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A happy life - for how long?

April 10,  2009  Good Friday - Dale

At the Alpha Course this week we talked about why someone would want to become a Christian if they had a happy life and didn’t need to be saved from anything.

The assumption is that Christianity is just about saving people. It’s a bit like asking why anyone would want to marry if they were happy being single. As though marriage was just a way of being rescued from singleness. But many happy single people decide to marry – not because they need to be rescued but because they choose to join themselves in love with another person.

Of course Christianity is also about being saved. But what if a person does not think they need a God to save them from anything? What if they think there is no danger or need?

Excluding death I suppose. But public opinion is against those who are not afraid of death. Every religion, in every place and time, has tried to provide an answer to death. And not just to suck in the followers – rather to answer one of the great questions: “Why does life end in death? Or does it continue after death?”

To this question Christianity gives a profoundly different answer. Death represents a double danger. It ends life. That is what death means – no more life.  Behind death is another danger – God. God is the great danger. He is the one we have to be rescued from. Death comes about by his design.

Paradoxical! Contradictory! The God who gave life to living creatures has built death into his creation.  Why? So the living creatures wouldn’t live forever in the state they are now in. It wasn’t the way things started. Death was introduced to deal with a corruption in human life – a decision by humans to establish themselves as the arbiters of what was right and wrong – a rejection, in other words, of God’s right to be God.

But death also became the means of rescue. God took it upon himself to deliver humans. He sent his Son as a human being to represent the death-destined race. Jesus as their representative himself carried the race to death. A death that was both a punishment and a cure.

And for the first time ever God raised a human being from the dead. So that humans could live forever. So that death was no longer the end. So that God was no longer a danger to them. In fact quite the opposite. Now the great purpose for which they were created could be realised: now humans could be joined in love with their Creator.

God has removed all the barriers to humans being his friends and knowing his love - to having a really happy life forever.

Dale