There is a religious tendency to think in terms of the saved versus the punished. Perhaps it originated from the Scripture’s habit of placing people into two camps: either they are sheep or goats, repentant or sinful, for salvation or for destruction. Perhaps it grew with the observation that God has been taking sides since the beginning: Abel made the right sacrifice and was favored more than his brother Cain, Noah and his family were ushered into an ark and stayed afloat unlike the rest of their forsaken race, Israel was liberated out of Egypt with a covenant inaccessible to the pagan populace. Book after book, from the Old Testament to the New, the events seem to hinge on those who follow and those who do not. It is as if the stories, separated by vast periods of time, are telling the same truth that God has His chosen fold, outside which there is only catastrophe for the sinners.
During His ministry, Christ affirmed that He had come not to bring peace but a sword, that He had come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. The sword He was referring to was one for division, and as the story goes what He divided were His believers and non-believers, the old camps of sheep and goats. This division presents further cause to draw a line between the saved and the punished, with good reasons. Drawing a line fixes the condemned on the wrong side and validates one’s position as the blessed on the right side, and it is always comforting for the soul to know which ruinous paths to avoid. With a line, taboos and anathemas can easily define the boundaries of one’s tradition, ensuring that the righteous have not mixed and are not mixing with foreign tribes, who do not share in God’s grace.
This tribalist attitude, however, forgets the vision of man’s total reunion with God, which sparks in many areas of the Scripture. In a particular story from the Old Testament, God commands His prophet Jonah to preach in Nineveh, whose severe wickedness is calling for a correction of some sort. Jonah, famously, decides that he would rather do the opposite of what God is telling him, and so instead of eastward he sails westward to Tarshish, hoping to escape God’s presence by going as far away as possible from where he should be. His disobedience may have stemmed from the same mindset that cancels all hope outside of God’s nation, which is where Nineveh is. Nineveh is a city of Assyria, a violent enemy of Israel. For Jonah, a man of Jewish stock, it is probably nothing but a place of heathendom deserving of the hellfire that expunged Sodom and Gomorrah. It is nothing worth getting swallowed by a whale for, and he wants absolutely none of it to be saved. In fact the story ends with him preferring death over tolerating God’s compassion for the heathens.
Jonah’s story shows a few things: that an adverse response toward foreigners is not new among those who recognize themselves as God’s people, and that God’s care extends to distant places. The story also offers a glimpse of God’s continual will to bring the Gentiles into proper worship, although in this regard it is only a piece of a larger picture.
Early in the book of Romans, the apostle Paul deals with the categories of Jews and Gentiles not by drawing any lines and naming camps but by focusing on faithfulness:1
Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish the law.
Near the end of his witness, the prophet Isaiah writes:2
Let not the foreigner who is devoted to the Lord say, “The Lord therefore will separate me from His people,” and let not the eunuch say, “I am a withered tree.” The Lord says this to the eunuchs: “As many as keep My Sabbaths, and choose the things I will, and lay hold of My covenant, I will give them a notable place in My house and within My wall, a place better than that of sons and daughters. I will give them an eternal name, and it shall not fail. I will also give an eternal name to the foreigners who devote themselves to the Lord, to serve Him and to love His name, to be His male and female servants, and to all who keep My Sabbaths so as not to profane them, and who hold fast to My covenant. I will lead them to My holy mountain and gladden them in My house of prayer. Their whole burnt offerings and sacrifices shall be accepted upon My altar, for My house shall be called House of Prayer for All Nations,” says the Lord who gathers the dispersed of Israel; “for I will gather together a congregation to Him.”
By the time Christ entered the world, it was clear that the place for this gathering was His body, the Church, to which He is married as a bridegroom to his bride. As for those who are gathered, they were identified by the Lord in His parable of the wedding feast, where a king arranges a marriage for his son and summons the invited via his servants. The invited, after making up excuses and even killing some of the importunate servants, provoke the king’s anger and suffer his armies. Still left without guests, the king tells his servants to bring in strangers from the highways instead, as many as can be found until the wedding hall is filled. Beyond the parable, these strangers cease to be Jews and Gentiles and simply become Christians through baptism.
Whether they come from Jerusalem, Damascus, Greece, Rome, Persia, Egypt, Ethiopia, or the ends of the earth does not matter. The new covenant welcomes all who are willing to be invited, promoting a steadfast effort to enter into Christ over a cycle of condemnation. The vision of total reunion includes all of man and makes an either-or tendency obsolete. It does away with the camps of the saved and the punished and treats everyone as fallen before God, yet equally capable of making progress toward the heavenly kingdom.
