The Exact Opposites
THE EXACT OPPOSITES
ROMANS 8:5-8
Where is your life headed?
There are two kinds of life, the life which ends in death, introverted, self-centered, seeking its satisfaction in the pursuit and fulfillment of the passing and ephemeral desires of the body. Opposed to it, and as different as life is from death (Ephesians 2:1-6), is the “eternal life” about which John, writing thirty to forty years later, speaks. That life seeks God’s will, is outward-going, free, and is conscious of God’s presence and help. Such a life is available to all who will lay hold of it in faith.
Jesus told a story of a fool (Luke 12:15-23). The man was a farmer, no evil monster. In a difficult land, he had made farming pay. There is no suggestion that he had won wealth by any means other than hard work. But he mistook his body for his soul. He thought life needed only a heap of wheat and farm produce. He thought he could control the future. He illustrates 8:6: he was typical of those who live according to the flesh. Such a life is, as Shakespeare made Macbeth describe it, “a brief candle”: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more; it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
This is not the life “in Christ.” Paul exhausts metaphor in his attempt to make clear and challenging the difference. Look also at Colossians 3:1-4: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God, and when Christ, who has become our very being, shall appear, then you shall share his glory.”
Read, too, Philippians 3:12-16, where Paul makes it quite clear that the life “in Christ,” the life “according to the Spirit,” is no effortless or sudden transformation. It is attained by growing and continually exercised faith, by remaining in Christ. ‘He must go on increasing, and I must go on decreasing,” said John the Baptist, expressing a continual process (John 3:30). Our “brief candle” merges its flicker with the unquenchable “Light of the World.”