A Purpose Driven Death

People want help with life. If you go to a Christian bookstore, you’ll find a lot of books about self-help for Christians and Christian living. Some of the information is practical, but you need to be careful about what lies beneath. Self-help can easily turn into help for selfish goals or helping myself rather than trusting God. Think of the Pharisees and others who wanted to use Jesus for selfish gain, like free food, driving out the Romans or support for their sinful lifestyle. Christian living books are often built on the idea that accepting God as the head of your life will get you some kind of deeper appreciation or meaning in life.

In other words, what is Christian living? Does being a Christian mean greater blessings for this life? Let’s see how this checks against the references.

First, how did the apostles live? Surely if God blesses those with right faith, His apostles were kings among men! Not so. For one, they lived in poverty. They were, for the most part, poor fishermen, living from catch to catch, and when they became evangelists, they spent most a lot of their time in prison for speaking the Gospel. An even better question is, how did they die? Certainly, since their lives were so “purpose driven,” we can expect that they died with velvet pillows under their heads, in comfy Sleep Number beds? Well…not exactly. Stephen was ripped apart by stones, James was torn in two by the sword, Paul and John the Baptist were separated from their heads, Luke was hanged, and Peter was crucified upside down! No matter how pious these men, who actually saw Christ, were, their earthly lives were definitely no more charmed and easy than normal.

You see now that faith isn’t some way to “get in good with the big guy” in this life, but rather our Lutheran (Christian) faith inevitably leads us to death—namely, the holy resounding death of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Did Jesus say, “Follow me for awhile, and I’ll make your wildest dreams come true?” By no means! Christ said: “Take up my cross and follow me.” It’s as simple as that: we must suffer and die with the Lord, so that we also inherit His resurrection. We might be blessed with earthly success along the way. We might not. But Jesus died to give us eternal life, not to make our present life carefree. The problem with that is that it is totally illogical to today’s modern man. Why on EARTH would we follow a God that has us carry a splintering, blood-stained cross? There isn’t room for suffering and dying in a life full of meaning! This is where faith comes in. Sin has corrupted our human logic to the point that we long for only blessings in this life rather than heavenly blessings. Faith looks beyond the things of this life to Christ and the gifts of forgiveness, heaven, and eternal life.

So what does this mean to the Christian today? Should we look for no blessing from above? Again, by no means! God will always provide what we need. “Consider the lilies of the field, they neither spin nor toil, and yet Solomon in all of this glory was not clothed like one of these,” says Christ. In gaining the knowledge of good and evil, we seem to have lost sight of how infintesimal this earthly life is. It is my belief that God’s limiting of human age was truly an act of mercy. Christian faith is to be in the world, not of the world, for, in the grand sweep of time, we will only spend eighty-ninety years in our sin-soaked flesh, and then, by grace through faith in Christ Jesus, eternity in heaven! That is, forever and always, never again to suffer or feel pain. With that perspective, how can anything material in this life come close to mattering? The beautiful cherry wood tables and chairs that we store up for ourselves will rot and return to dust, but our chairs at the heavenly table will last forever and ever. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses himself?”

This is the purpose, the blessing that matters. Christ’s selfless death has, in effect, destroyed death’s hold on us, so that, instead of dusty riches that pass away here on Earth, we may enjoy the High Feast of the Lamb forever and ever.

Caleb Kuddes is a sophomore English student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He spends his free time singing, rowing, blurting out random German words, and sinning, whether he knows it or not.

All biblical citations are from the English Standard Version.