Christ: Death = Entering Life

Thinking about Mark 9.43-47, this morning. Christ calls dying entering life, or alternatively entering the kingdom of God. A couple of obvious things from this. First, for those who have been declared righteous by God death IS entering life, or entering the kingdom of God. Second, we glean this because the alternative that Christ pronounces here is entering hell. One enters hell at death, and so we conclude that death for the believer is entering life. Christ is more explicit in John 5.24, Truly, truly I say unto you. He who hears my voice and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.

Which leaves the obvious question: When you die are you going to enter life or are you going to enter hell? Those are the two possibilities Christ leaves for us.

The Means to (True) Life...

...is endurance in the faith, according to Christ at Luke 21.19. By your endurance you will gain your lives. Simple and to the point. Christ must not mean physical endurance, as if to say, if you endure like a marathon runner endures you will gain your lives, because then the Christian life would be about working out and who could become a contest of the physically fittest. We can rule that out because Paul said bodily exercise profits little. Christ must mean that by endurance in the faith you will gain your lives (or souls, or inner lives).

BDAG defines lives as seat and center of the inner human life in its many and varied aspects, soul and further as, the seat and center of life that transcends the earthly. Christ is then not speaking of physical life, but of eternal life. NET puts it most succinctly: By your endurance is a call to remain faithful, because trusting in Jesus is the means to life.

God and Mystery

3000 years after Solomon penned Ecclesiastes 11.5, we still have no clue how the spirit gets implanted into a child in the process of pregnancy, just that it does. Men have learned a lot about science and how the world works, and yet we still cannot understand the complete working out of God's plan for man. This is very humbling.

My Grandson and Delighting in All God Has Made

We went over to my son's house last night to celebrate our grandson's second birthday. He is a great kid. I'm convinced that God gives us grandkids as a reward for enduring as parents. At any rate, he's at the age where he knows what is going on. He'd had some M&M's so he was already bouncing off the walls, literally running from one end of the house to the other because he could not contain his excitement, not so much at the prospect of presents, but just because there were a bunch of people there and he was, well, excited!

He dug into his cake with his hands—searching for M&M's—and then zestfully opened his many presents. As I watched him I got the sense that what God wants us to learn from excited little grandkids is radical and unflinching joy in all that God has made. No effort is required, one just lives in the moment of effervescent exuberance because everything is new and fresh and people are so fun.

God grant me to see life through the eyes of a two year old kid!

Get Busy Living...or Get Busy Dying

I'm working on a novel and had cause to think about the movie The Shawshank Redemption during the latest chapter. I love the line where Red tells Andy (who is new to the prison),
"you can get busy living...or get busy dying." In other words, you can accept your circumstances and deal with them, or you can start dying today, and it will be a long and bitter death.

It's a good philosophy to live out. We can't choose much of our circumstances or of the events that come our way, but we can choose to accept them as they are and deal with them. One of the things I need to model for my kids is exactly what Red was saying in the movie. I need to model how to "get busy living" no matter what my particular circumstances.

OBTW, The Shawshank Redemption is a great movie.