Bible Studies

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There is a writer who once portrayed Judas, that apostle who betrayed Jesus, as rejoicing when he heard that puzzling commandment from Jesus, that we must hate our loved ones and even our own lives if we are truly to be His disciples. (See Luke 14 v.26) He was suggesting that there was an impulse in Judas that wanted to hate everyone anyway, including himself, and now that impulse was legitimized. We don't really know if that view was fair to Judas, but I do think I'm beginning to get a better grip on what Jesus meant by those comments. What I am to hate is not the life itself but MY life, that is, the idea of it being MY life instead of God's life that I happen to be living for Him. My life is to be turned over to God as His rightful property since I was "bought with a price" (mentioned in both 1 Corinthians Chapters 6 and 7 so we would be sure to get it!) the terribly high price of Christ's shed blood. What we are to hate is that urge within us to retain the primary right to our own lives or the possessive urge in our loved ones and relatives to try to retain that primary right of access to our lives by attempting to control us, or that same possessive urge within us to do the same to them, instead of surrendering that to Jesus and allowing Him to live out His life uniquely in each of us believers.
Similarly in Matthew 10 when Jesus speaks about losing one's life paradoxically in order to find it, He's speaking about losing that concept of it being MY life and finding it again as God's life to be lived out HIS way. That is the way Jesus viewed his own life in relation to his Father. ( Whatever the father does, the son does these things in the same way) He's not asking us to do anything he hasn't done many times over. We lose OUR lives and rediscover them as His lives and that is when those lives become most fulfilling and adventurous. We do that losing our lives for Jesus's sake because they are rightfully His in that He created us and then went further to redeem us with the preciousness of His own blood. At St Giles cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, where the Reformer John Knox preached as I recall, there is an old pulpit in the shape of a carving of a kind of pelican, and the pelican is feeding its young by plucking from its breast its very own blood! It is one pulpit I will never forget. That pelican represented there definitely did not belong to itself, and as such is a remembrance to all of us who take the name and the word of God upon our lips all these years later.

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