Where is God?

I had a dear friend ask me, "Where is God when there is war, pestilence, and starvation? This is a difficult question, no doubt, especially for those who actually experience such terrible events.... but again John Piper has a wonderful word about this in the following message:

Where Is God?
The Supremacy of Christ in an Age of Terror

By John Piper September 11, 2005



This weekend is the first anniversary of 9/11 that has occurred on the Lord's day, Sunday. Therefore it seemed good to us to step back and pose the question again about the meaning of the supremacy of Christ in an age of terror.
The Supremacy of God in All Things—No Exceptions

One of the truths of the Bible that we embrace with trembling joy is the truth of God’s supremacy in all things. The mission of our church is that we exist to spread a passion of the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ. When we say that, we do not mean: “except in calamities,” “except in war,” “except when Al Qaeda blows up a building or a train,” “except when cancer takes a mom or a child is born with profound disabilities.” There are no “except” clauses in our mission statement.

We did not formulate our mission in a rosy world—and then get surprised and embarrassed by the reality of suffering. We did not have our head in the sand. We formulated our mission in the real world of pain and suffering and evil and death. We have seen even among our own people, some very peaceful, but also some very terrible deaths. We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things—all things—for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ—all the time. A passion for God’s supremacy—Christ’s supremacy (for he is God incarnate)—in all things, all the time.
Sorrowful, Yet Always Rejoicing

None of us who has lived a few decades—for me that means almost six—has embraced this mission without trembling. And none of us has lived this mission for long without tears. We have said it dozens of times here at Bethlehem, and we will say it till we die, that the joy we pursue and the joy we embrace in Jesus Christ is always—always in this world—interwoven with sorrow. There is no unadulterated joy in this world for people who care about others. The Bible describes Christ’s servants like this: “[We are] sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” (2 Corinthians 6:10).

“Sorrowful yet always rejoicing.” How can that be? It can be because Christ is supreme over all things forever, but suffering and death remain for a while. Life is not simple. There is pleasure, and there is pain. There is sweetness, and there is bitter suffering. There is joy, and there is misery. There is life and health, and there is disease and death. And therefore emotions are not simple. For those who love others, and not just their own comforts, this complexity means that we will rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). And there is always someone we know who is weeping, and someone we know who is rejoicing. And therefore we will learn the secret of “sorrowful yet always rejoicing”—and joyful yet always sorrowing. Those amazing words that describe the Christian soul—“sorrowful yet always rejoicing”—mean that suffering remains for a while in this world, but Christ is supreme now and forever.
9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Constant Suffering in This World

The first plane that hit the World Trade Towers, Flight 11, immediately killed 92 people on board that flight. Flight 175 that hit the second tower a few minutes later killed 65 people on board. In the Towers themselves it appears now that 2,595 people perished when the Towers fell, including those who worked there or visited there, and those who were entering to save them.

Flight 77 carried 64 people when it hit the Pentagon within an hour after the first attack. Inside the Pentagon 125 people died in addition to these 64. Flight 93 with 45 people aboard turned around over Pennsylvania and was headed . . . where? The White House? The Congress? Todd Beamer and others wrestled control from the hijackers, it seems, and the plane crashed with no survivors near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All 45 people died. The total fatalities in these terrorist events was about 2,986.

We thought that would be the calamity for this message to focus on. But God had other plans. Who can pose the question of God’s sovereignty and Christ’s supremacy today and leave Hurricane Katrina out of account. What happened in the last week in New Orleans and surrounding areas is different than almost anything this country has ever seen. The September 8, 1900 Galveston Hurricane may have killed more—up to 12,000, we don’t know—but it did not displace hundreds of thousands and leave a major city virtually empty and paralyzed with several surrounding smaller towns even more devastated. Who can speak of the supremacy of Christ in an age of terror without considering the terror of 140-mile-an-hour winds and broken levees and floodwaters covering 80% of a great city and who knows how many people dead in their attics?

And lest we think naively in response to these calamities, as though the cost of lives was something unusual, let’s remind ourselves of the obvious and the almost overwhelming fact that over 50,000,000 people die every year in this world. Over 6,000 ever hour. Over 100 every minute. And most of them do not die in ripe old age by sleeping peacefully away into eternity. Most die young. Most die after long struggles with pain. And millions die because of the evil of man against man.

