Voices: Love should prod us to proclaim Christ

I am certain most of you have had to watch a loved one spiral down the path of self-destruction. Maybe you saw a friend succumb to a crippling addiction. Maybe you witnessed a family member break the law and ruin their life with a criminal conviction.

Whatever the specific details, I have no doubt virtually all of you have been forced to watch as, despite your best efforts, someone you love made terrible, self-destructive choices.

It’s precisely our love for these people that makes their self-inflicted ruin so painful. If we didn’t care about them, we wouldn’t be that bothered.

But if you’re a Christian, there is no terrible choice you can watch a loved one make that is more serious and devastating than the decision not to believe in Christ. No self-destructive choice should bring you more grief than seeing someone you care about decide not to trust in Jesus.

The passion of the Apostle Paul

There are numerous places in the Apostle Paul’s letters where he lays bare his soul for readers to see, where he exposes the profound inner agony and emotional suffering he has to endure. Paul was many things, but cold and closed-off was not one of them. And few passages show this more powerfully than Romans 9:1-5.

Students of Scripture often see Romans 9 primarily as the key battleground where Calvinists and Arminians like to duke it out. This is a shame. Although Romans 9 has significant, direct relevance to questions about divine election and predestination, this chapter is not primarily about those doctrines, at least not in the abstract.

No, Paul’s focus in Romans 9 (and Romans 10 through 11) is much more personal and painful. Paul was born and raised a devout Jew, a son of Israel. And Paul’s embrace of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah did nothing to dampen Paul’s love for his Jewish countrymen. Even though Christ appointed Paul as “Apostle to the Gentiles,” Paul desperately tried, again and again, also to persuade his fellow Israelites to trust and worship Jesus as Messiah.

But for the most part, it didn’t work. One of the great crises facing the early church was widespread Jewish rejection of Jesus. Even though Jesus and all of his earliest followers were Jewish, within the first generation or two of Christianity, the majority of Christians were Gentiles and the majority of Jews did not accept Christ.

Romans 9-11 represents Paul’s most detailed attempt to process this difficult fact. And this section of Romans begins not with the apostle posing a stimulating yet coolly detached intellectual question, but with Paul pouring out his grief. “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart,” he says (9:2 CSB).

Perhaps most shockingly, Paul goes so far as to say, “I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the benefit of my brothers and sisters” (9:3). There’s a part of Paul that almost would be willing to give up his own salvation forever if it meant salvation for his fellow Israelites.

Do we believe what Paul says?

Paul serves as a prime example of how we ourselves should feel about our own loved ones who do not believe in Jesus Christ. Paul is full of emotional agony that nearly breaks him. Only the grace of God can sustain Paul through the pain of seeing people he desperately loves reject Jesus.

Why are more of us not like Paul in this regard? Why am I not more consistently like Paul in this way? One method I have seen Christians use to try to avoid pain like Paul’s is embracing alternative views of what ultimately happens to those who don’t trust in Jesus.

The traditional Christian view of the fate of those who don’t believe is eternal, conscious torment in hell. But there are many alternatives which some—including myself in the past—have been tempted to embrace.

Universalism teaches all people eventually will be saved. Annihilationism teaches those in hell eventually cease to exist. Inclusivism teaches there are paths to salvation outside of faith in Christ.

I don’t have space to refute these alternative views in detail, but many people have written much to that end. I’ll just ask this: If Paul understands there to be any hope of salvation and eternal life outside of believing in Christ, why is he so upset in Romans 9:1-5? If all his countrymen eventually will be saved, or they at least have a decent shot at salvation without faith in Jesus, why is Paul full of such emotional agony over their rejection of Christ?

Attractive as they may be, alternative views of final judgment and hell ultimately don’t do justice to Scripture, and they cannot be the way we calm our own troubled souls.

Let the pain push us to proclaim and pray

Many Christians do not embrace alternative views of hell, yet they still do not experience the same kind of inner turmoil Paul does over their loved ones’ unbelief. Why is that? I’m not a mind reader. I don’t know people’s hearts. But I have a theory: We just try not to think about it.

It is extremely tempting simply not to think about the eternal fate of our unbelieving loved ones precisely because those thoughts are so painful. We gloss over or simply ignore Scripture passages about final judgment and hell. We avoid talking about the wrath of God. We don’t outright deny the truth so much as we try to evade facing it head-on.

But Paul faces the truth head-on. He knows what awaits his beloved fellow Israelites if they don’t turn to Christ. And it brings him incredible anguish. But it also motivates him to proclaim the gospel all the more passionately and pray all the more fervently for the salvation of those who don’t know Jesus.

All of us should learn from Paul’s example. He accepts the hard truth, and it grieves him, but he does not let this grief paralyze him. Rather, he redoubles his evangelistic efforts. If we truly love people who don’t know Christ, we should do everything we can to persuade them to repent and believe.

Joshua Sharp is the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Orange, and a graduate of Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Mo., and Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary in Waco. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.