of salvation, and the future of humanity! Let's take a brief look. Note, I'm not going to take us through the entire history and all the different ideas proposed about who is saved and who is not -- just the basic concept of 'all.'

One good scripture to start with is John 1:29, where Jesus is described as "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." The phrase "the world" is pretty all-encompassing, isn't it? In Romans 5, Paul outlines the comparison between Adam and Christ: one man sinned, all men die, but one man's free gift results in "justification and life for all men." Neither of those groups is limited; Paul's phrasing says all die because of Adam, and all are given life through Jesus. The Greek "all" is the same for both. The work of Jesus not only is the un-doing of what Adam did, but we should also believe that Jesus' work in saving "all" is more powerful than Adam's work in dooming "all."

In 1 Tim. 2:4, we read that God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" and that Jesus "gave himself as a ransom for all" (v. 6). Jesus has already given himself for us, so all of us can be saved. There is no apparent limitation to the desire of God to save us.

Do we need to believe and respond? Yes, like any gift, you have to accept it in order to enjoy it. (Do you know people who are reluctant to accept a gift?) Humbly accepting what God has already purchased and gift-wrapped for us (all within Jesus Christ, of course) makes us drop our pretense of self-sufficiency, and rest in Jesus. That decision doesn't change God's attitude toward us, because he's already done all this for us -- but it changes our attitude toward him! That takes a decision that some aren't willing to make, at least not yet -- but we ought to be praying that they will make it soon, and we ought to be willing to point out the beauty of God's gift to them, when we have the opportunity.

(Oh, and one more thing: Jesus offered in John 7:37 "let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink," offering the Holy Spirit to all who would believe(v. 39). So I think that would make Jesus the first "all well" wouldn't it?)