“And even they, if they do not remain in unbelief, will be grafted in, because God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut off from your native wild olive tree and against nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these—the natural branches—be grafted into their own olive tree?” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Is there anyone too far gone for God to save them? That’s certainly a question believers have wrestled with over the centuries of church history. We wonder this objectively. We muse on it when thinking about public atheists and whether it is possible for them to finally come around. We agonize over it when the individuals in question are family members. What Paul says about Israel as a genetic people here speaks some to the question. Check this out with me.

How far is too far for God to save someone? The author of Hebrews warns against apostasy. Pharaoh in the Exodus story had a heart that was hardened to the Lord. Where is the line that, once crossed, is the point of no return on the journey toward Hell? What is the length of God’s arm? The answer to that is a whole lot further than you might imagine.

Jesus told a story that Luke records in his Gospel (Luke 15) about a young man who demanded his inheritance from his father. Unexpectedly—at least in cultural terms—the father agrees to his request, cashes out part of his estate, and gives his son the cash. The boy leaves home planning never to return. He goes and lives the life he had always wanted. He does all the things his father had never allowed. He indulges in every experience he could imagine. He refuses to tell himself no the way his restrictive father had done. In fact, he lives like his father doesn’t even exist.

And things go really well for the boy…until they don’t. Eventually, his money runs out. He discovers that you can only live on someone else’s foundation without actually standing on that foundation for so long before everything collapses on you. To put that another way, like Wiley E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons, he runs off a cliff, but because he doesn’t realize it at first, he just hangs there in mid-air, enjoying himself thoroughly. Then he looks down, realizes where he actually is, and drops like a stone.

In the mind of Jesus’ Jewish audience, the boy doesn’t just hit rock bottom. He lands with a thud, grabs a shovel, digs a hole, and falls in that too. He winds up working at a pig farm, feeding slop to the pigs, wishing he could eat as good as they were. Now that he has time to think and reflect on his situation, life back at his father’s house starts to seem pretty good again. He knows he can’t go back as his son again, though. He’s already tossed that relationship in the trash. Maybe his father will take him back as a servant. At least then he’d get to eat decently.

With the decision made that chucking his pride and trying to go home is better than the mess he has landed himself in, the young man composes a speech in his mind that will be sure to help his appeal succeed, and he goes home hoping for the best. Jesus’ original audience hearing this story for the first time all knew what they would do if they were this father. The boy had disrespected him in the most serious terms. Now he was justly paying for his foolish decisions. There would be no receiving him back even as a servant. He needed to be put even more fully in God’s hands for the great Judge to deal with him.

That is not, however, how things actually unfold. When the boy is still a long ways off, the father sees him coming and recognizes him immediately. Gathering up his robes around his waist, the father does what not a single one of the fathers standing around and listening to Jesus would have ever even considered doing. He runs. He sprints. He charges in the boy’s direction as fast as he possibly can. And when he arrives, he doesn’t scold, he doesn’t lecture, he doesn’t berate. None of that. He embraces his son with all the ferocity of a man who had received his son back from the dead, and throws a party in his honor.

How far can someone go before God won’t welcome them back if they turn and seek to come back? A whole lot further than we can imagine. History is replete with stories of dramatic returns to God’s loving arms. John Newton, the man who composed one of the most enduringly popular hymns ever written, Amazing Grace, was living about as far from the Christian faith as you can imagine. But when he came to his senses and came to Jesus for grace and mercy, that’s exactly what he found.

Lee Strobel was a hardened skeptic who thought the Christian faith was nothing more than a bad joke that made people stupid and poisoned the world everywhere it was embraced. Then he examined the evidence using the same methods he would have used as a legal journalist working to get to the bottom of a story so he could write the truth. Now he’s as joyful a defender of the faith as you will find anywhere.

The apostle Paul was so convinced that the movement of Jesus was a fraud and a threat to the Jewish way of life that he sought to stamp the movement out in its entirety. He drove all the believers save the apostles themselves out of Jerusalem and got permission from the religious leaders there to take his terror campaign to other cities and do the same. It was on the road to Damascus, though, that he actually encountered the risen Jesus who he was persecuting so vigorously. Jesus came to offer him not condemnation, but an invitation into life. The rest is history. Without Paul, the western world as we know it today might have never happened.

Paul has been cautioning his Gentile-background readers against walking into a trap of pridefulness over their right standing before God in Christ over and against the Jews who had rejected Him. As we have talked about the last couple of days, Paul wanted them to understand that their standing before God in Christ was not a function of their worthiness, but of God’s graciousness. Yes, the Jews who had rejected the Gospel had drifted into unbelief, but all hope was not lost for them. They may have been removed from the root of God’s well-cultivated tree, but if they returned to faith and started once again walking in the direction of Jesus, they would be received once again with open arms.

“And even they, if they do not remain in unbelief, will be grafted in, because God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut off from your native wild olive tree and against nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these—the natural branches—be grafted into their own olive tree?”

There’s no such thing as too far from God’s kingdom for Him to still be able to pull a person back to life if they choose to turn around. There’s no line to cross. There’s no action to perform. As long as there is still breath in a person’s lungs, salvation in Christ and an invitation into God’s eternal kingdom is a live option for them. As Jesus demonstrated with the thief on the cross, even a person who confesses Christ with his dying breath can be granted the gift of eternal life. Now, that’s no reason to wait until then because we don’t know when our dying breath will come, and we don’t want to get caught unaware, but the point remains all the same. There is no point at which life in Christ is not available to a person until this life comes to an end and all sales are final.

If you are someone who is walking a path away from Jesus, what this means is that there’s still time to turn around. You haven’t gotten so far that Jesus can’t still redeem you if you choose Him. It doesn’t matter how much of a mess your life has become. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve drifted. It doesn’t matter how much you have hated Him and rejected Him. If you choose to turn and walk in His direction, you will be received with open arms.

If you are someone who is already following Jesus faithfully, this truth should directly impact how you think about the unbelievers around you. No one is too far gone for God. No one is beyond the reach of the love of Christ. No one is truly a hopeless case. God doesn’t write people off and neither can you. His love doesn’t end, and neither can yours. Love can occasionally be tough, and sometimes the best way to help someone see the danger of the path they are walking is to leave them to experience the natural consequences of their rejection of the truth. But when they are ready to return, we need to be there with open arms just like our heavenly Father is.

God’s grace is abundant and unending. Let us praise His name and join Him in extending it to everyone around us without distinction. The world will be glad that we did.