The Cure

Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?   Romans 6:3

Death – Life on earth is a terminal illness for which there is only one cure: death!  No matter what you do to prolong your residence here, you will ultimately fail.  The only answer to this fatal attraction is the grave.  And that’s why Paul’s good news is based on death, not life.  The answer to this incurable illness is to die NOW instead of waiting for the inevitable, because until you decide to die, you will never live.

We have it all backwards, don’t we?  We have forgotten that we are captives of death, and have been so since the first sin.  We think that because we eat and breathe and move around, we are alive.  But that’s absolutely not God’s perspective. Until we volunteer to give up this useful fiction about living, we will act out our lives based on the wrong reality.  In God’s view, we are dead until His Son gives us life.  We are not rescued from earthly life to spiritual life.  That’s not what rescue is about.  Rescue is about bringing something back to life that was dead!  Everything you do without a vital connection to the life of the Son is grave stuff!

Paul knew it.  So he says you and I have been baptized into thanatos (death).  But not just any death.  When we sink under the water, we enter the grave of Jesus.  We leave behind all of that earthly, grave-bound existence, and we arise, not with new life, but with life itself – life we never had before when we were on our way to the hole in the ground.

This takes some deliberate mental correction.  If I am not living the rescued life of Jesus, then I am still shackled to the grave.  There is only one kind of life, not two.  There is life in the Son and there is death without the Son.  So, if I am operating in any reality without the life of Jesus as the source of my actions, then I am trying to make something out of grave clothes.  It just won’t work. 

Take a moment today and think about what is alive in your present existence.  What is empowered, endorsed, encouraged and invigorated by the Son?  Then ask yourself why you are hanging on to that stuff in the casket.  It’s dead, my friend. 

The good news is that we get to die by choice.  God undoes the inevitable for anyone who lets Him.