Sudden calamities shock us only to make more plain what is happening every hour of every day of your entire life. Thousands perish in pain and misery every day. Probably seven or eight thousand people will have died during this worship service. Some of them are screaming out in pain just now as I am speaking and as you sit there in relative comfort. If there is to be any Christian joy in this world, along with love, it will be sorrowful joy, broken-hearted joy. What person in this room, who has lived long enough, does not know that the sweetest joys, the deepest joys, are marked with tears, not laughter?
Evil and Pain as a Pointer to the Need and Evidence for God

So even in our own experience—in our own souls—believers or unbelievers, there is a kind of witness that the world of evil and pain and misery and death is not a meaningless place. It is not a place without a good and purposeful God. Some people—not all—have found in the greatest evil—the time of greatest sorrow—the greatest need for God and the greatest evidence of God.

It happens like this. A great evil happens—say the holocaust with 6,000,000 murders. Or the Stalinist Soviet gulag with many more than that sent to their deaths. In the midst of these horrors, the human soul, that had been blithely pursuing its worldly pleasures with scarcely a thought about God and with no serious belief in any absolutes like evil and good, or right and wrong—happily living in the dream-world of relativism—suddenly is confronted with an evil so horrible and so great as to make the soul scream out with ultimate moral indignation: No! This is wrong! This is evil!

And for the first time in their life they hear themselves speaking with absolute conviction. They have a conviction of absolute reality. They know now beyond the shadow of a doubt that such a thing as evil exists. They admit that all their life up till then was a game. And now they are confronted with the stark question: If there is such a thing as absolute evil—if there is a moral reality that is above and different from the mere physical processes of evolutionary energy plus time plus matter—then where does it come from, and what is it based on?

And many people discover in this moment of greatest evil that there is only one satisfactory answer: There is a God above the universe who sets the standards of good and evil and writes them on the human heart. They are not purposeless chemical reactions in our brains. They have reality outside of us, above us, in God. Paradoxically, therefore, the times of greatest human evil have often proved for many to be times when God is most needed and most self-evidently real. Without him evil and good are simply different electro-chemical impulses in the brain of mammal primates called homo sapiens. We know—you know—that is not true.
Why Does Such a World Exist?

So we ask: Why, Lord? Why is the world you made like this? If you are God—if you are the Christ the Son of the living God—why is this world so full of terror and trouble?

Here is what I believe the Bible teaches in answer to this question. I will give two answers that are not the reason such a world exists, and then four answers that are the reasons such world exists. I deal with each very briefly and point you to the Scriptures where you can search God’s word for yourself.

1. The reason this terrorized and troubled world exists is not because God is not in total control.

The Bible is overwhelmingly clear that God governs everything in the universe from the smallest bird to the largest storm. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matthew 10:29). “Even winds and sea obey him” (Matthew 8:27). “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:33). “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). “Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?” (Lamentations 3:37). “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” (Amos 3:6). “He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (Mark 1:27). “I am God, and there is none like me . . . saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isaiah 46:9-10).

There is no person or being in the universe that can thwart the sovereign will of God. Satan is his most powerful enemy and does much evil in the world, but he must first get God’s permission, and none of his actions is outside God’s governance. He never breaks free from his leash (Luke 22:31; Job 2:6-7; 42:11).

2. The reason this terrorized and troubled world exists is not because God is evil or unjust.

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). “Good and upright is the Lord” (Psalm 25:8) The angels cry before God day and night, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3). And when he does things that seem evil to us, the Bible teaches us to speak to man like this: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). God is not evil, even when he wills that evil come to pass. There are good and holy and just purposes in all he does. For those who love him he “works all things together for good” (Romans 8:28). Now and forever.

Now the four positive reasons why this world exists.

1.The reason this terrorized and troubled world exists is because God planned the history of redemption and then permitted sin to enter the world through our first parents, Adam and Eve.

In 2 Timothy 1:9 the apostle Paul said, “[God] saved us and called us toa holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” In other words, before there was any world or any sin in the world, God planned saving grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That means that God knew Adam would sin. He was already planning how he would save us.

Therefore Adam’s sin was part of God’s plan so that God could reveal his mercy and grace and justice and wrath and patience and wisdom in ways that could have never been revealed, if there were no sin and no Savior and no history of salvation. God’s aim for this fallen world is that he be known more fully, because knowing God most fully is what it means for us to be most fully loved. If you turn to Christ, you will discover in God more wonders in this fallen world than could be imagined in any other world.

