1 Peter 5:8-10, "Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world. After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you."
On my commute home yesterday I was listening to Michael Savage on the radio. Truly a talented man who can talk without a partner for two or three hours and keep an audience interested. That is really the marvel for me. As for a person, all I know is that he is a Jew by birth and perhaps spiritual on some level, but by no means a Christian. I say this not to judge, but more to set up a reason to have my heart guarded concerning what he teaches.
So in the segment that caught my attention he was being critical of people who "embrace death." That somehow they were sub-human or inferior. He further asserted his position of avoiding death and fighting it at all costs.
So this got me thinking, which for me is really nothing more than prayer and questioning of the Christ that lives inside of me. Is "Death" something to be fought? Certainly we fight it and resist it, but is it God's plan for this resistance? Is the death that Michael Savage is referring to the same death as in death, burial, and resurrection provided by taking up the cross daily? If we as individual's are called to turn the proverbial other cheek, are we as a community, or even a nation required to collectively do the same thing?
It is here that I both agree, and disagree with Michael Savage. God allows nations to exists. And in such He also allows the protection of a nation's boarders. Therefore it is a responsibility of a nation to protect it's borders, to allow for the individual within those boarders to have certain liberties. Likewise states have certain responsibilities to protect the liberties of people within their boarders, and this responsibility follows the subdivision of the boarders all the way down to the home. All in the protection of liberties.
Now here is where is gets almost ironic. One primary liberty that deserves protection is the liberty to choose spiritual life and death within one's self. The liberty to be a fallible human walking always in the results of original sin with the ever present choice and knowledge of good and evil. Our founding fathers would call this concept freedom of religion.
The point is this. Death has a lot of connotations. The death that we all should embrace is synonymous with surrender. It is a death of the dross within us. It is further followed by the resurrection of Christ in the place where death occurs. The death that must be fought, that must be resisted is the death brought by evil. It is a death of liberty. Oh it includes physical death as well, and a host of other dying concepts. But in the end there is a good death, and an evil death. The good death must be embrace and the evil death resisted.
Surrender, don't die, is perhaps the way to understand it all simply. In surrender death leads to life. In death there is just death and no life at all.
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