By Robert J. Wieland
American Heritage recently reported a meeting in East Anglia, England, of World War II Air Force veterans who gathered to reminisce their dangerous bombing stories. Local Britons remember the waves of B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators and fighter planes that took off each morning. Always more went out than came back.
"Each one here was a proxy for those who weren't," says John McDonough. Veteran Dan Coonan remembers: "When you're in a plane getting shot at, you become very close to your associates." When Don MacGregor's B-17 was strafed by a Messerschmitt, three of his crew were killed, but he survived. "I had such a tremendous sense of guilt over those three guys it took me forty-three years to ... talk about it." In September 1944, Al Ball was part of a crew that became lost. He found three of his buddies years later in a cemetery in the Ardennes, and wondered why he was alive and they were in their graves. Air Force veteran Roland Webber says, 'As a POW I had a lot of time to think about fate. ... I tried to ... find the combination of factors that made it favor some and not others.... I never found it."
American Heritage sums up the feelings of these men who survived: "Many of the men who were here had the disturbing sense that they had lived on time borrowed from the ones who were not" (April, 1990, p. 108).
If you survive a war in which your buddies didn't, you are forced to look at life very soberly unless you are completely hardhearted. You ponder those crosses "row on row" "in Flanders fields" with an ever-intruding conviction that you could easily be there too. A serious sense of reality invests all of life with a different color.
The same feeling is shared by survivors of an air crash. And many who escaped the Holocaust are like the WWII veterans; they feel an indefinable sense of guilt—they too should be dead. If they had been in a different seat, or flown a different mission, or sailed on a different ship, or stood in the line that went to the gas oven, they would be dead. They don't deserve to live. In some instances, veterans know that someone else deliberately took the bullet that should have been theirs.
When these survivors sense that they are living on time "borrowed" from others who lost life, they realize that they don't own their life. Every new day becomes an undeserved dividend. Nothing they have done has motivated them to adopt this new attitude toward life; they have simply seen something that others have never seen. If they could articulate their deepest feelings they would say, "I was strafed, I was torpedoed, I crashed, or was gassed, together with my buddies. Nevertheless I live, yet not I; and the life I now live is the life I 'borrowed' from someone else."
The Larger Reality of Life: the Cross of Christ. This was precisely the apostle Paul's gut feeling about his own life after his Damascus road experience. "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live," he proclaims, "and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20, NKJV).
He adds forcefully: "The love of Christ constrains us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died" (2 Corinthians 5:14). The reality that Paul discovered is that Christ died the death that "all" deserve, and which all would have died if He had not died their death instead. He saw himself as the survivor of the greatest Death that anyone ever died, the death of the Son of God in which death he also died corporately. "He is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe" (1 Tim. 4:10). By His righteousness "the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life" (Rom. 5:18). It is "acquittal and life for all men" (NEB). Thus it is a legal justification for "all men," for "He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world" (1 John 2:2).
When the apostles saw this grand truth, the cobwebs and fog were blown from their minds. Just to be alive when you know you should be dead is itself good news aplenty. But they saw much larger Good News implicit in this obvious truth—a new motivation that will deliver us from the curse of self-centeredness that poisons our life otherwise: "He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again" (2 Corinthians 5:15). The "should" is the motivation of that agape. It's not a works trip.
An insensate animal that escapes out of a trap where another one perishes can feel no sense of gratitude, no sense of dedication, although it may indeed enjoy a renewed lease on life. But a human being created in the image of God can sense an entirely new motivation imposed by grace. He must live henceforth for the One who died his death and rose again!
This is phenomenal. It completely negates all legalism. Hope of reward and its converse, fear of hell, are transcended. From the moment that this fact of life becomes real to the myopic, self-centered sinner who has up to now wallowed in his or her worldly pride, a new purpose in life takes over. The previously dominant motif of What-can-I-get-for-myself? becomes instead, What-can-I-give-for-the-One-who-gave-His-all-for-me?
The affluent "take thine ease ... and be merry" citizen of the First World can no longer look upon his materialistic treasures as his own "hard-earned" wealth. He realizes he is no more deserving of what he has than are the impoverished denizens of cardboard shanties in the Third World. The same imponderable "fate" has blessed him that has blessed the survivor of the Holocaust or our Air Force veteran.
Are well-fed Americans really more righteous than starving famine refugees in Ethiopia? Maybe our blessings are a consequence of the "accident" of living under a Constitution given us by liberty-loving founding fathers, something we don't deserve, an advantage others can never know. Maybe prosperous Western Europeans have also inherited some happy fall-out from a Marshall Plan of a previous generation, and are no more "deserving" than are the hungry ones left in Eastern Europe.
This new motivation of grateful service in response to the cross of Christ is no fanatical goody-goodyism. Newly envisioned people who feel the constraint of His love still have a sinful nature, still are tempted as anyone else is tempted to indulge the clamors of self. They are "alive" in every sense of the word, even more sensitive to subtle temptations to indulgence than are the often besotted, semi-conscious victims of worldliness. Like strings of a finely tuned piano, they are not flabby but taut with a constantly heightened sense of obligation in life; but they make beautiful music. They are an honor to Christ.
This new life is not a "works trip". The first idea of merit being earned is instantly repulsed. The burning vision of the cross of Christ cauterizes all thought of reward.
This new motivation makes service for Christ and others "easy" rather than "hard." Many Adventists scour the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy for little snippets lifted from context in a desperate attempt to make it seem "hard" to follow Christ. They have not seen the true dimensions of "the width and length and depth and height" of "the love [agape] of Christ" revealed at His cross. They think they are forced to disbelieve His Good News declaration: "My yoke is easy, and My burden is light" (Matthew 11:30). A glance into that open grave that is our just desert renews our gratitude to Him for the life we now have, and makes all burdens henceforth to be light.
The gospel is not an instruction manual of "do-this" or "do-that" in order to go to heaven. It is Good News of One who took our rightful death and gave us the grace of His life instead.
The only decent thing I can do is to give Him my life and my all. Won't you join me in that response?