The Unbelieving Suicide Squad

There was a time you wanted to die. You may not know it, you may be over it now, but I assure you, without a doubt that there was a time when somewhere deep in your psyche, you wanted to climb up to the roof of a burning building, drink some cyanide, inject yourself with aids, put a bullet in your temple, and jump down to a certain, gruesome death. Don’t believe me? Just watch.

Romans 6 talks about how the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. It reveals to us that eternal life is a gift (as in a present, not strived for, not earned, not acquired, but gifted), whilst death is something we actively sought after as workers of sin. Let me put it this way, when we were yet sinners, we worked in a company which paid in a bullet to the head. Our flesh signed the contract, our flesh knew what it was doing, but  somewhere at the back of our mind we knew that this thing, one day, would kill us. Only a very few people get to ever realize it before it’s too late. An example is the smoker. The smoker knows that smokers are liable to die young, but his flesh wants to keep smoking, because his flesh by design and application wants to die. It decays slowly over a period of years, its cells are rapidly depleting, it is in a long drawn out process of shutting down, and in the middle of all that it is looking for any and every way to speed up the process. Mind you I’m not necessarily talking about physical death, I’m talking about the real one, the one where you’re separated from God, hellfire death.  The bible records that the flesh lusteth against the spirit, what does the spirit lust after? Why life of course, the anti of which would be death. So your flesh doesn’t want sin, its lazy, it doesn’t like work, but like all workers, its only working because it wants that big pay day, it wants to die.

How does it get you to buy into its suicide attempts? Some mad PR skills of course. I call the first one…

DEADSHOT

…Because it never misses. Deadshot is your flesh telling your soul that you have to gain your life, you have to be self-seeking, be ambitious and achieve your goals by whatever means necessary. The bible records that if you seek your life you’ll lose it, and your flesh knows that leveraging on your welfare is a sure fire way to get you to give in. So like Uriah you think you’re carrying out a service to your king (yourself) but what you’re really doing is seeking out your own death sentence.

To dodge the deadshot you have to be shot dead, that is, if you lose your life you’ll gain it. Its Christian doctrine that we died with Christ, which means we are alive to God. Therefore which life are you seeking when your life is hidden in Christ? What are you Sherlock Holmes? Super detective, do you really think you could find a thing if it is hidden by the Son of God Himself? Everything you do must seek to profit withal, it must be for the benefit of others. And this gets tricky, very tricky. But you should want to succeed so that others would benefit from your success, so that you will be a good testimony unto God, so that when you evangelize, people will actually listen. Going to school, doing well, getting a great job, working hard must be with this mindset that you are doing it for others. For Christ being equal to God, counted it not as robbery to be reduced to being human, so that He could save us. His sacrifice got Him the whole world (Some EA Christian Game cheats: If you gain the world you’ll lose your soul, but if you live/die for the world, sacrifice yourself, be lifted high, you draw all men unto you, in effect gaining the world, maybe just not in the way your flesh imagined). The deadshot will try to tell you to jump off the temple so that everyone will see angels save you, to create a spectacle. And Jesus did a lot of spectacles, but not that one, why? Because the mindset was wrong. The devils deadshot was fired by the gun called identity. “If you are the son of God”, that’s what the deadshot does. You’re born with a purpose, you’re born with a certain confidence that you were put here to do something important, that you matter, and the deadshot comes along saying “If you’re truly that awesome, then show them all, show them how awesome you are, prove it!” But that’ll be wrong, you’re not here to prove anything to us, you’re here to let your light so shine before men, that it may bring glory to God, and even at that. Your identity is in Christ, not in anything that you do.


That is the balance. That is how despite living for people you do not allow them use you. Paul wrote do I seek to please men? Or persuade God? You will never please everybody, the world will ask you for a lot (remember they asked Jesus to “show us a sign”), it may be more benign than that, but you must seek always to only convince God. He says if you love me you will keep my commandments, and what is that commandment? That you love others, as an expression of your love for Him.  And there will be pressure to that love, people will ask you to do things your faith is yet to conceive, they might even be good things, but remember without faith it is impossible to please Him. So you may build that ark because your family pressured you into it, you may take Isaac up someplace to be slain, but if that is without faith, you may have convinced men, but God is not mocked.


In the final analysis, please remember that the believer can now only die the natural death, but the unbeliever has a true deadshot at eternal damnation, so get out there, do some evangelism, and save a member of the suicide squad.