A Matter of Life and Death

It is impossible to read through a book written by C.J. Mahaney without having the cross of Jesus Christ stick right out in the middle of every single page. As I was re-reading Humility: True Greatness this afternoon I was made keenly aware of this fact. As I read of how James and John, disciples of Christ, went from being prideful individuals, asking Christ to recognize them for their greatness (Mark 10:37), to being humble servants of Christ, suffering for the sake of the Gospel, I was reminded of the transforming power of that Gospel. The same John who pridefully asked to be seated at Christ’s side later wrote of true humility and servanthood, “By this we know love, that Christ laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). These are the words of a man who had been transformed.

The same is true of every single one of Christ’s disciples. In Mark 9 we read of how the twelve were actually arguing who among them was the greatest. Jesus responds to this argument by instructing them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (v. 35). The disciples at this point were following Christ, but they weren’t living transformed lives. If the power of the Gospel is truly transforming, how could this be? The answer is because Christ had not yet died, and the entire Gospel had not yet come to pass. You say: obviously. And yes, it is obvious, but the implications are huge.

You see, it is not the life of Christ but the death of Christ that transforms us. Or more accurately, we are transformed by the death of Christ to the life of Christ. This is important because when we see this, we begin to understand more fully our sanctification. If we try to make Christ’s life the means of our pursuit of godliness, we are only trying by our own power to emulate His example. Rather, Christ’s life must be the goal of our pursuit, and Christ’s death must be, and can only be, the means by which we pursue that goal.

To understand more clearly this goal and the means by which we pursue it, let us quickly look at the life and death of Jesus Christ on this earth. Jesus, fully God and fully man, lived a perfect life. He was completely sinless, all the way up until the cross. I say until the cross because Jesus Christ was anything but sinless when He died. 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us that Christ actually “became sin on our behalf.” R.C. Sproul writes that “God would have been more than unjust, He would have been diabolical to punish Jesus if Jesus had not first willingly taken on Himself the sins of the world. Once Christ had done that, once He volunteered to be the Lamb of God, laden with our sin, then He became the most grotesque and vile thing on this planet.” So Christ was not only not sinless at His death, He was the very essence of sin... our sin.

Does this then invalidate His previously perfect life? Certainly not! That He chose to be our sacrifice and take on the sins of the entire world does not in any way suggest that He Himself was ever less than perfect. He took our sins upon Himself; not one of the sins He was punished for was His own. So, with the perfect life of Christ as our goal, let us press on to be “conformed to the image of [Christ]” (Rom. 8:29), but let us never lose sight of His sacrifice, the means by which we are transformed.

It is in light of this truth that we can understand the concept of salvation by grace alone and not by works. We refer back to the example of the disciples. They had seen Christ’s life. They saw His example of what a godly life was to look like. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until Christ had died on the cross that they began to experience transformation. Before the cross, all their attempts to imitate Christ’s life were inadequate. After the cross, their reliance on its transforming power and grace was evident.