2.The reason this terrorized and troubled world exists is because God subjected the natural world to futility. That is, God put the natural world under a curse so that the physical horrors we see around us in diseases and calamities would become a vivid picture of how horrible sin is. In other words, natural evil is a signpost pointing to the horrors of moral evil.

Before I say another word, hear this word of clarification: some of the sweetest, most humble, godly, Christ-exalting, heaven-bound people carry some of those signs. Listen to Romans 8:18-21:

The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

In other words, God subjected the creation to futility and bondage to decay and misery and death. He disordered the natural world because of the disorder of the moral and spiritual world—that is because of sin. In our present condition blinded by sin and dishonoring God every day, we cannot see how repugnant sin is. Hardly anyone in the world feels the horror that our sin is. Physical pain we feel! And so it becomes God’s trumpet blast to tell us that something is dreadfully wrong in the world. Diseases and deformities are God’s portraits of what sin is like in the spiritual realm. That is true even though some of the most godly people bear those deformities. Calamities are God’s previews of what sin deserves and will one day receive in judgment a thousand times worse. They are warnings. And that is true even when they sweep away Christ-followers and Christ-rejectors.

Oh, that we could all see and feel how repugnant, how offensive, how abominable it is to blackball our Maker, to ignore him and distrust him and demean him and give him less attention in our hearts than we do the carpet on our living room floor. We must see this, or we will not turn to Christ for salvation from sin. Therefore, God mercifully shouts to us in our sicknesses and pain and calamities: Wake up! Sin is like this! Sin leads to things like this. (See Revelation 9:20; 16:9, 11.) The natural world is shot through with horrors to wake us from the dreamworld of thinking sin is no big deal. It is a horrifically big deal.

3. The reason this terrorized and troubled world exists is so that followers of Christ can experience and display that no pleasure and no treasure compares to knowing Christ. That is, the loss of every good thing in this world is meant to reveal that Christ himself more than compensates for all losses.

We see it in the New Testament and the Old Testament. The apostle Paul says, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). The superior worth of Christ is magnified because in all Paul’s losses, he experiences Christ as all-satisfying.

The prophet Habakkuk said it with amazing and painful beauty:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, 18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. (Habakkuk 3:17-18)

Famines, pestilence, persecution—these happen so that the world might see in the followers of Jesus and discover for themselves that God made us for himself and that he is our “exceeding joy” (Psalm 43:4) and at his right hand are pleasures for every more (Psalm 16:11). The losses of life are meant to wean us off the poisonous pleasures of the world and lure us to Christ our everlasting joy.

4. Finally, the reason this terrorized and troubled world exists is to make a place for Jesus Christ the Son of God to suffer and die for our sins. The reason there is terror is so that Christ would be terrorized. The reason there is trouble is so that Christ could be troubled. The reason there is pain is so that Christ could feel pain. This is the world God prepared for the suffering and death of his Son. This is the world where God made the best display of his love in the suffering of his Son.

Romans 5:8, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” All his suffering was the plan of God to reveal redeeming love to us. The sovereignty of God, the evil of the world, and the love of God meet at the cross of Christ. Listen to this amazing statement from Acts 4:27-28 about God’s plan for the suffering of his Son—for you! “Truly in this city [Jerusalem] there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.” All the scheming, all the flogging, all the spitting, all the beating with rods, all the mockery, all the abandonment by his friends, all the thorns in his head, all the nails in his hands and feet, the sword in his side, weight of the sins of the world—all of it according to God’s plan. For you to see God’s love more graphically.

God’s deepest answer to terrorism and calamity is the suffering and death of his Son. He entered into our fallen world of sin and misery and death. He bore in himself the cause of it all—sin. And he bought by his death the cure for it all—forgiveness and everlasting joy in the age to come.

On his behalf I invite—I urge—you to receive him as your Savior and Lord and the supreme Treasure of your life.

John Piper's Sermons

One of my favorite preachers is John Piper, author of Desiring God, among other great titles, and a terrific website by the same name.. he has allowing the reproduction of his sermons to get these very important words to as many folks as possible.... so following are couple of his very timely sermons as we contemplate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

The Greatest Thing in the World is to be Saved

That title is the abiding legacy of Dr. Widen, a great saint who led the building campaign for the 1955 building where most of our Sunday School classes and church offices are. I visited him in the hospital about 16 years ago as he was dying. He looked up at me from his bed with a smile, and said, "Pastor John, the greatest thing in the world is to be saved."

