Falstaff.  If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host I know is damned; if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved.  No, my good lord, banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company; banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

Prince.  I do, I will.

–Henry IV, William Shakespeare

Just because I cannot plumb the depths of the purpose of my life is no excuse for not examining it.  In this light we have thought about freedom and sacrifice, and there are limitless fathoms of understanding yet to be sounded.  To try to reduce the scope of my life’s labors to the exercise of some simplistic confession such as “I am saved by the blood of Christ” would be impossible, and that not because the confession is untrue, but because by its very nature it entails a lifetime of Christian thought and deed.  One of the most pregnant statements in the Scriptures is Paul’s I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  In so doing he relegated his text to the entire Bible, his analogies to the whole of the universe as we know it, his authority to rest upon that very King who is above all kings, and his goal nothing less than to see Christ be his Church’s hope of glory.  God’s word can be dangerous in that way; we must remember that we are not dealing with one who is bound by the same dimensions we are, and when he calls us off on an excursion it is sometimes well for us that we not know too much about the dangers we will encounter along the way.  It is enough to know that our salvation in the blood of Christ will be sufficient to ensure the good of our eternal future.

That last sentence is probably for each of us the most significant issue having to do with the purpose of our life – that is, how it’s all going to end up – and as such it also comprises our greatest problem.  It is one thing to confess this assurance with your mouth for the benefit of assuring others that your faith is strong (typically my first motivation); it is another thing entirely to believe in your heart, where nobody can see, that your fortunes are irrevocably tied up with Christ’s when you lay down to die.  Here is the cold finger of death that is laid upon every person’s heart at some point in their life, chilling their warmest thought with its unfeeling sentence of destruction.  You and I both know its touch and have shuddered at its approach.  At those moments we have done our best to stave it off with food and fun and friends, to no avail.  We are unable to deal with the thought of impending death, coming as it does with the promise of a heart that stops beating and a mind that stops thinking and a name that changes from a meaningful vignette of a living person (Jeremy Vogan is my friend) to a final desperate epitaph on a silent gravestone (Here lies Jeremy Vogan).  All the humanity within us recoils at it.

Believing that death as a part of our life is going to be for our good is made infinitely more difficult by the fact that our sentence is fully deserved.  If I could take refuge in my innocence, nobly accepting my fate as a caprice of the heavens (and perhaps letting slip a quiet imprecation or two merely as a nod to the weakness of my flesh), the punishment would not be so hard to bear.  But there was a reason why Job protested his situation for twenty chapters in the Old Testament.  If he had truly been innocent he would only have needed one short prayer, as we see in Jesus’ Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani; but he well knew the sin by which his sacrifices were made necessary.  And I know something of the wrong that is so grievously hidden in my soul.  I know where the image of jealousy is set up at the gate of my altar; and I know where the idols of the house of Israel are portrayed upon my wall; and I know where my ancient ones stand with the censers of obscurity; and I know where my tears fall for the lover of Venus; and I know the five-and-twenty – but it is too much: I cannot go on.  Hast thou seen this, O son of man?  Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations that they commit here?  The eye of the Lord shall not spare, neither shall he have pity: and though they cry in his ears with a loud voice, yet will he not hear them.  And despairing I succumb to the finality of my condemnation, and my doom comes upon me apace, and I know that there is no hope to be found there.

For even death itself is not sufficient to reverse the damage caused by our treachery against God.  If it were, simple annihilation would have been a viable solution and the universe would not have existed twenty minutes after the fall of man.  But we know that the tragedy of eternal rejection of Christ is that man was created with an immortal soul, and thus that there can be no end to the agony of existence without God which we have thereby chosen for ourselves.  Death was only the punishment for our sin, of which we were duly warned before we rebelled, and in itself can perform no greater function than that of a voiceless, merciless harbinger of our just deserts.

But redemption is a quirky thing.  Like the greatest novelist who ever set pen to paper, God cannot bear to let a theme go undeveloped.  It was he who set death over our heads as the only appropriate end of a creature who sets itself against its Creator, and it will be he who sets death as the gateway that will lead us back to him.  As the sword is beaten into the plowshare, so the instrument of our undoing shall be the symbol of our triumph forever; for is it not the cross that we raise as our standard?  But we will not be the ones who walk through that door.  It is with good reason that my being rebels against death with all its finality.  I am not able to bear the scrutiny of the eye of the Lord, or cry out to him as a truly righteous man overcome with affliction.  Only Jesus could undergo such a punishment and satisfy the requirements of the Law.  Only he could take on himself the pitilessness of God, and cry out to him knowing that there would be no answer, because only Jesus was a sacrifice worthy of the offense.

Jesus by the power of an indestructible life has taken death by the horns and wrestled it into submission, along with all things.  He has established his lordship over the grave, and in him our cry changes from a despairing call for help to a jubilant O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?  In him we can indeed take up our crosses, knowing that our obedience does not presume to buy our peace with God, but instead proclaims it.  So, that when I think about my death as a Christian, I no longer see it as a punitive measure (did not Christ redeem us from the curse of the law?) but rather as an opportunity to model my life closer after my Savior’s; and, interestingly, a quite mandatory one.  It is poignant that God did not leave this choice up to us.  Following in Jesus’ footsteps is as necessary for us to practice in his death as in his life, and we were baptized into this death so that we might be dead to sin forever.

Eternity, then, is the weight God has affixed to the scales of our decision whether to live and die for Christ or for ourselves.  It is what makes the contemplation of our destiny so momentous, for it makes life in the new heavens and the new earth a hope that is a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul; and it makes existence without God unthinkable.  Because whether Shakespeare knew it or not, all the world has already been banished, and that long ago.  What we have to struggle with is whether we will have that banishment to fall on our own heads (as richly deserving as plump Jack ever was), or whether we will be found taking refuge in the One who was exiled for our sakes and has now taken his seat at the right hand of God.  It is a reality we pronounce with every action we take, every word we say, and every thought we permit.  May God will that faith in Christ would be the truth about each of our lives, to the very end.

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV