When it Comes Down to It ...

What will you choose?  Who will you serve?  When it comes down to it, when all you have left are precious fleeting moments fast fading from view, what will you choose when time is no longer a commodity?  Most of us just don’t think this way, and the evidence of our lives would show, we certainly do not live this way.  The healthy believe health will just continue for the length of our lives.  The accident free, find the idea of falling victim to an accident, an entirely foreign idea.  Those who have never lived under threat simply cannot imagine any other way of life.  But when you struggle to breath, finding yourself in a make-shift ICU ward, never having gotten around to getting vaccinated – you begin to realize that each breath is getting harder and harder to take.  The tubes put down your throat to ease your breathing prevent you from communicating just how desperate your situation is getting.  Fear begins to grow in your heart and mind.  You could die.  You may be actually dying right now.  There is no family nearby to see and sense your need.  They are not allowed in here.  You are alone.  And breathing just keeps getting harder and harder to do.  Your time is nearly up, and there is nothing you, or medical science can do about that anymore.  This is not the plight of some random patient in some forgotten hospital you never heard of.  This is the plight of so many, the Advent Health main campus in Orlando is fighting with, that the entire campus has gone code-black.

So when it comes down to it, when you don’t just see your life flashing in front of your eyes, you are struggling to take every breath slowly and painfully over what may be the last hours of your life – what will the choices of your life add up to?  Will you have the brain capacity left, enough oxygen left in your brain, to even make a choice you may never have made in your life up to now?  Welcome to the crucifixion, more pointedly, your own.  Jesus lived His life knowing this day would come, knowing these moments of struggle would come.  For Him it was not some far off fate, most of us dream will only happen in our nineties when we are ready, tired, and well prepared for it.  Nope, this fate of Jesus would be thrust on Him in His early thirties.  And as for Jesus, He would have to endure all of it, at our hands, without using any of the limitless power He had to avoid a single moment of it.  When it comes down to it, Jesus would have to go through all of it, even the loss of His own life, in order to save us.  For Jesus there would be one other wrinkle; all of Jesus’ life He could always sense the Father God with Him every moment.  But here at the end that would not be true.  Jesus must die alone, without the Father.  For the Father must turn His eyes away while His Son carries the immense weight of our sins to the ultimate punishment of our sins, in order to save us.

Jesus had never known that solitude.  He could not have imagined dying alone like He was.  When it comes down to it, would Jesus go through with it?  Luke records the saddest events of our salvation in his gospel letter to his friend about what we believe and why picking up in the 23^rd chapter in verse 26 saying … “And as they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus.”  Simon being forced to carry the cross of Christ, was because Pilate had already beaten Jesus with 39 lashes of a whip with broken glass in the tips.  This beating ripped the flesh off of the back of Jesus so badly he nearly died from blood loss.  The pain was so excruciating He could not carry the cross for it was too much for Him.  His humanity just could not bear up under it.  So after collapsing, the Romans realized they needed a different victim to carry this cross or it would never move again.  They conscripted Simon the Cyrenian to do it for them.

None of us still drawing breath in the comfort of our living rooms, and homes, truly know what the pain level is like for someone who is headed for death in a random ICU ward, of a local hospital.  We just assume they are drugged up enough not to truly feel much of anything.  But when you are fighting to take the next breath, you need a certain amount of awareness to make that struggle.  If you are out of it entirely you may lose that fight quickly.  None of us know, what pain can be like, how extreme, or not, when set upon by accidents in a car, or stones in a kidney, or slipped discs in a spine, until or unless you have experienced one of these things.  We never plan for that.  We never anticipate it coming, knowing we must face it.  It just happens to us, all at once, out of the blue, then begins our cursing and crying it has happened at all.  Pain will sober that up quickly.  But if we were ever in that kind of extreme pain, and had the power to fix ourselves, we would not waste a second enacting that fix.  Jesus didn’t.  He could have fixed any portion of it for Himself.  He didn’t.  He endured it.  For you.  For me.

Luke continues in verse 27 saying … “And there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him. [verse 28] But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. [verse 29] For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. [verse 30] Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us. [verse 31] For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?”  It was tradition to mourn the dead (or the dying).  Often it was spectacle, without real feeling, just to make a show for those who might actually care.  But Jesus even in His depleted state, sees what is coming upon Jerusalem in the very near future.  Jesus sees its siege and ultimate destruction.  He sees mothers eating their own children to survive.  He sees the trauma of all of this, the guilt that will never go away.  He sees the victims begging for death and the peace of sleep in the grave, for life in the barren land without Jesus there anymore in person, offers just no comfort to face all this horror.  Horror that will come from the decisions these residents will make despite the warnings.

