The Risk

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. — Hebrews 2:14-15

Surely the Creator, the One who created man in His image and likeness, knew what it was like to be human.  God dwelt within the world all along.  Yet the Incarnation is different for it is more than some stirring of God's empathy.  In Christ, God invests Himself totally in man.  

This is the meaning of Christmas.  God put Himself into the hands of man, specifically a woman and a man.  There was no backup plan.  If Joseph failed, if Mary failed, if Herod succeeded, it was all over.  The entire history of humanity — which means the whole of creation, hung upon one man doing the right thing under pressure.  We can understand, sort of, Jesus coming through for us, but before He could, He had to trust entirely in the love, the strength and the wisdom of two "regular" people.  God chose well, no doubt.  He poured His grace into their lives, certainly.  Still, history pivots on a hinge so frail and insignificant that we wonder how it could bear the weight. 

God came to know what it was to be flesh and blood, to be weak and helpless and to have someone risk everything to bring Him into the world and to protect and provide for Him once He was here.  Through the Incarnation, we learn of God's love for us, but He learned of our love for one another.  He knew our weaknesses and our sins.  He learned of our hopeless courage, our remarkable ability to endure, our almost stupid joy when a new one of us shows up. 

We get frustrated with ourselves and with those around us.  We see addictions and abuse, neglect and ingratitude, greed and violence.  We wonder sometimes what God sees in us, or how He could love us, or how a loving God could even have created such hapless and sometimes despicable creatures. 

But then comes Christmas. 

People remember that once a very vulnerable baby came into the world, and stars shone, and angels sang, shepherds marveled, and wise men traveled far.  We have made a lot of mistakes since then, but, once, we did the right thing.  Not all of us, not all of the time, but Christmas is a reminder of what we are can be, what we are at our best, and of where we are headed.

Merry Christmas.

When the Whip Comes Down

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. — Hebrews 2:14-15

"[T]hrough the fear of death", humanity was held in bondage all their lives. Most people would say that animals fear death. I question that assumption. Animals fear pain. They instinctively struggle to avoid termination. In order to fear death one must have something like a sense of coming into existence and of the possibility of ceasing to exist, or of existing in some less desirable state.

I don't think the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is talking primarily about physical death. The knowledge that we will someday pass from this world does influence most of us. We know that we have only so much time in which to reach our goals, to fulfill our dreams and desires. We may have much less time than we anticipate; we rarely have more. Death is a boundary we must all acknowledge at some point, but that does not necessarily make it into shackles to enslave us.

Too, how is it that the devil has the "power of death"? Perhaps we should consider a related passage, First Corinthians 15:56: "Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law". If we picture a bullwhip, the kind used by taskmasters and overseers to keep slaves in line, we see that on the very end is a cracker that disperses sound. Just behind that is a replaceable section called, appropriately enough, "the fall" which is an unbraided strip of leather attached to the tapering, braided body or "thong" of the weapon. This fall, in the hands of a skilled operator, exceeds the speed of sound and creates a tiny, but very distinct, sonic boom. Multiplying and magnifying the movement of the hand, the whip turns that little fall into a stinging, cutting instrument of torture and control.

Death, then is not so much a wall or chains or shackles that restrict us, but a dark, flying serpent swinging over our heads, a warning, threatening shadow sailing above, an intimidating snap and sting that can seize the strongest heart with fear. The enslaving power of sin is its attachment to death — or better, the enslaving power of death is the attachment of sin.

I am a creationist in the sense that I believe in God as Creator. The young earth creationists, as we have said before, believe that the planet is only a few thousand years old and that there was no death prior to the Fall of Man. Their argument is that death is impossible apart from sin, thus, nothing could have died on Earth prior to sin's entrance through Adam's disobedience. One point against this is that sin and disobedience existed in eternity-past through the fall of Lucifer. But a second point is that, as is the case after the Cross, sin and death need not be tied together. The sting can be pulled. Death without sin is pop-less. That is to say that no one who understands the teeth of death have been pulled will be any longer intimidated by its flailing shadow. Jesus promises that we can tread upon scorpions and snakes without harm. "In My name they will drive out demons ... they will pick up snakes ..." (Mark 16:17-18). The sting is gone. The venom is gone. The poison is no longer deadly. Death is not deadly. Or as the late, great Jake Hess used to sing, "Death ain't no big deal."

Adam may have put the whip into the devil's hand, but most of us tie our own fall to it. Our sin is what hurts us as the whip comes down. Sometimes it isn't so much what we have done as what others have done to us. The sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. The fall a man ties on may be stinging and biting and enslaving for three or four generations. It does not matter if the fault is ours or another's. Forgiveness and faith are the blades of the shears God has placed in our hands through the finished work of Christ.

Christ took on flesh and embraced death. He even bore the lash of the whip — the lash that I tied on, and that you tied on. In doing so, He took forever the power of death. We need submit no longer to the cruelly cutting penalty and power of sin. We are liberated from guilt and shame. We no longer need obey the world, the flesh, or the devil for their whips have been blunted and silenced.

Death is swallowed up in victory.