A Favorite Passage - Part I

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is II Corinthians 5:14-21. This week I am going to tease out my understanding of this passage and its implications for life.

"For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that
one died for all, therefore all died;" II Cor. 5:14

Paul is the author of this letter to the church in Corinth and the two things that jump out to me is motivation and conviction. Paul reveals that the motivation for his missionary zeal is the love of Christ. He has encountered in Jesus a love that blew his circuits and drove him to the uttermost parts of his world. Why does he preach? Jesus' love drives him!

Paul then gives us a glimpse into his thinking when he tells us that he has concluded something. In the NIV translation, it states that he has become "convinced". When Paul states that he has become convinced of something, I tend to take notice. What is this conclusion that he reveals?

"...having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died;"

Could this be true? Does Paul really believe this? The implications are huge! Who is the one who died for all? Jesus, of course.

I have found that most people do not have a problem accepting that Jesus died for all - unless they are of a theological persuasion that believes that "all" only means "all of a chosen few". We remember the words of John 3:16 that states that "God so loved the world" and most agree that world means world - every last person that has lived and will live, Jesus died for.

What do we do with the next conclusion of Paul's - "therefore all died"? Could he actually be saying that in Jesus death, you, me, your neighbor Earl and Kareem Abdul Jabar all died with Him in His death? How could this be? The implications are too staggering and we start to crawfish.

"No, that can't be so. He must be talking about the church... after all, he is writing to the church."

OK, let's go with that. If he is talking about only the church dying with Christ, then it is only for the church Jesus died. That ought to satisfy the Calvinists - Jesus only loves the elect and only died for the elect and only the elect died with Jesus. I don't buy it!

All means ALL! Jesus died for ALL and ALL died. This tells us something enormous about Jesus and about you, me, your neighbor Earl and Kareem Abdul Jabar. It tells us that Jesus is way bigger than we give Him credit for and there is more going on with us than we ever imagined.

Paul expounds on the amazing greatness of Jesus in the first chapter of Colossians - go read it. You can't read his letter and not conclude that Paul really believes Jesus is huge - Jesus is Lord! At the same time, you can't observe Paul's missionary zeal and conclude that he doesn't see people in a new and different light.

You can see why I like this passage, it has the potential to upend the sock drawer of our neat little conclusions and scatter our exclusionist socks all over the floor. But then again, it seems that when we encounter Jesus he does just that. He overturns our tables and calls for a thorough cleansing of our temple - His temple - and our lives will never be the same. When we meet this Jesus and believe this Jesus, it changes the way we relate to Him, yourself and others.

I know what some of you are thinking. Your "yeah, but's" are starting to explode. You are reeling at the notion of everyone being "in". You want to make sure that some get left out in the cold (or heat).

I'll talk more about this tomorrow, after all, I have a whole week to blog and I have only touched on the first verse.