Unconditional?

‘Oh, hello.  I see you signed up to see me with the name ‘John’.  Please, have a seat, and what is your surname, by the way?’

‘Thank you.  This seat?’  ‘Yes, certainly.  And I’ll sit here’ motioning to the sofa.  ‘Thank you again.  Ben Zacharias, that is my surname,’ the visitor said in a heavy accent that caught a guttural ‘ch’ and rolled the ‘r’.  ‘Middle East?  Is that an accent from the Middle East?’  ‘Ah, yes.’

The two settled down, and the pastor continued.  ‘So, I am Pastor Andy.  We are informal around here.  Now, what would you like to talk about?’

‘The Kingdom of God.’

‘Oh, very well, a theological conversation.  Perhaps I mentioned this in a recent sermon.’

‘No.  I am sorry, but I have not yet visited your church.  I am, where I come from, a speaker like you who draws the occasional crowd.  People say that all Israel has come out to hear me, but I’m sure that is an exaggeration.  My topic is the Kingdom of God.’

‘Very interesting,’ Andy said, politely, but inwardly a little put out that someone had signed up to have a session with him and had come to speak rather than to listen.  Who wouldn’t be?  He checked his watch quickly.  ‘So, the Kingdom of God.  Truly a great subject, isn’t it?’

‘It is the subject,’ answered John.  ‘I tell people that it is near.’

‘Well,’ said Andy with a smile, ‘I know of another person with your name who lived a long time ago.  He also preached that the Kingdom of God is near.’

The visitor smiled.  He pulled out a jar of honey from his satchel.  ‘Please,’ he said, offering the pastor the jar.  ‘This is for you.  It comes from my country.  Shalom.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any locusts to go with it?’ Andy joked.

‘You eat locusts?’ asked John in all seriousness, fingering inside his satchel.

‘No, no!  I was just joking a little.’

‘I saw in the paper,’ John continued, ‘that your church is hosting a conference this month.’

‘Oh, yes.  Our ‘Unconditional’ conference.  Will you be coming?’

‘My question is this word, ‘unconditional’.  Help me with that, please.’

‘Well, good, let’s look at it with this theme of the Kingdom of God you mention.  Jesus brought the Kingdom, didn’t He?  And He fellowshipped with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners of all sorts.  This offended the Pharisees, who used the Old Testament Law to beat people up with their sins, so to speak, leaving them no better off afterwards.  They thought of themselves as too holy to associate with sinners.  But Jesus taught unconditional love.  Love the sinner, even if you hate the sin.’

‘I actually know Jesus, too,’ said John.  ‘He did as you say when He was among us.  There is this one additional thing, though.  He fellowshipped with sinners, taught them about the Kingdom of God, and spoke about Kingdom righteousness.  You might say He fellowshipped with sinners unconditionally, but the path of righteousness  to the Kingdom was hard and the gate to enter small, He said.  He didn’t pave the road and widen the gate unconditionally.’

‘Well, we are concerned that people are too hard on matters like this.  We don’t want to shut down the Kingdom to people, as though we are the Pharisees ourselves.’

‘The Pharisees were also sinners,’ said John.  ‘They were hypocrites.  Their problem was not that they followed the Law but saying they followed the Law and then not doing it.  And they used the Law to limit the call to righteousness of the heart to mere actions.  Jesus fellowshipped with them as sinners, like the tax collectors and prostitutes, but He called them all to repentance and a righteousness of the heart.  He did not accept any of them ‘unconditionally’, as you say.’

‘We think that, well….  I recently told this congregation to ‘unhitch’ their theology from the Old Testament!’ [cf. https://www.christianpost.com/news/andy-stanley-to-host-conference-for-christians-with-lgbt-kids.html] 

‘I see,’ said John.  ‘Like “Thou shalt not murder?  Thou shalt not commit adultery?"’

