Jesus and His Friends, a View of Particular Atonement

In John 15:13-14, that Apostle reports to us these words of Jesus: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you." The Lord tells us that the highest love is to die for one's friends, a description of what yet lay ahead of Him when He spoke those words. Was He contradicting what we are told elsewhere in Scripture? For example, in Romans 5:8, the Apostle Paul tells us, "God shows His love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." No, there is no contradiction. Paul tells us what we were before the application of Christ's atonement, while Jesus describes what we became after that application. We were enemies, but His blood turned us into friends. 

But the part I want to discuss is what Jesus says, that He would soon die on the cross, not for men in general, but for those who would thereby be turned into His friends. That is, those who remain His enemies do so because He did not die for them. 

To my mind, this is one of the biggest differences between Calvinism and Arminianism. Calvinism teaches - because Jesus taught - that the blood of Jesus is effectual. As He Himself also says, every man whom the Father gave Him to be redeemed would unfailingly be converted (John 6:39). In contrast, Arminianism claims that Jesus died equally for all men in general, so that salvation would be possible for everyone, but certain for no one. If that were so, then it would have been hypothetically possible for not a single person ever to have been saved. And even worse, it also means that the Arminian believes that Jesus died just as much for every person in Hell as He did for every person in Heaven. 

To my mind, that is a grotesque view of the atonement.

And I think these words of Jesus indicate that He never imagined such a thing either, but looked forward to all of the friends that He was gaining for each moment that He suffered on the cross, just as the Father promised Him in prehistory: "Out of the anguish of His soul He shall see and be satisfied; by His knowledge shall the righteous one, My servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and He shall bear their iniquities" (Isaiah 53:11).