Do you feel this? If not, you probably never really felt very lost and desperate before the judgment of God, or threatened by an eternity of conscious torment in hell. O, how we love being saved after we have just come close to being killed. Perhaps by a powerful ocean undertow. Or getting a finger caught in the drain at the bottom of a swimming pool (yes, filled with water!). Or almost walking out in front of a car which you did not see that speeds by just three feet from you at 40 miles-an-hour, but your wife's voice caught you in the split second before stepping into death. Or a remission from a long battle with cancer. Or release from a prison camp in the Gulag after 16 years of expecting death. Or after surviving a plane crash inexplicably when others perished.

O how we love life at those moments, and cleave to everything precious. So it is when you taste the preciousness of being saved from sin. Not just the words. Not just a fact learned from the Bible, but really feeling that you are justly damned and hopelessly lost and cut off from God and life and joy. Then to learn that God has made a way. That he will forgive you. That he will accept you and love you and work all things for your good. That ALL your sins can be forgiven and cast into the deepest sea and never brought up against you any more. O, the preciousness of being saved from sin and judgment and hell!

But is it biblical to say that the greatest thing in the word is to be saved? Well, of course, the greatest thing in the world is GOD. But Dr. Widen did not mean to compare our experience with God. He meant to compare it to all other experiences. The reason being saved is the greatest experience in the world is because GOD is the greatest Person in the world, and being saved means being rescued from sin and damnation to know and enjoy God forever. If GOD were not the greatest Reality in the universe, being saved to be with him would not be the greatest thing in the universe.

Yes, yes, but is it biblical to say this? Well, here is the text that I have in my mind as I say it. Jesus said to the seventy disciples in Luke 10:20, "Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven." In other words, you have just had great ministerial success. Demons have fallen before you. People have been delivered. This is great. This is wonderful. This is what you have been sent to do. Praise God for this triumph.

BUT, let not this be your first joy, or your root joy, or your indispensable joy. Rather "rejoice in this, that your names are written in heaven." That is, rejoice that you are enrolled in the redeemed. Rejoice that you will go to heaven when you die. Rejoice that God has written you among the elect. Rejoice that you are saved. This is the greatest thing. Not ministry. But knowing God, seeing God, enjoying God. The greatest thing in the world is to be saved. Because it is being saved for GOD.

Saved and rejoicing with you as Good Friday and Easter approach,

Pastor John

and yet another:

The Son of Man Must Suffer Many Things

Download: Audio | Audio Excerpt | Video | Video Excerpt

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By John Piper March 28, 2010

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Mark 8:31-38

And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” 34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

This is an unusual sermon because its two halves are going to be very different, though not unrelated. In the first half, I will try to open this text from Mark 8 in such a way that the greatness of our self-sacrificing king, Jesus, will be clear for the sake of your admiration and worship, and so that his call on your life to follow him will be, Lord willing, compelling. That’s the first half. In the second half, I am going to explain to you why I have asked the elders for an eight-month leave of absence starting May 1. So you can see how seemingly disconnected they are. But perhaps they will prove to be more connected than you think. Now that I have pricked your curiosity, may the Lord give you grace to listen to this first part for your own soul, and not just for mine.

3 Times in Mark’s Gospel

Three times in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciples in detail that he is going to Jerusalem to be killed and to rise from the dead. I want you to feel the force of this. So let’s read all three.

First, Mark 8:31: “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

Second, Mark 9:31: “He was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.’”

Third, Mark 10:33-34: “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.”

The Great Central Fact of History

One thing is clear. This is important to Mark and to Jesus. At least four things stand out in each foretelling of Jesus’ suffering. One is that he is going to die. Second, this death is intentional. He intends it. He means for it to happen. He is not running from it, but walking into it. Third, it will not be suicide; it will be murder. And the murderers are mentioned in each text. Fourth, he will rise from the dead. Not at some uncertain time in the future like us, but precisely in three days. His death is appointed and his resurrection is appointed. They will happen on schedule.

What is not mentioned in each of those texts is why. Mark gives us the clearest statement of that after the three predictions. In Mark 10:45, Jesus says, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” This is the great central fact of history and of our lives. Jesus, the Son of Man, the exalted human, divine God-man, came—was sent by God the Father—to give his life as a ransom for many.

