Pride…or Obedience?

“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13 ESV

As I write this commentary, my society here in America is in the cold, dark depths of the Coronavirus outbreak. Times are frightening, and things may not improve for weeks or months. Medical supplies, the tools our healthcare ‘troops’ use to fight this invisible enemy, are in critically short supply. Testing materials, physical protection equipment, are all being used up at phenomenal rates, with no supplies left with which to replace them. Respirators in particular, which can under the right circumstances carry us through the hardest hours of an infection, are very hard to come by, and some of us are using the shortage to generate increased profit. “Supply and demand”, don’t ya know?

We are physically separated from one another, one in every six of us has lost his or her job, around us our economy crumbles away, and all we can do is watch it go. And be afraid. Many of us can’t pay our bills, may not have jobs to go back to when this is eventually over, and through no fault of our own face the loss of everything we have built for ourselves; our home, career, possessions, whatever ease of life we have been able to scratch out. Waves of stress pound on our rocky cliffs like never before, and as we stand on that precipice with nothing else to do with our time but watch, too many of us feel like the earth under our feet is turning wet, slippery, beginning to give way to those waves.

This feels……..biblical, in its scope.

Jesus’ words in John are hard words to live by, especially in times like now, when a few days from today any one of us could really, truly face the gut-wrenching choice of ‘do I go on a respirator, or allow someone else to take that slot?’.

What does my faith require of me? What might my Lord and my King want from His servant? 

We can debate who is a ‘friend’ in the eyes of the Lord. It’s also important to point out that Jesus doesn’t command this, He merely states it. But there it is, nonetheless.

I think the question every person of faith needs to consider is, ultimately….how will you live out your faith? Is God more important than your own life? Your life has always been in God’s hands, and surely if He wishes He can save you through the fire, respirator or no. The Bible shows us this. But this choice is at the heart of Christian faith. Is me first, you next…acceptable?

How will you choose to understand Job 13:15? “Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face.”‬ ‭ESV‬‬  It’s not honest to just look at the first part of that verse, and ignore the last. Will you trust God all the way to death and beyond? Or will you argue with God, protesting your innocence before Him and disagreeing with His perfect will?  God never directly responded to Job’s arguments, He just forcefully reminded him which of them was God and which was not.

What do you take from that? If God allows you to become infected, will you choose to potentially save your own life, or potentially save someone else’s? A terrible choice to face to be sure, but it could happen. For some of us, it will happen. Your own life over another’s? Or faith in God’s saving hand, His miracles?

Even in the theoretical, that choice looms. The boastful pride of life…or sacrificial obedience?