For those who know me well, you know that I have an interesting relationship with death because of the career field I chose. In a very biological way I know death well, and unfortunately I see it often. I can see it coming when I look at a person who is eminently dying...and even sometimes in those whose death is a ways off. There are things that happen in a person's body that are fixable, or correctable, or reversible, and we do our best as care providers to aggressively treat what we can. But there are things that medicine cannot stop, and inevitably death is one of those. When efforts are being made to revive a dying person, there is a point sometimes when we look at each other with the realization that the fight has been lost. Death is a force to be reckoned with...People think of it in a spiritual way, but in a material, physical way it is very real and unbelievably powerful. When it's coming there's nothing we're going to do to stop it. We can push against it with all our human might and sometimes we can delay it ever so slightly, but in the end, we aren't the ones who get to determine the outcome. Sometimes we must yield to this unseen thing that is most obviously controlled by something greater.
When I consider Christ defeating death for the salvation of mankind, the word "miracle" doesn't seem like quite enough. Coming back to life entails the reversal of death, and the reversal of what happens after death. On a cellular level, this is about as probable as the Big Bang. There is no logical, physiological explanation. I wish I could see what it looked like from the inside - the content of all of those cells rushing back into working order, and then that first breath and heartbeat of His newly un-dead body. It would make a great NOVA documentary...I hope in heaven we can see the footage of that truly miraculous, impossible event.
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I've come to the conclusion that if someone is going to be close to God in a real way, and if they are going to be used by Him in a real way, they will spend their life being crushed...That sounds pretty harsh maybe, like it's a condemning of Christ's followers to a life of pain and struggle. But the end result - if accomplished - requires it because we are so in love with ourselves, so enamored with our own lives, and so fixated on the present. The crushing presses me out, so that there is room for no more...It brings me, hopefully, to the end of myself. It is a dying that we are called to. A minute-to-minute death of self.
We have a couple of choices then if we're in that place. We can yield to it, and allow ourselves to be emptied...or we can fight against it and try to hold our ground. Yielding sounds like the thing to do, right? But for those of you who are strong-willed like me, that is most counter to my natural heart. And so more often than not I find myself trying to convince God that what He's asking is most definitely unjust. "Someone ELSE should do the dying, because LOOK at what is happening here," I tell Him.
The problem is that even if I kick against THIS dying to self today, God will not stop His pursuit. He wants my heart...He wants every ounce of it. He won't stop forcing the issue of my idolatry of myself...and He will continue to crush me. Because He knows, like a dad who disciplines his daughter, that what He has for me is far, far greater than what He is asking me to give up. He will resurrect me as someone different - as someone who is all His.
In my smallness I see only the death...just like I do at work when we decide that we've exhausted all we have to offer. Dying seems like the end - like I'm giving up, and it isn't my time, and there must be some other way or some other treatment or some other solution. I forget the next part - the resurrection. I forget that when I have breathed the last lung-full of me, He will rush in. He will take that empty vessel and fill me back up with Himself, and I will be more alive than I was before. "Miracle" isn't word enough.
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Romans 5:8 tells us about the love of Jesus - that before we loved Him, before we were sorry, and when He knew our whole future of failing Him and misrepresenting Him - He died for us. He knew our darkest and still He chose us - and then after that He gave His body as a physical sacrifice. And probably worst of all, He allowed what most of us fear - separation.
WHY? And in my own heart I ask equally as often if not more, HOW??? How did He see my unfaithful heart and choose to die for it? Multiply that unfaithful heart by millions and millions, and we will just begin to see the depth of His decision.
Hebrews 12:2 says that He endured it for the joy set before Him. He didn't see the death as much as He saw the rushing in of life. He looked past the now into eternity and chose death - He chose the hardest thing so that we, too, can be resurrected with Him. And that resurrection isn't just for later - it's for now. When we choose to welcome the crushing weight of dying - when we put ourselves all the way under - He will rush in with brand new life.
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"Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep nothing back. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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