And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. (Mark 1:17)
Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, met two fishers named Simon and Andrew. (Matthew 4 and Mark 1) It was on that occasion that Jesus set out in Simon’s boat and, when they were some distance from land, told him to let down the nets. Simon protested saying that he and his crew had already fished all night and caught nothing. Nevertheless, he did as Jesus asked and was so shocked when the net nearly broke for the catch of fish that he fell before Jesus and said: “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” (Luke 5:8)
I want to bring out some things here that I believe are extremely important which I have never heard taught directly. First of all, Simon did not catch the whole sea in his net. He caught fish. Secondly, he did not catch all the fish in the sea. He only caught some and that was only in the place where Jesus directed him to let down the net. Thirdly, he did not beg Jesus to help him catch more fish or to do other miracles after that.
Instead, Simon was immediately struck by his own sinful state in contrast to Jesus’ righteousness and begged Him to depart. Nothing of the kind happened when the Pharisees and the Sadducees came into contact with Jesus, because they were convinced of their own righteousness. But Simon responded to the truth. And you know the rest of the story: Simon received the revelation of the true identity of Jesus, he was subsequently called “Peter” and he became a great Apostle for the Lord after denying Him three times before the Crucifixion.
“Called out of the world.” Now what does that mean? We know that God loved the whole world and sent Jesus so that whoever would call upon Him would be saved. Yet, there is some limitation. Just as Simon did not catch all the fish in the sea, so Jesus did not “catch” everyone in earshot of His parables:
That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. (Matthew 4:12)
The fairness of how God operates is beyond the scope of this present discussion. But the fact is that just as all the fish of the sea did not swim into Simon’s net, so Jesus does not call all in the world (and yet all who come, He will not turn away). Simply put, He does not call the world to repentance, but He calls people to repentance, out of the world.
We know that God has great plans for the world (the cosmos), but we don’t fully understand what that entails yet. We know that He calls everyone generally and individuals specifically even if we don’t understand His sorting method. (See Matthew 13:30). But back to my original point about Jesus calling people out of the world…
I saw something I’d never seen so clearly after my last post on “The Mind of Jesus.” You see, I’d heard all my life, “You have the mind of Christ.” (See 1 Cor. 2:16) But did I really have it? It was assumed that we all had it, but why did I seem to experience it so sporadically? For sure I remembered times when I was guided by the Holy Spirit (John 16:13), but there were other things — not immediate choices of action, but opinions about right living in general and how I should influence the environment in that regard.
I’d like to be clearer about the mind of Christ in many areas of life. I realize that I have blown many important moments because I was blinded by the worldly church. (The “worldly church” is the church that thinks it has a formula for making the world live right, whether that means social programs or moral behavior.) I have injured other people trying to have right “biblical” views. I confused the “mind of Christ” with a mindset about what Christ thought of things. Knowing the black and white pages of the scriptures does not give us the “mind of Christ.”
Jesus is the savior of the whole world, especially of those who believe, right? (See 1 Timothy 4:10) Universalists have one mindset on it (is it the “mind of Christ”, though?), but it could be taken another way. God desires on the one hand to save the whole world. Christ is the answer to everything. But He is not the answer to the world ; He is the answer to those who believe. Jesus is nobody’s answer until they, like Simon Peter, recoil at their own wretchedness in light of the revelation of Him before them. But until then, He is not their answer.
A young man told me he had given up on God because Jesus did not make good on His words, “If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:14) This is a typical story I hear where people ask for some thing and God doesn’t perform it. But Jesus did not promise they could have whatever popped into their heads. He said that the disciples could have whatsoever they asked. Jesus had called them, they had responded, and therefore, they could have what He promised them.
Every answer to our needs grows out of the same realization the 12 disciples came to — that there is something fundamentally wrong with me . “Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” But many don’t care that they are sinful. It’s not even in the equation for them. They want to be declared right by fiat, be accepted by the world and then demand things of God. They want God to take care of all their problems but they don’t want to belong to Him.
The world can do no other than apply its own solutions to things it’s not equipped to deal with, though they seem unjust or cruel to us.
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. (Proverbs 12:10)
Jesus is not the answer the world seeks. He is the answer to His Body, the Bride. We must come to Him on His terms or we do not belong to Him. It is the fisher who owns the net, not the fish.
3 comments
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June 27, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Nik
I’ve missed reading your musings. You continue to amaze me.
June 27, 2009 at 7:18 pm
saltsister
I was just thinking of you, Nik! I miss chatting with you lately. Maybe soon, I hope.
July 2, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Melville
This statement, “Jesus is not the answer the world seeks”, may sound radical or extremist, when compared to how we have often heard the gospel mission phrased.
My thought went to Revelation 11, when it was after the seventh angel sounded his trumpet , that “the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” Until then the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God are different spheres, under different administrations and in conflict with one another.
I remembered how much we’ve heard a certain phrase in evangelical appeals about the mission of Christians, in various forms but always ending with, “a hurting world”. A quick Google search turned up these variants: “bringing healing”, “hope”, “reaching out to”, “spreading the love of Jesus to”, “release the power of God to”, ”ministers to”, “called . . . to be His hands and heart to”, “to be salt and light to”. . . “a hurting world”.
It sounds very compassionate, these various summations of a call to help this “hurting world” in the name of Jesus, and they all carry a sort of unspoken implication that, because the world is hurting, they’d welcome Jesus if only it could have Him rightly presented to it.
“A hurting world” is one of those expressions that is used so frequently in Christian speech that it virtually carries the weight of scripture, though it isn’t a biblical phrase, per say, and it’s typically just repeated without stopping to think or compare with scripture itself. It’s an example of popular phraseology that becomes so embedded that acts as a filter when reading the Bible itself. It carries an emphasis, a heart appeal that the main thing to remember when considering the world around us is that it is hurting and we should be in the business of doing something about it.
What does God word, “world”, mean in scripture? It’s not an entirely simple question to answer because its usage is paradoxical. “Love not the world” but, “For God so loved the world . . .” “You are in the world but not of the world”.
Then our English word is different from the New Testament Greek one, though they also seem to overlap in ways. We understand that the Greek word, kosmos, means an ordered system. We say “world” when referring to the globe, the earth, but also meaning the people of the world. “For God so loved the world (kosmos) . . .” Does that mean the people of the world or the creation as a whole?
“. . . that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The emphasis here really isn’t referring to the world at large in terms of fixing it. Later in John’s gospel, Ch. 17, the Lord prays to the Father “not . . . on behalf of the world:, but for those the father has given Him “out of the world.”
How come the Lord didn’t seem to talk about “a hurting world”? He seemed to have more to say about the world “hurting” those who came to Him out from it.
It may not be an altogether easy biblical study, what “the world” exactly means and what being in and not of it is about. It does seem to be an important enough subject to get right.