Relatively mature Christians have absorbed an abundance of important principles from scripture. Sadly, we don’t always apply them as effectively or comprehensively as we might. At least, I don’t.
The limitations of human memory in a fallen world are such that we are constantly relearning things we already know. For me, this week’s “Oh yeah” moment was a conversation with my brother about our dad, and a reminder that the Lord put us together in one Body by his Spirit for many reasons.
One good reason: iron sharpens iron. We help each other understand the Bible. You will always see things I don’t, and vice versa.
Memorializing Dad
Several years ago when Dad went to be with the Lord, I had the privilege (along with other family members) of sharing some thoughts about his life at his memorial. In the process, I made a statement that I have subsequently reconsidered:
“There’s a day coming, as I am often reminded by a very good friend, when my hope — our family’s hope — will be tested in the cold light of reality. We are all going there.
If it turns out the atheist is right, then I’ll never know it and it sure won’t bother me. Best of all, the atheist will not be around to rub it in and say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
The statement I made is the one I have highlighted in bold text: that if atheism as a worldview is correct, dying won’t help me figure that out. Whatever the resolution, it sure won’t bother me.
I have since mulled that thought over and over. And over.
Now, I don’t mean that I said anything wrong, it’s more that I later thought through the implications I drew from it. Because what I said is the hard, cold truth, isn’t it? In a purely materialistic universe, the moment life leaves the human body we cease to exist forever, and all thought and self-awareness end abruptly. Therefore, if the Bible is a lie and my faith is vain, and I am not — as I fully expect and as scripture promises — ushered into the presence of the Lord for eternity when I die, I will never know the difference. I will experience no surprise, sorrow or regret for the choices I made in life. I will experience nothing at all. The thought that I might have enjoyed more, experienced more or consumed more will never haunt me. I will never know I was “wrong” to trust in Christ and live my life for him, and nobody else will either.
Win/Win
I didn’t go into it during the memorial, but my point was that this was also true of my dad. His whole life was a win/win situation, because he thoroughly enjoyed himself in the service of the Lord. I believe he lived the best life he could have lived: he loved, he helped people, he said what he believed and he acted consistently with his worldview. As a result, he enjoyed the benefits of an untroubled conscience most days. He was a one of those “uptight Brits” born in the 1920s who lived through a world war and came out the other side. Had he not become a believer, I doubt his life would have been vastly different in terms of its basic morality. Serial fornication, wild parties and the pursuit of riches would never have been on the agenda in any case: he simply wasn’t constituted that way. The things he “missed out on” were never goals or interests for him even before he became a believer. To the extent that he made sacrifices in life for the sake of his faith (and he certainly did), he never regretted those things one iota. Becoming a materialist and knowing the “truth” about the universe would not have bettered his ninety-plus years on this planet in any way.
This being the case, he literally could not lose, whether or not Christianity is true. I believe that. His earthly life was the best it could have been, and even oblivion for eternity could not possibly have troubled him since by definition oblivion is the absence of cognition. Win/win.
Rethinking Win/Win
The “rethink” to which I refer came when I recalled this statement from the apostle Paul:
“If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
Hmm, I wondered, am I disagreeing with the apostle Paul? I would not want to do that, not least because it would make me wrong. Nevertheless, at first glance it seems like Paul thought that people who did not live earthly life to its fullest might find themselves missing out on something. He even quotes some Greek sage: “If the dead are not raised,” Paul writes, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ ” That is definitely not the way I assessed either my dad’s life or the potential outcome of my own choices. How could I reconcile Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians with my own analysis of Dad’s life, which, I can assure you, did not magically transform the moment I recalled Paul’s words?
As with all other questions about what the Bible teaches, we have a choice when we disagree with what we read. Either we can trust the inspired word of God, or we trust our own reasoning. Alternatively, we can do what I did from long experience with this sort of conundrum: mull it over, pray it over, and wait for the moment when I arrive at a better understanding of the issue. I did, for about five years now. I wasn’t so much troubled as puzzled, and the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing eventually went on the back-burner.
A Two-Letter English Pronoun
So I’m sitting with my brother this week having coffee before heading off to work, and I shared these thoughts with him. He did not hesitate for a second in responding, and his answer revolved around a two-letter English pronoun with which I was very familiar from the writings of the apostle Paul, because I’ve written about it myself repeatedly. That little word is “we”.