‘Oh, no, we are not promoting murder or adultery!’ said Andy, but he wondered how he could recover.  He checked his watch and thought, ‘I need to signal that this conversation is not going to go on.’  ‘Nothing like that,’ he said.

‘Oh, theology, not ethics?’ asked John.

‘Well, I did say theology.  But I really just meant the Law.  The Law has come to an end, right?  [Romans 10.4] Didn’t Paul say that?’

‘Hmm.  I think the simple answer to that is that Paul’s point was that the Law as a way to establish righteousness failed because all it does is expose sin.  We need the Spirit of God to empower us to live righteously.  He wasn’t downgrading the morality of God’s Law in the Old Testament.  Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, and He said that He had not come to abolish the Law and the prophets but to fulfill them [Matthew 5.17].  That is, the Old Testament.  If we are going to talk about Jesus and Paul, there is no unhitching a Christian congregation from the Old Testament.’

‘Well, let’s focus on this.  Jesus said that He desired mercy, not sacrifice [Matthew 9.13; 12.7].  He said that the greatest commandments are love of God and love of neighbour [Luke 10.27].’

‘Yes.  The problem was when people interpreted the Law without mercy, but the solution was not to preach mercy without the Law.  Jesus said that on the two greatest commandments hang all the Law and the prophets [Matthew 22.37-39].  Again, He did not oppose the Law, not a jot of it!’

Andy said nothing.  This was not the conversation he wanted, and he had a lot of planning to do for the ‘Unconditional’ conference.  John spoke up again.  ‘In my ministry, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is near is a call to repentance, not acceptance of people in their sins.  Mercy is forgiveness, not license.  To love God is to obey His commandments [Deuteronomy 6.4-9].  To love one’s neighbour is to do what the Law tells us to do in our relationships—even with our enemies.  When people come to hear me speak about being ready for the coming of God’s reign, they hear that this means repenting for sin, not being welcomed as we are in ongoing sin.  There is nothing more unloving than to tell people God will accept them in their sin rather than cleanse them from their sin when we all know that we must all face the final judgement and give an account to God for what we have done in the flesh.  It is like telling a person on a train headed to a broken bridge that the trip is safe because he or she wants to be comforted.  The loving thing to do is tell them to get off the train.  If people hearing me want to repent, I baptize them.  Their sins are washed away.  They are clean.  They don’t head right back to their sins but change their lives and follow Jesus.’

Andy made an obvious look at his watch and said, ‘Well, yes, this has been a very good chat.  Thank you for stopping by.  I see our time has passed quickly.’  He stood up.

John stood up as well.  ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said, politely.  ‘But if I may say in parting, when it comes to the Kingdom of God, I can only say it is conditional.  In fact, Paul said to the Corinthians,

 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

'He got that list of sins largely from the Old Testament, didn’t he?  That word ‘homosexuality’, for example, comes right from Leviticus 20.13. It means something like ‘men who go to bed with other men for sexual relations as a man does with a woman.’  You used to use the word ‘sodomy’ for that in English, and now the word is ‘homosexuality’.  In Greek, it is actually a unique word—actually two words in Leviticus that Paul turns into one Greek word from his Greek Old Testament [arsen + koitai]—and by its uniqueness, we know that Leviticus 20.13 is being referenced.  By this, then, Paul was affirming the Law, not unhitching the Church from it.  And when he says that such sinners were now washed, sanctified, and justified (or made righteous), he was speaking of the grace and mercy they found in the Lord Jesus Christ because their sins were forgiven and their lives were turned around, and he was speaking of the transformation of their lives by the Holy Spirit.  The Kingdom righteousness of God is so conditional, in fact, it required the gracious sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins and the empowering presence of God the Spirit to bring about the change in us.  This is why I preach the condition of repentance and baptise sinners.’

With that, he walked to the door, and, as he did so, Pastor Andy noticed John's peculiar shirt and leather belt.  And then, of all things, a locust jumped out of his satchel.