"When our ultimate goal becomes security and protection, God becomes a means to that security and protection. We "test" him then, to see if he is able to serve as a means to our real god, our sense that everything will be all right. As long as we see our way toward physical, emotional, financial, relational, or familial well-being, God is welcome. But when such things are threatened, we indict God with our grumbling, even when we carefully disguise this as "venting" against our circumstances, not against God. We assume that God's love entails God's visible protection right now. When that is absent, we grow distant and prayerless toward God. We put him to the test.
I heard not long ago from a man I haven't seen since high school. When asked about his religious beliefs, he simply says he is "an atheist until proven otherwise." I fear sometimes that despite all my Sunday learning I'm the same thing. It's not just that I want to be protected from whatever scares me-- I want to be reassured now that this protection will always be there. I want Christ, but I too often want him as a quantifiable spiritual asset, as something I can always check to be sure of just as I can check my bank account balance or my cholesterol level. I want what God has promised, but I want power of attorney to execute those promises when I determine I need them. That's not what the gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.
What ultimately undoes the pull to self-protection is the cross. Jesus refused to seek the proof of his own protection because he was seeking more than his own protection. He was looking for you, and you weren't on the pinnacle of the temple. You were outside the camp, cut off from the presence of God. Jesus didn't throw himself from the high place for the same reason that a faithful husband doesn't run out of a burning building to call a lawyer to sue the arsonist if he knows his wife is trapped inside. Jesus didn't come to protect himself. He came for the world. He came for the church. He came for you. He bore your reproach, strapped on your curse, carried your exile. This other-directedness freed Jesus to live out a very different life from the cringing, anxiety-filled lives so many of us carry on."
"We don't need to protect our lives because our lives are already crucified. We are, the gospel tells us, "hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). We can know then, whatever comes at us, "When Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with him in glory" (Col 3:4). We can be willing then to lose our lives, our reputations, and our arguments because we can't hold on to anything by our cunning strategies anyway. In the long run we're all dead, and in the longer run we're all raised from the dead. There's a freedom that comes from seeing that."
-Excerpts from Tempted and Tried by Russell D. Moore
