Dennis Tuuri

Q1:
Questioner: The fire that these branches are cast into, why are we sure that’s damnation fire, not a refining fire like 1 Corinthians 3 where we’re saved yet as through fire?

Pastor Tuuri: Yeah, there are some people who think it’s a purging fire because there’s a distinction made between those who are pruned or purged and cleansed and as a result bear more fruit. So this seems to be a cutting off of those that are not bearing fruit. Given all the Old Testament imagery of the destruction of Israel that will not bear fruit, it seems best to think of it as being cast into hell.

Arthur Pink thought that the cutting off was a raising up, and there are some commentators that have said that we can have carnal Christians who don’t bear any fruit and then God just kills them and takes them to heaven but still saved as through fire. But I don’t think that’s consistent with the image given here.

He seems to be throughout the upper room discourse drawing this distinction between true and false Israel, and that salvation is only to be found in the context of true Israel. Those who don’t bear fruit don’t abide in true Israel—they are cut off and judged. So that is a common question that comes up in the commentaries, but as far as I understand it, it speaks of eternal judgment.

The problem you have, and I touched on this in my sermon, is that we don’t want to slide into the doctrine of losing salvation. So here we have branches that are really connected to Christ, even maybe bearing some fruit, and yet they end up being broken off. You know, the same analogy appears in Romans. So some people want to make them either Christians who die and go to heaven or those that were never really branches.

I think that we just want to let the biblical language speak its obvious truth, and that is that these are people who were in some kind of covenant relationship, part of the community of Christ, part of the disciples. Some people think that the cleansing by his word is a direct reference to his telling Judas to go do his thing. And that would be an example of that—where he prunes it and Judas has been pruned off and will go to hell. He’s that branch that has not abided in Christ, is still not with him.

The obvious sense of abiding in Christ, of course, is staying in the context of the church. You continue to abide in Christ by doing this every week. And this was no longer open to Judas. He had cut himself off and ends up as the son of perdition.

Q2:
Questioner: I probably from my fundamentalist days kind of always interpreted the fruit as witness to others—you know, bringing others to Christ—but it seems much more to make sense to me if you comment on that.

Pastor Tuuri: Yeah, some commentators, Robin’s sermon on this really took it in the primary sense of bearing disciples. You know, they’re dealing in the first instance with the apostles who will build the early church. So I think it’s legitimate to think of that as the first thing we think of—the fruit will be more branches so to speak. And so I think that’s an appropriate application of the text. I just think that the fruit is probably more diverse than that.

If you take the whole imagery of the Old Testament and then the way fruit is used in the New Testament, it seems to make it a much broader application. But we certainly do not want to leave off that emphasis on evangelism. And I’ll talk more about that in my next sermon on this.

Really, I wanted to break it up for particular reasons. I was already too long, but it’s really too bad in a way because the whole idea of loving the church and living self-sacrificially for one another is of the essence of this abiding and fruitfulness too. But yeah, I think you’re right—there is certainly a healthy emphasis to be placed on evangelism, but I do think it’s broader than that.