What's the Point?

Herod's Sheep Gate

What if I told you that the point of getting "saved" was not to avoid going to Hell? Not even to go to Heaven. Those are by-products of obtaining salvation, but not their purpose and goal. Yet, that has been the popular focus of what they are about in much of American Evangelicalism beginning primarily in the 1800s with the revival camp meetings.

I mean, you'll hear people talk about salvation as an "insurance policy" to avoiding Hell. The whole focus on Johnathon Edwards' sermon, "Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God" was specifically to this point. And how many others have preached similar messages from the pulpits of many of our biggest churches and denominations? Sort of the carrot and the stick approach to evangelism. Carrot: you'll get to go to Heaven. Stick: you'll go to Hell if you don't.

Rather, that the whole point of salvation is to glorify God by becoming more like Him. We obtain salvation not to get that mansion in the great by-and-by, but to become one with God through Jesus Christ.

This point was brought home to me yesterday as my priest preached on John 5:1-16. This is the story of the man who had been paralyzed for 38 years, who waited by the Pool of Bathesda for an angle to stir up the water, and the first one in the water was healed. The only problem was this man was unable to move, at least very fast, and so someone else always got into the water before him. Jesus asks him if he wants to be healed, and so Jesus does, and the man picks up his pallet and walks out of the place.

Now I hear you asking, how on earth did you get from that to the point I'm making? No, this wasn't at all what the priest focused upon in this passage. Rather, my mind went down this rabbit hole. Because it struck me what the reaction of the spiritual leaders was to this event.

For you see, once the man picked up his pallet and began to walk out of the temple, some of the Pharisees began questioning the man saying that it was not legal to carry anything on the Sabbath. The man told them what had happened, and cast the blame upon Jesus in that He had told him to pick up his pallet and walk. As if this released the man from his responsibility, the concluding verse of this section of the story says:

And on account of this the Jews began to persecute Jesus, and were seeking to kill Him, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath. (John 5:16 EMTV)

What struck me about this is that this man just gave them a wonderful testimony. That he'd been healed of an affliction he'd suffered from for 38 years! And all the Pharisees were concerned about was him carrying a pallet on the Sabbath? Really? And it was such a big deal that they began to find a way to kill Jesus for commanding him to carry it on the Sabbath?

Talk about missing the forest for the trees. What should have become a cause for celebration and rejoicing instead was morphed into a death threat. Horror of horrors! He carried a pallet on the Sabbath. We need to kill someone!

And that's when the thought struck me. We do the same thing as it concerns salvation. We've become so practically focused on salvation as a means to avoid Hell and gain Heaven, that we've missed the whole point of why we get saved in the first place. As if the whole point of killing Jesus was so I could gain Heaven and live in bliss. Rather, St. Paul puts it this way:

More than that I also consider all things to be loss, on account of the surpassing worth of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have sustained the loss of all things, and I consider them to be rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through faith * in Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith; so as to know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if in some way I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3:8-11 EMTV)

Paul sums up the Gospel message here. In verse 10 and 11 he gives the purpose of the Gospel. To know Jesus Christ, God the Son, in His suffering, His death, and the power of His resurrection, for the purpose of attaining, interestingly he says "somehow," the resurrection from the dead personally.

Now we know that everyone will have a resurrection from the dead, for there will still be a last judgment to go through. What St. Paul is talking about here is obtaining a resurrection from our spiritual death brought on by the fall of Adam. Yet it is through becoming one with Christ's sufferings, death, and resurrection that this is accomplished. As I mentioned, getting to Heaven and avoiding Hell is a natural by-product of getting "saved," but it is far from the whole of it, much less the central focus of it.

The result of us focusing on what we'll get out of salvation is for us to be like the Pharisees, who could only focus on the fact that someone had broken their law of what constitutes working on the Sabbath, ignoring the miracle that has taken place right in their midst. When we reduce salvation to what we'll get out of it, we ignore the central miracle that has taken place in us and the commitment we are making by joining ourselves with Him.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether our faith is so shallow that in getting saved, we've focused more on where we are going instead of who and whose we are to become?

The Meaning of the Resurrection

This past Sunday marked the celebration of Easter in the Western churches. In Orthodoxy and other Eastern Churches, this coming Sunday is Easter, or more appropriately,  Pascha (The English transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word for "Passover," because originally this feast was known as the "New Passover" when we passed from death to life).

Why this difference in time tables? Without getting off into the weeds, the simple answer is the West adopted the Gregorian calendar while the Orthodox remained on the Julian calendar. Currently, those two calendars are 13 days apart, so depending on when the new moon is means our Pascha can fall on the same Sunday, one week later as it is this year (because it has to happen after the Jewish Passover), or even almost a month later.

Anyway, that is just by way of explanation, not the focus of this devotional. Would be a pretty dry one if it were.

What I want to focus on this Holy Friday is the following verse:

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. (Phil. 3:10-11)

The question I hope to answer is this: Is the resurrection simply a celebration to us, or is it a life-modifying reality?

For St. Paul, it was the driving force of his existence. He was ready to even be made "conformable to His death." That's how important it was to St. Paul. Is it that important for us? Are we ready to throw our prosperity-laden sub-theologies under the bus in order to have "fellowship of His sufferings?" Is the faith really all about "Sunshine and Roses, only a thorn now and then?" Not according to St. Paul. The resurrection is so powerful, it enables us to conform to the sufferings of His death. It enables us to pick up our cross and follow Him.

Not for any kind of abstract happiness, but that we too might attain to the resurrection from the dead, when we will know what divine joy is really all about. As St. Paul also says in Romans 6, we must die with Him if we expect to be raised to new life with Him. You can't have only the resurrection without also going through the suffering of death, both metaphorically as well as literally.

That is why in our Friday service called the Lamentations of Christ, we sing in hope, not despair. Because we know how the story ends, and we know we too, through Christ's death, can attain to His resurrection from the dead for ourselves. Amen.