God Can Ransom What Man Can’t

Our sin had, as it were, kidnapped us and put us in a prison of our own making, far from God, in the chains of iniquity, under God’s holy wrath, and powerless to free ourselves. One of the images the Bible uses for our liberation is ransom. A ransom had to be paid.

But listen to Psalm 49:7-8, “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice.” In other words, no mere man can ransom another man’s soul. And you can’t ransom your own. Then listen to verse 15 of that psalm: “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol.” Man can’t. God will.

God’s Loving Plan

That’s what is happening as Jesus plots his death on the way to Jerusalem. The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many. And this is all God’s idea. It’s not Jesus against God. It’s God through Jesus. What God wants us to see in this plan is his love for us. Watch how Mark brings that out in Mark 8:32-33.

And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

“Peter, if you resist my plan to die, you resist God. You side with Satan against God. Satan doesn’t want me dead, because he wants you in hell. Satan wants me to bow down and worship him and jump off temples for fame and turn stones into bread for self-preservation. The last thing he wants is for a ransom to be paid for his captives. But that’s what God wants, Peter, because, he loves you. My coming to die as your ransom is the love of God.”

Are You Among the “Many”?

Now here is the key question of application to you: Are you among the “many”? Mark 10:45, “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life as a ransom for many.” Are you ransomed? Have you been set free from the bondage of sin and guilt and condemnation and wrath? That’s what the rest of verses 34-38 are about. Who are the ransomed? Are you one of them? You can be.

Verse 34: “And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’” The ransomed follow Jesus, even though it means self-denial and cross-bearing. If you trust and treasure Jesus enough to follow him even when it is costly, you are ransomed.

Four Fors

Now notice something striking. The next four verses (verse 35-38) all begin with the word “for”—at least in the ESV, and that is accurate. And “for” usually means “because.” So in each of these four statements, Jesus is giving reason or a basis or a foundation for what goes before. Verses 35-38:

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

Reading in Reverse

One way shed light on a sequence of logical steps like this is to read it in reverse order and change the “fors” to “therefores.” For example, if I say,

I am eating my lunch voraciously.
For I was really hungry.
For I skipped breakfast this morning.
For I got up late and had to hurry to work.

You can say this same sequence in reverse order by using “therefores,” and it has the same meaning.

I got up late this morning and had to hurry to work.
Therefore, I skipped breakfast.
Therefore, I was really hungry by lunch time.
Therefore I am eating my lunch voraciously.

So let’s read the sequence in Mark 8:34-38 in reverse order this way.

Verse 38

Verse 38: “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Let’s get the meaning clear before we make the connection. What’s the opposite of being ashamed of somebody? Being proud of them. Admiring them. Not being embarrassed to be seen with them. Loving to be identified with them.

So Jesus is saying, “If you are embarrassed by me and the price I paid for you (and he’s not referring to lapses of courage when you don’t share your faith, but a settled state of your heart toward him)—if you’re not proud of me and you don’t cherish me and what I did for you—if you want to put yourself with the goats that value their reputation in the goat herd more than they value me, then that’s the way I will view you when I come. I will be ashamed of you, and you will perish with the people who consider me an embarrassment.”

Verses 35-37

Therefore, verse 37, “What can a man give in return for his soul?” That’s a statement concealed in a question. What’s the statement? Therefore, there’s no nothing you can give in return for your soul. If you’re not proud of the ransom I paid for your soul, then there is no ransom for your soul.

Therefore, verse 36, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” That’s another question that’s making a statement, namely, If you gain the whole world by valuing it above me—by being more proud of it than me—it won’t be able to save you in the end. There is nothing you can pay for your soul when you have scorned my ransom (verse 37). Therefore (verse 36), gaining the whole world will be of no use to you. None.

Therefore, verse 35, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, since being ashamed of the ransom I paid for you cuts you off from me (verse 38), so that there is no ransom that can be paid for your soul (verse 37), not even if you gained the whole world (verse 36), therefore, you will have your life forever if you treasure me enough to lose it for my sake.

Verse 34

One last step. Therefore, verse 34, “If you would come after me, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.” In other words, treasure me more than your own comfort and your own safety. The opposite of self-denial is the idol of self-gratification, and the opposite of cross-bearing is the idol of self-preservation. Rather, be like Paul in Philippians 3:8: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”