Here’s what I wrote about “we” in 2020, not long before Dad went to be with the Lord:
“The book of Romans is an absolute smorgasbord of pronoun association. Sometimes ‘we’ means Paul. Sometimes it means both Paul and the original reader. Sometimes ‘we’ means all Christians, and sometimes only strong Christians. Sometimes it means all Jews, or even all human beings. Context determines how we understand each of these references in Romans, and whether or not we can legitimately apply them to our own lives in any direct way. We will not want to be grabbing instances of ‘we’ that relate to, say, Jewish judgment, will we?”
My problem was that, for reasons I can’t possibly explain, it had never occurred to me to ask the obvious question: “Who is Paul talking about?” I simply assumed the “we” in “we are of all people most to be pitied” meant every Christian. I now think Paul was talking specifically about the authors of the letter, himself and his fellow-worker Sosthenes, and perhaps by extension other Christian workers of the first century who made similar sacrifices in the service of Christ.
Two Lives of Service
Don’t get me wrong. My dad served the Lord faithfully. He spent a few years overseas teaching the Bible in less-than-desirable circumstances. When he returned to Canada, it was not in order to live a cushier life in the West, but in order to more effectively use the gifts the Lord had given him. Over the course of serving the Lord for the next few decades, we were rarely the poorest family on our street, but I’m guessing we were frequently in the bottom 10%. I have few regrets about that, and I guarantee Dad had none, but nobody in his right mind would say we were well off by Western standards. (By the standards of the Third World we lived like kings, so it’s all relative, I guess.)
But my point is this: Dad was faithful in his day, but he was no apostle Paul. He could not possibly have been. He couldn’t help where he was born, when he was born or how he was raised, or the opportunities and challenges that presented themselves along the way. The Lord simply did not require the same things of him as he required of Paul. He did not require them of many Christians in the West in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We are outliers among believers of the last two millennia.
My dad never “fought with beasts at Ephesus”. He was never “in danger every hour”. Paul was, and he says so right in the context.
Five Times Forty Lashes
Elsewhere, he tells the same church:
“Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.”
My dad once nearly died from a bout of malaria in the service of Christ. That’s not nothing. But to the best of my knowledge, he never took a punch to the face for his faith, let alone got spit on or flogged. If he were around for me to ask him, I’m quite sure he would laugh at any comparison of his “sufferings” for Christ to those of the great apostle and his companions in service. If he missed a meal or two on account of his faith, I never saw it. Paul missed many. He did not go to jail for preaching the gospel. Paul did. He did not die a martyr’s death, as Paul expected he would. He went into eternity quietly in his sleep in his mid-nineties. I had the privilege of being there. The vast majority of his sufferings in life, such as they were, were those he had in common with all men in a fallen world: failing eyesight and hearing in old age, mobility issues and chronic disease. These things were not fun, but he would not claim them as evidence he suffered for the sake of his faith.
Paul and his companions were another matter. If Christ had not been raised from the dead, Paul’s life could and would have been very different indeed. Let’s just say that by comparison to what he voluntarily endured for his faith, life as a Pharisee would have been a cakewalk. My dad could afford to be wrong about everything he believed, and his life would still have been a good one. Such were the conditions in which he was born and the opportunities presented to him, and I will not judge him for that. He sacrificed a great deal more for Christ than I ever will. That said, for Paul and his companions, the stakes were much, much higher and the cost of serving Christ that much greater. They simply could not afford to be wrong about what they believed, because their lives were back-to-back episodes of persecution and physical distress on account of it.
Perfectly Obvious … Now
I think that’s what Paul was saying, and it seems perfectly obvious to me now. It was perfectly obvious to my brother immediately. I should have known it, but I didn’t. I suspect many of our readers have encountered similar puzzles and conflicts in scripture that other believers easily resolved for them. Differences in study habits, gift, experience, maturity, and many other factors will do that.
It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s why we need each other. If you’ve got a question about what the Bible teaches, ask somebody you trust. You may be surprised to find that the difference between clarity and confusion may be much smaller than you think when viewed through another set of eyeballs.
It may even be as small as a two-letter English pronoun.
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