What if we are the unbelievers in John 3?
Over the last couple years, I’ve had the privilege of joining a guy named Michael on his podcast “The Bible says what?!”, an “atheist vs. Christian” podcast where he invites Christians to explain to him why they believe God is real and loving. After experiencing an unhealthy church environment as a youth, he began looking into scripture and was struck with several passages that he found to not just be unloving, but cruel for a God who claims to be love. He is firm on his stance that God is neither real nor loving, and since I believe the opposite, you can image our conversations can be an adventure. We just recorded our fourth, and while we disagree on much, there were laughs and respect along the way (you can hear released episodes here.)
When Michael asked about recording a Bible study episode from the New Testament, I asked if there were any verses he wanted to explore. He quickly responded with John 3:36:
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.
I fully understand Michael’s concern with this. A similar passage earlier in chapter 3 has strong words about unbelief:
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. (3:18)
For Michael, this does not seem like the response of a “loving God”; just because he doesn’t believe, he is to receive condemnation and wrath? To be fair to Michael, many of his questions are valid: how do love and wrath coexist? How can killing children and puppies in the flood be loving? How is killing first-born children in Egypt an act of a “good God”? Michael asks these questions often, and they are indeed hard to answer, particularly in a way that brings him satisfaction; so, he chooses not to believe, and John 3 seems to tell him the punishment of his unbelief is condemnation and wrath.
Here’s where the blog takes a turn: I am not going to breakdown the theology addressing Michael’s unbelief, because I’m not convinced that passage is directed to him, but us.
As I studied the passage, the Spirit brought me to a specific phrase: “whoever rejects the Son.” While other places speak of unbelief, rejection is a very different thing; in fact, you cannot reject something in which you do not believe. You can reject the concept of it, but if you do not believe the thing exists, there is nothing there to reject. In other words, Michael rejects the concept of Jesus being the Son of God, but he can’t reject the Son of God because that is not a real thing to him.
If this passage isn’t for “unbelievers” as we typically define them, who is it for? We can start with the target audience: most scholars agree that the gospel of John was written for the Church; this means the verses in John 3 were written for believers (though unbelievers can still benefit.)
How can believers be accused of unbelief?
Have you noticed how Scripture is filled with emphasis on remembering and honoring God, as though without those reminders we would do the opposite? It’s almost as though God realizes that mental belief in Him is only part of the journey: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” (James 2:19)
Passage after passage makes it clear that belief is more than just a mental exercise, and necessitates our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength to live into it. Hebrews 3:6 exhorts “if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory“, acknowledging the scenario that it’s possible to forget our confidence and hope. Herein is where things get serious, in a section one translation titles “Warning against Unbelief”:
So, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion.”Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies perished in the wilderness? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.
Hebrews 3:7-19
Church, sometimes we can be so focused on traditional “unbelievers” that we fail to recognize the unbelief within.
Hebrews 3 was written to believers who had heard His voice and seen Him work, and were at risk of having an “unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” Michael does not believe he has heard God’s voice, while many of us have, yet we will point this passage at “unbelievers” like him and believe we are fine:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Matthew 7:3-5
The readers of Hebrews likely thought they were fine too, and the author saw this as a serious enough issue to take the bold risk of calling them out. “I know that you love God and are committed to serving him, but if you are not humbly vigilant even you could harden your heart and turn from God! Belief in Him is not a singular moment; we must hold firm to our original conviction to the very end!”
If it is true that believers can stumble into unbelief, what are we to do?
- Humble introspection: If you are serious about evangelism, you must be serious about Matthew 7:3-5; each of us are not immune to eye planks. Be honest before God, invite the Spirit to bring awareness, and do what is needed to stay aligned with Christ daily. Allow scripture to not just comfort you, but to penetrate “even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; [to judge] the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)
- Community: We engage this process in isolation too often, and it does not work. “Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” God designed us for community because He knows that in community is where we not only thrive, but spiritually survive. We need each other to avoid being deceived.
- Acceptance of Christ: Michael and I talked at length about what it means to be “born again” based of Nicodemus’s queries in John 3. I shared with him words from Tim Keller, who described how in birth you see, hear, and experience things in a new way; reality in the womb, with its confined darkness and sustaining umbilical cord, is vastly different than life outside it. In the same way, Keller shared how he had engaged scripture and spiritual truths before being “born again”, but after, he saw them in new ways. Christ was something very new to the disciples, and while many of them accepted him generally, it became harder the more he expressed and lived into spiritual realities; they were not yet at a place to see, hear, and experience Truth, and many walked away (John 6:66). However, those who were born again through the coming of the Spirit accepted this “foolish” spiritual reality, and joyfully devoted their lives to being Christ’s Ambassadors, even unto death. Are we truly accepting all of Christ, or merely a concept of him? When we fully accept him, the old ways no longer satisfy.
There are many passages for individuals like Michael, but John 3 and Hebrews 3 are firm exhortations to us who claim to believe:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion.”
Let us then be honest about our humanity, pursue the gift of unity, and embrace what it means to really follow Christ, so that we can be a true, healthy witness to the world that does not yet know him.
