I’ve come to believe that atheists are right! Without God, when we die that’s it, life comes to an end. If God is the source of all life, then without him there can be nothing more than the life we experience in this world. Without God life is short and at its end, we die.
The ancient writers of the bible saw God in everything around them. They were surrounded by plants and creatures whose presence pointed to a God who was the creator and sustainer of life itself. To them, it was death that was discordant, and the knowledge that death comes to us all at the end of time on this earth was something they needed to make sense of.
This God, who continually revealed himself to them, showed himself to be not only the source of life but also a God who was good, true, just and merciful. He was full of light and hope. They knew too that he was immortal and uncreated, and that in him life could not come to an end. Yet when they considered, the fleetingness and the frailty of human existence, it seemed out of place if such a God was in control.
Their conclusion, come to through long revelation, is carried to us in the Bible’s opening stories. They learned that a short and pain-filled life was not God’s plan for humanity. In the beginning he had created a paradise garden where people could live in his constant presence unbounded by time. But rebellion, disobedience and an all-too-human determination to do things our own way became part of our human experience. Humanity abused its God-given freedom and chose instead to decide its own destiny. The closeness we could have enjoyed with God was fractured and the inevitable separation that followed would lead only to death. Our ancestors became mortal beings, our days became numbered, our lives destined to be cut short by death.
And so as we read through the Bible’s stories, one question remains central in all of its writings. If we are created to bear the image of God, how then can we escape death? How can we shake off our human frailty, this mortality, and inherit once again a life with and from God that is unbounded by time? How can we be like him once again?
Page after page we see the same pattern. Human action falling short of God’s plan. Rebellion and sin, strivings and shortcomings, defacing the image of the holy God embodied in every human soul. Sin leading to defilement, and defilement leading inescapably to alienation from God and to death as its inescapable conclusion. And as we read all this, we are left wondering if there is any way we can escape.
The ordinary people who encountered Jesus, those who listened to his words and experienced how he engaged with individuals struggling with the challenges of life, were surprised more than anything by the fact that this fundamental pattern of human experience did not seem to apply to him. He did not show the same shortcomings that everyone else does. He did not have to strive to be better. His relationship with God was not fractured and he exuded a sense of wholeness and peace that few humans know.
They were also shocked to see, that rather than being tainted by the shortcomings of others, sucked in to the darker sides of life by those who lived in dark places, the opposite appeared to happen when Jesus came by. Where Jesus was, there was peace and wholeness. When Jesus touched someone broken by illness, he was not contaminated by their touch, instead his touch brought healing to them. He was not condemned when others spoke harshly of him, his words instead called others back to life. In him and through him came wholeness, healing and life itself. And it was because of what these people experienced, what they saw and heard and encountered, that they came to realise that, though Jesus was clearly human, he must also be divine. Because they knew that no other human was like him.
Though in many lives, it may appear that God’s original plan for humanity to inherit a life that is not bounded by time, may have failed. It is clear from what he has revealed to us through the Bible that God has never erred from his desire that every person might live forever with him. His supreme legacy to the humanity he created has always been life in all its fullness. This unrivalled gift he has made available to all who will accept it. Because, through Jesus, God has offered us an exchange. His kind of life for our kind of life. His immortality for our mortality. That is some offer! It is just down to us to accept his terms.
We call this love. Not the cheap, selfish, desire-ridden love of today. But the self-sacrificing love of a father for his children. The love of a friend who lays down their life so that others may live. This sort of love is the kind of love that maybe only God can display fully, and that most humans can only long for and admire. This God, who in Jesus, stood, touched, and spoke his wholeness, healing and life into the people he met, was also willing to carry all our sin and shortcomings and to meet their consequence, death, on our behalf. This is the love that God is, and this is what happened on the cross.
Jesus’ cross is ultimately about just one thing. It’s about life and death, and death and life. Our death and God’s life. God’s death and our life. On it the old pattern was broken. Sin would no longer lead to defilement and separation from God and from there inexorably to death. On the cross God reversed the pattern. On the cross he willingly sacrificed himself, substituted his own life for ours, and died in place of us. Jesus was a sinless human being, he never needed to die, and yet he voluntarily laid his own life down so that we might live.
But none of this makes any sense without what happened next. The cross itself could never be the whole story. With God, death can never be the end. Having laid down his life, having experienced the death that every human faces, God in Jesus once again broke the pattern. Death had followed life, now life followed death. Having laid down his life, Jesus took it up again, rising up from the darkness of death and into the light of the living. God is life and light, and death was only something he had allowed himself to enter into so that his plan for humanity could be fulfilled. The power that death had had, to hold humans in a place devoid of God, had been defeated. A new pattern had been cast, a new hope offered to everyone prepared to follow the path of Jesus.
There is a beautiful simplicity, an exquisite symmetry, to the path to life that Jesus leads us down. We have all been given life. If we choose to keep this life to ourselves, if we decide that we are the ones who control our own destiny. If we close our eyes to the invisible God who has given us this life, then the old pattern will repeat itself once again. But, this does not have to be the way.
We can, if we desire, choose the new pattern. We can decide to enter into that great exchange, a life and a death, for a death and a life. If we will willingly lay down our own lives, as Jesus did with his for us, if we will die to ourselves, and live instead for him, then his substitution can be ours too. His sacrifice can sit beside our own, and his life can enter our lifeless bodies. We can take up life again, not our own life, but his, and we will rise with him from the darkness of our sinful human lives to the light and hope that comes when we live in him, and he lives in us. The exchange takes place, the divine embracing our human death, so that we humans can embrace his divine life.
The gospel writer John put it this way, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16)
Now that is something worth considering.
Be encouraged.