A guest post by Wes Hitzke
‘Jesus changes lives’.
This must be Christianity’s most popular sales pitch and the driving force behind modern evangelism. The ‘Jesus-changed-my-life testimony’ is not only good for attracting new converts; it also encourages those who have already signed up. A positive life change is a great thing, but if this is the ‘best offer’, then Christianity will not stand alone.
I have encountered enough testimonies outside the Christian faith to be unsettled. From atheistic Buddhists to Tony Robbins believers, there are many ‘life-changing’ testimonies out there. And as much as some Christians don't want their 'motivational self-help’ stories to be true, they can’t dispute the evidence. Jesus is not the only way to a better life. Dr. Phil and Oprah have built wildly successful careers on this fact. Like it or not, Christianity's greatest sales pitch is not unique.
So what do we do with unique, life-changing claims such as this one in John 14:6, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’?
Before we start thinking there is disunity between His Word and reality we need to appreciate the powerful influence of our presuppositions. We all have a tendency to see what we want to see and read what we want to read.
The passing of my beloved father shook many of my presuppositions. The painful, drawn-out path of cancer forced me to look at the darker colours of life and consider questions like 'why do good people, who I love dearly, suffer?' Reality removed my coloured glasses and I saw something in scripture I hadn't noticed before. A ‘life change’ was not the priority of Jesus Christ's mission to humanity.
Jesus does change lives, but more importantly, He changes deaths.
Why is that more important? If death wins, all is lost, including justice (good fades away and evil get away). If death holds us, then God can't. If the end is ‘nothing’ then life is nothing. Or think about it this way, if in the equation of life the end equals zero, it matters not how grand the preceding figures were.
It doesn't matter how much we avoid the topic or how 'positive' our confessions; death reigns supreme on this planet. Everything that lives is subject to it. Even if we 'survived' or we were 'healed' or if modern medicine threw us a lifeline, it won’t stop the Grim Reaper. Everyone will die, it's only a matter of time. Our life cannot overcome death. This is the biggest lesson life teaches us.
Humanity’s greatest need is not a life change, it's a death change.
This is why the life of Christ was not focused on money or possessions or comfortable living or the good life or government or gaining influence or relieving poverty or healing everyone. Jesus Christ's number one priority was to take out the Grim Reaper. He came to conquer sin with a new type of 'life' death could not hold down.
Jesus' resurrection was about breaking out into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lies beyond it - a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence. Therefore the resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated event that we could set aside as something limited to the past, but it constitutes an 'evolutionary leap' (to draw an analogy, albeit one that is easily misunderstood). In Jesus' resurrection a new possibility of human existence is attained that effects everyone and opens up a future, a new kind of future, for mankind.
Christ's resurrection is not a happy ending, it is a new beginning.
The first Easter Sunday was not about getting a dead body to live again, that had already happened before with people like Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus. In their 'resurrections' nothing new happened, they received the same human life back. But not so with the Son of God. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was about a new kind of life, a life with an eternal physical power that could spread and 'infect' humanity in the same way 'death through sin... spread to all men' (see Romans 5:12). The Son of God's 'resurrection life' redeems our souls and will raise our bodies.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up in victory." "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?"
1 Corinthians 15:54-55
So if death has been 'swallowed up in victory' why do our hearts still ache?
It’s a bit like when having wisdom teeth removed; the post extraction ache doesn’t mean the job wasn’t done. Discomfort is expected in this broken world. Death will always have a painful residue this side of life. Even Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus.
The pain of death does not change the fact of victory. Christ's resurrection life broke the hopeless finality of death. Underneath all the intense emotion and pain of my father's passing there was still a 'living hope'. The fear that rides with hopelessness was nowhere to be found. I knew it was not over. My father joined the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews 12:1) and I live with a constant sense of his ‘aliveness’.
Hope is not wishful thinking, it is real sustaining power.
Hope, with the eyes of faith, looks through death and sees the perishable putting on the imperishable, the mortal being dressed in immortality. Don't let temporal pain distract from this eternal truth. Hope, unlike happiness, can handle the presence of pain. Hope is as solid as faith and love and for the believer will always remain.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
1 Peter 1:3-5
Our hope is 'living' because Christ is living.
Not only has our eternal future been changed to a heavenly reality but also our earthy perspective right now. When we put our hope in Christ we get His perspective of reality. So how does Jesus see my father right now? The answer is simple and real – fully alive! Dad died, but not in God's world. For Christians there is not the land of the living and the world of the dead, there is just God's reality.
If in the equation of life, the end equals a resurrected body, animated with the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead, then everything changes, including dark things like martyrdom. The story of Stephen (Christ's first martyr) in Acts 7:54-60 is a great example.
'Now when they heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth at him. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And when he had said this, he fell asleep.'
In God's reality Steven's life was not a waste. His martyrdom was glorious, not foolish. Not only does Jesus’ resurrection give us life at death, it also gives meaning to our suffering. Don't allow the excess of positive prosperity preaching to deny the fact that suffering is also part of the equation of life.
... but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy
Spirit who has been given to us.
Romans 5:3-5
Jesus does not guarantee us a good life or better living, in fact, the Bible suggests the opposite.
John 16:33, '...you will have tribulation...' and, Luke 21:12, 'They will lay hands on you and persecute you...'
These words of Jesus not only came true for all His disciples but there have been more Christians martyred in the last 100 years than ever in history. Changing your life is good, but changing your death is better. This is the living hope of all who are persecuted for their faith in Christ.
Christ has made Death into life’s golden chariot, sent to fetch his Cinderella bride out of the cinders of this fireplace of a world, through a far midnight ride, to his very own castle and bedchamber, where Glory will beget glory upon us forever.
– Peter Kreeft
Unlike the 'life changing testimony', the death changing reality of Christianity makes it totally unique.
Plenty of religious leaders have made statements about life and living, but no one has uttered statements about life and death like Jesus Christ.
The truth is, Christ is the only way to life through death. A friend rang me one day to tell of his conversion from Christianity to an eastern religion. He proudly testified how much happier he was, but the phone went quiet when I asked if his permissive 'happy' religion could face off with death. Only with the Son of God is the greatest enemy of human life put to death. If you have been born again to a living hope, Christ's resurrection was the death of your death.
'Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.'
– Glory Be (Doxology)
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?"
– John 11:25-26
(All bible quotes from ESV)