Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Matt. 16:25, ESV)
Golf is a paradoxical game, isn’t it?! Think of how often it strikes you as counter intuitive. For instance, when you need to get out of a green side bunker, the idea is to “miss the ball.” There are other things about golf for which the word paradox applies. Consider: “swing easy to hit it long,” “swing left to hit it right,” and “swing down to hit it up.”
Many will know that the ideas of paradox and contradiction are not the same—though some still confuse the two.
Paradox, properly defined, is an “apparent contradiction” that is untangled upon deeper investigation. As those who follow Christ, we subscribe to many paradoxes. For instance, at the heart of biblical faith is the reality of God as both “three and one.” We call this “Trinity.” This idea of trinity, among other truths, distinguishes biblical faith from all other faiths. The god of Islam is one. The gods of polytheism are many. Both, tragically, miss the truth of the true and living God as “three in one.”
At first blush, this is, indeed, a head scratcher. While inexhaustible mystery regarding our Trinitarian God still remains, the truth of our triune God avoids the charge of contradiction by clarifying that God is one in substance and three in person.
One implication of this paradox/mystery is the humility it produces. After all, if we could completely understand the incomprehensible God, then we would have to be God. Hence, paradox/mystery keeps a check on our pretensions to know more than we do. A deeply important corollary to this truth is this: when we say God is incomprehensible, we are not saying we can know nothing about God; rather, we are saying we cannot know God exhaustively. That is, we can know him accurately, but only partially. Agnostics, we are not.
While inexhaustible mystery regarding our Trinitarian God still remains, the truth of our triune God avoids the charge of contradiction by clarifying that God is one in substance and three in person.Another unfathomable paradox/mystery involves the identity of Jesus. We say, with the church’s creeds and confessions—Jesus is fully God and fully man. If you want a charley horse in your mind, ponder that one! Scripture teaches that Jesus is both God and man (i.e., the God-man). As such, we are surely involved in a paradox. More precisely, we are stepping onto the holy ground of mystery.
We who live in the West have largely become uncomfortable with the mysterious, the inscrutable, the inexpressible. We have been shaped by the false claims of scientism that everything is understandable by our rational capacities and empirical evidence. According to this view, scientists will unravel all the unknowns given enough time. These claims are easily overthrown. Science can tell us at what temperature water freezes, but it cannot tell us why we exist or what is morally right and wrong.
While it is true that science, along with its method, is capable of unraveling many enigmas of our physical world, it is entirely incapable of exploring the spiritual and unseen realities all about us.
In today’s verse, we discover yet another paradox, one that applies to our daily lives. We are told whoever “loses his life for [Christ’s] sake will find it.” Notice, it doesn’t say, to lose your life in order to find it. Rather, it says to lose your life for Christ’s sake…. That is, we are to give up our lives for him and his purposes that he might live his life through us.
We can’t pretend to comprehensively understand the paradoxical teachings of Scripture, but we must cherish the wonder and worship they create.
—
Dennis Darville
January 3, 2022
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