Clay and Ice, Cuts and Scars
The Puritans had a saying: “The same sun that hardens the clay melts the ice.”
I was converted to belief in Jesus Christ as savior and Lord over a period of time, so I don’t have the testimony of those who say, “I was at a Billy Graham Crusade; I heard the gospel for the first time, and I was all in.” Although my justification was secured in a moment, the process of my understanding and acceptance took place over a year-long time of some guys being patient with me and loving me and walking with me. They invited me to church gatherings and spiritual events, and they even allowed me to mock those things. They just patiently explained them to me more fully. I asked a lot of questions that I now know won’t be answered this side of heaven, but they let me ask them anyway, and they tried to answer. Sometimes they’d give me books to read. Through that whole year, God began to gather kindling around my life.
You start a fire with small pieces of grass and wood, and once that’s caught, you put on bigger sticks, and then you put on bigger sticks, and then you put on even bigger sticks. In those early conversations with my friends Jeff and Jerry and others, God was laying kindling around my heart, and then, three days before my eighteenth birthday, he lit it up. What’s funny is that in that moment I no longer needed all my questions answered. It took me a while to catch, but when I did, that’s when I was all in.
Before that, though, I needed to know how it all worked; I needed to know how everything fit; I needed to know why God would say such-and-such. But when the Holy Spirit opened up my heart to Christ my savior and God my Father and reconciled me to God, I didn’t need those questions answered. Even after my conversion, the residual contention I held out, that some specific complexity has to be solved for this whole thing to be credible, melted away in the light of God’s grace and mercy in my life. In May of that decisive year, I was an aggressive agnostic. In June I was converted and began to share the gospel.
I should explain what I mean when I say I shared the gospel. At that time, I knew that if you don’t love Jesus, you are going to hell, and therefore you shouldn’t drink beer and try to sleep with girls. That was the sum total of my frame of reference; I wasn’t theologically built out. But I had an insatiable thirst for the Word of God, so I studied the Bible constantly. Even so, I knew nothing of deep books, deep thinking, and the deep realities of the good news. I just knew that I loved Jesus, that I wanted other people to love Jesus, and that if you didn’t love Jesus the way I did, you were going to hell. That was my evangelistic strategy, so I told almost everyone I knew about this fantastic news: “This is what has happened to me. This is what God has done. This is what Jesus has done for you!”
In God’s mercy, he covered my naivete and honored my sincerity with the powerful gospel in spite of me, and I actually won people to Christ. I began to see a great deal of openness to the good news among my friends. Several came to know the Lord right after I did and began to follow him, love him, and serve him, and they continue to do so to this day. What I learned in those early days is that the proclamation of the glory of God, the might of God, and the majesty of God brought to bear on the sinfulness of man in the atoning work of Jesus Christ actually stirs the hearts of men. And men respond to that stirring. Some are stirred to belief; some are not.
I remember some friends who were stirred not to belief but to interest. “Explain this to me,” they’d say. “Help me understand this.” But, in the end, those guys were hardened to the gospel, and as time went on, and as they asked more questions, they didn’t become more and more open to Christ but more and more closed to him.
This is what the gospel does. This is why the gospel of Jesus is dangerous. When we hear the gospel word, we are opened up to the Word of God. We’re subjected to God’s Word reading us. We sit underneath it, and for the moment of our hearing, it rules us. It does not save all, but all who hear it are put in their place. This is dangerous, because the proclamation of God’s Word goes only one way or another in the soul of a man, and one of those ways is the hardening of a man toward the grace of God.
This means, for instance, that nobody can really attend church as though it’s a hobby; to do so does not reveal partial belief but hardness. The religious, moralistic, churchgoing evangelical who has no real intention of seeking God and following him has not found some sweet spot between radical devotion and wanton sin; he’s found devastation. The moralism that passes for Christian faith today is a devastating hobby if you have no intention of submitting your life fully to God and chasing him in Christ.
It is an amazing thing, but this one message can reach both those who are near and those who are far (Eph. 2:17) and bring one person near and push another farther away. The same sun that hardens the clay melts the ice.
Jesus gives us some insight into this phenomenon in his parable of the sower in Matthew 13:1–8. The sower does not offer a different seed in all his scattering; he apparently doesn’t even adjust the way he scatters. He has one seed, and evidently he distributes it indiscriminately. He knows every soil needs this one seed to grow what only this one seed produces. The different responses to the seed are contingent upon the receptivity of the soil. The seed finds purchase in soft soil but does not in hard soil.
I think of the way the Word of God, which is “sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12), cuts into the soul of every man and woman. The Word is sharp; there’s no doubting that. But some souls it cuts to the quick, breaking open like freshly tilled soil; others it bruises, leaving marks scarred over. This is not because the sword is not sharp enough, or that God cannot cut to the quick any soul he wants. Our softness or hardness is subject to the good pleasure of God (Rom. 9:18). Nevertheless, the effect is such that the sharp word of the gospel cuts some open, and others it scars, further callousing them against its promise of life. There is no one in between.
