“…eternal life, promised us through the humility of the Lord our God stooping to our pride.” (St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine.)
Christian or non-Christian, regardless of worldview, have you ever paused for just a moment to consider what salvation as defined and made possible by the God of the Bible truly is? Is it me lifting myself up to heaven, hoping that good deed by good deed, I can earn my way to eternal life? Is it the spending of a lifetime in pursuit of moral choices that, when cumulatively considered, will tip the divine scale in favor of my rectitude and earn me a spot in the heavenly afterlife? Salvation earned at one’s own hands is at best uncertain, almost certainly unattainable, and one arguably not worth having for if “hell is other people” as Jean-Paul Sartre suggests, heaven would truly be hell if the people who inhabit it were to arrive there by the works of their own hands and the morality of their own character.
The salvation of Christianity is like no other. Rather than me in my pride reaching up to God to demand I be given what I believe is rightfully mine, the salvation of the Bible and the Christian worldview is that of God stooping to me, calling to me in my disobedience, patiently waiting for me to submit to Him in humility that He may then lift me up to Himself.
God never intended for death to be a part of life. He asked one thing of Adam and Eve in the Garden – do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – and stated in no uncertain terms the consequences if they disobeyed – “you shall surely die.” Had they listened to Him, Jesus’ suffering and death on the Cross would have never been necessary.
It may please the mind for me to think that had I lived in the Garden, my choices would have been more righteous, that I would have obeyed God and, in doing so, unlike Adam and Eve, I would not have doomed all humanity to live apart from God while here on earth and endure suffering, death and eternal separation from Him. But such self-deception reveals all the more clearly the depravity of my own heart and mind. I possess the same free will as that of Adam and Eve. Had God given me the same command, I would have made the same choice. It may have come more quickly or more slowly, but eventually, I would have succumbed to my own pride as they did, and it would have likewise become necessary for God to either allow me and all who followed to die apart from Him or to enter the fallen world we brought about by our rebellion and provide a way for reconciliation so that any man or woman could be saved should he or she so choose to accept it.
And so it is that “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18), a pattern that did not end in the Garden but is repeated every day in the life of every human being since. We have learned nothing from the example of Adam and Eve. We are given clear rules by God by which to live, we are told plainly the consequences should we choose to disobey, yet we choose time and again in our pride to disobey anyway.
And though there must be and are consequences for disobedience because God is perfectly just (Deuteronomy 32:4) and death is one of them, out of His perfect love and mercy, He did not leave us to die in our pride apart from Him, though that is certainly what we all deserve. Nor did He leave us to our own futile attempts to earn our way to heaven. Rather, He provided a way – the Way – for all men to be reconciled back to Him. Stooping to our pride, He sent His Son to take upon Himself the punishment that was rightfully ours. And His Son became the most despised, rejected, humiliated of men, suffering to the point of death and separation from His Father so that we would never have to. And through the sacrifice of His Son, God offers salvation to all as a gift, yielding His pride, one might say, because we refused to yield our own. Yet many continue to believe salvation is something to be earned, which, if such were the case, would render the Cross meaningless, even cruel. And still others continue to refuse His gift altogether, claiming to worship no god while blind to the fact that every man worships some god; theirs is simply their own pride.
Could there be any more eye-opening, any more humbling, any more true statement of what salvation is than this: “eternal life, promised us through the humility of the Lord our God stooping to our pride”? For what is more humbling than to realize that but for my pride, the Cross would have never been necessary?
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What if Jesus really is who He claimed to be?
Then I must see salvation for what it truly is – me loving myself so much and His Father so little that in my pride, I refused to bend my knee to Him, and Him loving me so much anyway that He chose instead to stoop to my pride. If that thought, if that reality fails to humble me, I question if anything will.
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that ALL should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)
And if he is 