When I was younger, we played a game called “duck duck goose.” You know the game. Everyone forms a big circle. A person walks around the circle tapping each person’s head, “Duck, Duck, Duck.” But if they so happen to touch your head and shout “Goose” you have to chase them down and tag them otherwise you become the next picker!
A rising number of Christians believe this is how salvation works. That God is the picker. That he walks a circle announcing duck, duck, duck… saved… saved… saved.” But then for reasons hidden or concealed in the sovereign mind of God, there are some God condemns. “Saved. Saved. Saved. Condemned!” Or maybe it’s more like, “Condemned. Condemned. Condemned. Saved!”
Is this really how salvation really works? I meet people who believe they aren’t saved, nor can they be saved. They say things like, “God hasn’t chosen me. He hasn’t given me a sign. He hasn’t called my name. He hasn’t given me faith. My life has been a train wreck, I’m pretty sure I’d a child of damnation.” Do you know there are people committing suicide, there are people “deconstructing” their faith in Jesus, because they don’t think they “can” be saved? That God’s “willed” them to hell.
Who can be saved? John 1:12 says, “But to all who did receive [Jesus], he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name.” If you were Jewish, John 1:12 sounds scandalous. You would see yourself as one of the chosen ones, the elect ones. But if you were non-Jewish, John 1:12 is the sweetest news imaginable! The word “all” suggests a universal availability of salvation. That is not to say all will receive Jesus, or all will believe in his name. In John 3 we’re told many don’t receive Jesus because they love the darkness, and chose not to come into the light. Not all “will” receive or believe, but all “can.”
John 1:13 amplifies the universal availability of salvation. John 1:13 speaks of those “. . . who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.” The Jewish person thought their Jewish ethnicity determined salvation. So, imagine Nicodemus’ shock in John 3. Here is a Jewish ruler, a leading Pharisee, a true descendent of Abraham, Isaac, Israel. In John 3:6 Jesus tells him, “Whatever is born of flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.” In other words, your Jewish ethnicity doesn’t privilege you. Who you were first born to, the will or desire or ethnicity of your parents, is immaterial. John 3:3, “. . . Unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And let us not forget John 3:16: “For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
Nicodemus’s salvation comes down to one issue. Will he accept the testimony of John the Baptist, of Jesus testimony of his self-identity? This is the whole force of John 3. John 3:33 says, “The one who has accepted his testimony has affirmed that God is true.” John 3:18, “Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.” Why would God play a game of charades, announcing salvation, commanding people to repent and believe, if it was all smoke and mirrors?
While Nicodemus contemplated the universal availability of salvation where do you suppose we next find Jesus? John 4:3-6, “he left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria; 5 so he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon.”
What business does a young Jewish man have in Samaria? No respectable Jew ever “had” to be “in” Samaria. You’d circumnavigate the whole province even if it took days, to avoid those dirty dogs, otherwise known as ethnic “Samaritans.” And wouldn’t we know it, but in John 4:7, “a woman of Samaria came to draw water.” And Jesus is alone w with her, the disciples has gone into Walmart to get food.
It gets worse, In John 4:8, Jesus speaks to her and says, “Give me a drink.” There is a notation in John 4:9. Jews don’t associate with Samaritans. But also, a male wouldn’t associate with a female. And a righteous person certainly wouldn’t associate with a person of such questionable character! Questionable character? How do we come by that? A reputable woman (a loved woman) would have never gone outside the city alone to fetch water. Bathroom rules applied then as they do today. No woman goes to the bathroom alone. You go together, and not for social reasons alone, but to look out for each other, it’s instinctual. You’re vulnerable alone. This woman was alone.
In John 4:9 she asks, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me.” And Jesus’ response is quite remarkable. In John 4:10 he says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.” Do not overlook the context of John 4:10. If you knew the gift of God—and if you knew who God is—you would have asked him for living water. This is what we should be saying to people who think they are irreligious, too sinful, too broken, too messed up, too whatever to be saved. If you knew the gift of God… and if you truly knew God… you would be asking for the gift!
Now this woman has questions about Jesus. She asks Jesus if he is greater than our father Jacob. Now Jesus has already told Nathaniel and Nicodemus that they will see signs greater than what Jacob saw. In Jacob’s vision he saw angels ascending and descending a ladder—but Jesus tells them they will see the Son of Man, who has descended and stands before them, ascending back to the Father!
But here in John 4:13-14, Jesus tells this woman, “Everyone who drink this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drink from the water I will give him will never thirst again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
Now Jesus told Nicodemus he was like Moses’ staff. When the staff was lifted up, all Israel believed in the God of Moses. When Jesus would be lifted up from the face of the earth, and ascend to the Father, all would believe. The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus is the Sign of all signs. But not only is Jesus greater than Jacob, evidently Jesus is greater than Moses. Because when Moses struck that rock in the wilderness streams of water flowed forth and a thirsty nation drank and was satisfied! And now here is Jesus saying he can provide living, everlasting water that’s like a spring welling up to eternal life!
But the crucial issue is this: Will this woman love darkness or come into the light? Will she repent and receive and believe and be born again? In John 4:16 Jesus asks her to call for her husband. But she doesn’t have a husband. In fact, she’s had five husbands and is with yet another man who is not her husband!
You know I’m reading this text and my mind is buzzing. There are two ways you can read John 4:16. You can read it and say, “Oh, here is an adulterous woman, a prostitute. Plus, she’s a she. Plus, she’s a Samaritan. Plus, she’s worshipping on the wrong mountain.” The Samaritans worshipped on Mount Gerizim.
But you can also read John 4:16 in light of John 2 and 3. The God of Israel, the bridegroom of Israel, had come to his bride Israel. But read prophets Malachi and Hosea. Like this adulterous woman, God’s bride had been the harlot. God’s bride Israel has intermarried foreign men not their own and forsaken their marital covenants (first love). But they had also been seduced by idolatry and forsaken their God. Worse, they had turned God’s holy temple into a den of robbers and thieves. Whatever flesh-based, ethnic privileges the Jew enjoyed had been utterly squandered. A Jewish Nicodemus had no more “right” to be a child of God. . . and was no more deserving of “the gift of salvation”, than this Samaritan woman.
But wait. There is something redeemable about her after all. Jesus tells her in John 4:23 that what God is seeking is worshippers who “worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.” Not only does she repent and receive and believe Jesus’ testimony… she races back into town and tells everyone there that she’s found the promised one of Israel! She receives Jesus’ testimony… thus affirming that God is true… and then she proclaims the name of Jesus to her whole village! If she can be saved, then any other Samaritan dog can be saved!
John 1:12-13 says, “But to all who did receive [Jesus], he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.”
While she’s telling everyone about Jesus, the disciples come back from Walmart with a cart full of food. But while they’re sitting there, another spectacle is unfolding. Jesus tells them in John 4:35, “. . . Listen to what I’m telling you: Open your eyes and look at the fields, because they are ready for harvest.” And in John 4:39-42, “Now many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of what the woman said when she testified, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 Many more believed because of what he said. 42 And they told the woman, “We no longer believe because of what you said, since we have heard for ourselves and know that this really is the Savior of the world”
In John 4:34 Jesus tells his disciples, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” Right now, is the day of harvest! WHOEVER BELIEVES can be saved. That means you. But potentially, that means EVERYONE. In 1 Timothy 2:4-7 the Apostle Paul exclaims, “[God] wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, a testimony at the proper time. For this I was appointed a herald, an apostle (I am telling the truth; I am not lying), and a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”
WHOSOEVER BELIEVES WILL BE SAVED.