Our Way Out

and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save Yourself!”  Luke 23:37

Save Yourself  – A friend of mine is about to lose his home.  He took a job far away in response to God’s call.  His house remains unsold.  Now foreclosure breathes down his neck.  Another one I know has been unemployed for a very long time in spite of every effort to find work.  The prospects look worse every day.  I know people who struggle with life-threatening health issues, others who can’t seem to resolve damaging relationships, some who cry out to God for relief from pain or suffering.  The world stands before each of them, sneering, hurling verbal challenges to stop believing and accept reality.  The world gives each of them the same advice given to Jesus.  Save yourself! 

That is the world’s answer to the silence of God.  Save yourself!  No one else will.  Certainly God won’t do it, right?  If He were interested in rescue, He would have acted by now.  He might be able, but He clearly isn’t willing.

This is a favorite attack of the enemy.  “Save yourself,” is an attempt to get you to doubt the character of God.  It is just a little ploy to get to you think, “Maybe God doesn’t care.”  It’s just enough for you to question God’s integrity.  This is a very old strategy (see Genesis 3).  “Did God really say that He would care for you?  Did He really mean it?  Then, where’s the proof?  You’re being a religious fool.  Everyone knows that in this world you have to save yourself.”

In Greek, soson seauton.  Quite literally, rescue from death thy own self.  It’s quite a statement.  It is a direct denial of God’s sovereignty over life.  Do you really think that you have the power to save yourself?  Jesus did.  He said so.  But who among the rest of us can claim that we possess the power to lay down our lives and pick them up again?  Yet, when the world shouts, “Save yourself,” that is exactly what we are claiming.  We deny God’s goodness at the same time that we assert our omnipotence.  “Save yourself,” is the exclamation of men who want to be gods.

Jesus had the power, even on the cross, to demand rescue.  He was innocent.  By the way, that is not the same as “not guilty.”  We might be accounted “not guilty,” but we will never be innocent.  Jesus had not one single mark of sin upon Him.  He deserved justifying rescue.  But He did not exercise that power.  He left it in the hands of the Father.  The cry of the righteous man is not, “Save yourself!”  It is “Thy will be done.”  When we are able to transition from self-protection to self-sacrifice, then we truly know that the enemy lies.  God is glorified when I answer, “Your will, Father, is more important then my desire to take care of myself.  I leave it in Your hands because I trust you, no matter what the world shouts at me.”