The cries for the mountains to fall on us, is often attributed to the last days of mankind, but here Jesus attributes it to the coming days of the destruction of Jerusalem.  There were warnings sent to Jerusalem before the Romans attacked it.  Warnings that begin in a message “not to rebel” against the Roman empire in the first place.  Leave politics and who runs the world up to God, stop trying to interfere with it.  Instead focus the energy of your life on loving others and that love will begin to change the world.  But as the time for Jerusalem to be destroyed got close, signs in the clouds and the sky, alerted the Christian community that the time had come.  They fled.  They left not only the city but the region, taking with them the gospel into all the world in every direction.  But not a single Christian died in the destruction of Jerusalem.  Because they heard the warnings, and took action, immediately.  Yet here we sit today, with the biggest hospital I have ever seen, on a code-black lockdown, because despite every warning, so many people refuse the vaccination that might have kept them out of the ICU, away from the ventilators, away from the pain of struggling to make that next breath, with the horrible fear it may truly be their last breath. 

These conditions in our day do not persist for lack of warning, or for lack of a way out.  They persist for the decisions people make in their health, that they foolishly believe will last them forever.  All the while venturing into public spaces, encountering so many others, risking exposure to a pandemic they refuse to acknowledge.  They care little for their own lives, and even less for the lives of others.  And for what?  When it comes down to it, do you really think lives will change, people will live differently, begin to value the lives of others even more than their own?  Why, because the fear of losing it all has finally become a reality.  No, fear is terrifying, but wears off quickly.  Transformation is what has been needed.  But no one is seeking that.  They look to be “saved” just as they are, every sin still preserved in tact, sent to heaven this way with nothing about them changed except their bodies and health.  They would prefer to be Lucifer sent back into His Kingdom unchanged by his experiences.  When it comes down to it, your time may already be past.  The residents of Jerusalem suffered, experienced the horror of a siege, and many died in the battle that destroyed the city.  If you were “lucky” enough to have survived you lived out the rest of your life as a slave taken across the world to be sold, abused, and finally killed from the hardships you would have endured.

Ignoring the signs, the warnings, and the cure – are ALWAYS done at the cost of your life, one way, or the other.  Misery loving company as much as it does, there would company at the horror of the crucifixion of Jesus.  Luke continues in verse 32 saying … “And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death. [verse 33] And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.”  Jesus would die between two criminals who had no choice about where they were, or how they would die.  They had been caught at their crimes, tried, and convicted.  They were going to die, no choice at all.  They would struggle for their last breaths as well.  They had lived badly.  They were sinners caught in their sins.  And now death was to be thrust upon them.  When it comes down to it, how would they die?  Suffering was certain, death was certain, but salvation was right there in between them.  They had only to reach out before it was too late.

Luke continues in verse 34 saying … “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. [verse 35] And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God. [verse 36] And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar, [verse 37] And saying, If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself. [verse 38] And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.”  Notice the contrast of Jesus, who even while struggling for His own final breaths thinks of us, thinks of His own persecutors asking forgiveness for those who clearly want no such thing.  Instead those He just asked forgiveness for, strip Him naked, start making fun of Him, cast lots for his clothing.  Soldier mock Him as well.  Everyone telling Him if He really is the Son of God, just prove it, come down off the cross and everyone there will believe.  That was a lie.  Everyone there already knew who He was, but could not imagine the Son of God willingly allowing Himself to be put thru torture and death.  As Jesus struggles to breathe, hate is hurled at Him.  But Pilate will have the last word in all of this, He will place a sign above Jesus to list Him as the King of the Jews whether the Sanhedrin likes it or not.  They won’t.

Luke continues in verse 39 saying … “And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. [verse 40] But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? [verse 41] And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.”  One of the criminals joins in the verbal abuse of Jesus, demanding a different outcome rather than death.  But death was to be certain.  The other criminal realizes they are not going to get away, nor perhaps, should they get away.  But the second criminal realizes he is guilty, Jesus is not.  The love and forgiveness of Jesus even in this state so near to death, has reached in to this condemned man’s heart, and found him for to save him.  When it comes down to it, what will you choose?  The outcome was not to change.  The decisions these men made in how they lived before they were criminals, had gone badly.  Not because they were caught, but because they did not live rightly.  There was not much left to them.  But salvation was still there.

But rather than waiting till it comes down to it, rather than waiting till your brain may not even be strong enough to make a different choice, why not look to Jesus for salvation right now.  There is time right now, if you are able to read this, to find the transformation your life and mine so desperately need.  We can still live like Jesus would enable us to live.  We can still see the signs in the sky, read the warnings, get the help, show the love.  There is no reason for us to be caught up in the code-black make-shift versions of an ICU.  Getting the shots, wearing the masks, being mindful of the lives of others, is a far better outcome than grasping for every last breath, like these men would do in the crucifixion they faced.  But it is not death we are trying to avoid, it is life we are trying to embrace.  Living for others, for the time has come when it comes down to it.  Will you find yourself calling for mountains to end the pain of your struggle, or find yourself reaching out the salvation of Jesus who was right there in between you all the while.  If you can read this, or hear this, it is not too late.  What will you do?  Who will you serve?