Specially of Those That Believe

One adverb carries the whole matter. "We have set our trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe" (1 Tim 4:10). Paul does not say Savior of all men, full stop. He does not say Savior of believers only. He sets the wide title down first, all men, and then he narrows it with a single word: especially. The wide title is true. The narrow one is truer in its kind. A theology that cannot hold both halves of that sentence will break one of them, and both breakages are common. One party erases the "especially" and calls the result universalism. The other erases the "all men" and speaks as if the ransom had a fence around its offer. Paul erases neither. The herald proclaims the sentence as written.

The wide texts are wide. God "desires all people to be saved and come to full knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim 2:4). The one mediator "gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony at the proper time" (1 Tim 2:6). "The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men" (Titus 2:11). Christ is "the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world" (1 John 2:2). Let every one of those stand at full width. The gospel is not honored by shrinking its proclamation, and the church that whispers "for all" as if it were an embarrassment has already begun to deny the ransom's testimony at the proper time.

But each wide text carries its fence, and the fence is not added by cautious men. It stands in the same Scriptures, often in the same breath. The same Gospel that records the gift to the world records the division the gift makes: "One who believes in the Son has eternal life, but one who disobeys the Son won't see life, but the wrath of God remains on him" (John 3:36). Remains. The wrath is not threatened as a future possibility for the man who never believes. It abides on him now, while the ransom for all is preached to him. Scripture holds the wide ransom and the abiding wrath in two hands and does not drop either.

The Lord's own words on the drawing settle the mechanism. "I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself" (John 12:32). Read alone, the sentence sounds like a promise that every man who ever lived will arrive. But the same Gospel uses the same verb under the Father's hand, and there the drawing is defined: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up in the last day" (John 6:44). In John 6, the drawing is not an invitation that may be refused. It is the necessary cause of coming, and its end is resurrection. No man comes undrawn, and the drawn man is raised. Carry that definition back to John 12 and the "all people" of the cross are the people the cross actually brings. Who are they? The Lord names them in the same chapter of John 6: "All those whom the Father gives me will come to me" (John 6:37). The all who come are the all who were given. The drawing and the giving are one work, spoken of by the Father's hand and the Son's cross.

And beneath the giving stands the order that John 10 states without embarrassment: "You don't believe, because you are not of my sheep, as I told you" (John 10:26). Not: you are not my sheep because you don't believe. The sheep come first. Believing is what sheep do when they hear, because the Shepherd knows them and they follow. This is why the "especially" of 1 Timothy 4:10 is not a crack in the wide title but its explanation. He is Savior of all men. He is Savior especially, effectually, savingly, of those who believe. And those who believe are those who were His before they heard.

So the proclamation loses nothing and gains its spine. Preach the ransom for all to all. Testify it at the proper time, in every place, without a prior inspection of the hearers. The wide words are the herald's commission. But do not confuse the width of the proclamation with the outcome for every hearer. The same Lord who gave Himself a ransom for all divides the hearers into those who have life and those on whom wrath remains, and He traces the division to the Shepherd's knowledge of His own, not to the hearer's power to make himself a sheep.

One thing Paul leaves undefined, and the herald leaves it undefined with him. In what sense is God the Savior of the man who never believes, the man on whom wrath remains? Paul gives the title and the "especially," and no more. Scripture elsewhere shows the living God preserving all He has made; He "makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust" (Matt 5:45). But Paul does not say preservation here, and he does not say a lesser salvation, and he does not say a salvation that fails. He says Savior of all men, especially of those who believe, and he moves on to charge Timothy to command and teach these things. What the wide title means for the unbelieving, beyond the fact of it, the apostle does not open. The two titles stand over the two groups, in one sentence, in that order. The herald's work is to keep them in that order, and to stop where the sentence stops.