Worth Dying For

This morning my wife was talking about the music on one of our local Christian radio stations. She wisely pointed out that there is a certain theme present in some of “popular” “Christian” music. The idea running through some popular KLOVE/WAY FM style music, is that, "Jesus died for you because you are worth dying for."

Jesus did not die for anyone because they were worth dying for, but those for whom Jesus died are now worth that death… What do I mean? Let me explain in the following.

The general lyrical progression in these songs goes, “I am such-and-such bad; a fighter, a drinker, a swearer, a bad friend, etc. But…I (In my sinful state) was someone worth dying for. And so they go on in many ways to praise God for sending Christ Jesus to die for them, which is a great and wonderful and holy thing to do and I believe that Christendom on earth, myself chief among these, does not do it enough. We ought to be thanking God every moment for purposing and sending The Son to die for and redeem us. It is that very thing that we will be doing for the rest of our unending existence.

“And they sand a new song, saying,

Worthy are you to take the scroll

And to open it’s seals,

For you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God

From every tribe and language and people and nation,”

(Rev. 5:9)

While it is good to be about the business of praising God for Christ, it is unbiblical to think that the Father sent Christ because we are worthy of Christ and it is dangerous to make unqualified statements that could lead someone to believing that.

There is another popular saying in our day that goes something along the lines of,

“The cross shows just how much we’re worth.” Or, “The cross shows how precious we were in God’s eyes.” Many in our day have properly criticized these sorts of sayings as well as these songs, but the fallacy has not gone away. These songs are still playing and the underlying ideas are laying an unbiblical foundation for generations of Christian people and so we need to continue to raise our voices against the problem. Check out the following lyrics:

“You're worth it, you can't earn it

Yeah the Cross has proven

That you're sacred and blameless

Your life has purpose.”

(The chorus from Mikeschair’s “Someone Worth Dying For.”)

“All we want is the love that was on the cross

All we need is Your blood to comfort us

All we desire is for You to fill this place

We shout it out, we're free”

(The Chorus from an All We song…The title of that song, “Worth Dying For”

Again, the problem is not praising God for his mercy, but the unbiblical philosophical basis for that mercy that has crept and is creeping in our sub-Christian culture. It is not my belief or assumption that these songwriters always knowingly teach a salvation ground in man, but I firmly believe that songs and sayings such as these do ground it in man. And as teachers (Lyric writing musicians are certainly teachers), they will give account for the things that they teach (James 3:1)

This idea that we are people worth dying for destroys in the hearts and minds of people the true and biblical doctrine of God’s grace. "you're worth it" and "you cant earn it" are two contradictory statements when the "it" is the same thing, and here the "it" is referring to the death and atonement of Christ.

The whole point and meaning of grace is that we are NOT people worth dying for. Yet Christ died for us anyway. And he did so to make us worthy before God. Don’t miss the subtleties between these two ideas.

Idea #1) Christ died for us because we are worthy (Conditional love and action)

Idea #2) We are worthy because Christ died for us (Unconditional love and action)

These are two radically different statements.

If Christ died for the Church because she was worth dying for, then his death (containing inherently his life [Heb. 2:9-10] and Gods purpose and foreknowledge [Acts 4:27-28; 1 Pet. 1:20-21; Isa.53:10]) was conditional. That is, it had a preexisting condition for existence. So it, the purpose and foreknowledge of God and the life and death of Christ, manifests itself, both before time and in history, as a result (foreseen or historical) of worthiness inherent in the created being rather than in the creator being.

So, what’s the problem with the idea that we are worth dying for?

There are a myriad of problems that come to mind, but I’ll point out one primary reason, as the other problems will stem from this one.

·It philosophically removes the grounds of God’s grace from being himself and his pleasure, and replaces it with ourselves and our pleasure.

The biblical doctrine of Total Depravity teaches that man is completely horizontally depraved. That is, his depravity is not total, but complete. What I mean is this, that man is not as bad as he could be, as God is actively restraining people from doing worse evils than they already does, and so we understand that God had a level of restraint even over Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao Tse-Tung. However, every part of man from his birth contains the code, color and stench of Adam’s sin. Our depravity has not gone as deep as it might (Vertical), but it has gone as wide as possible (Horizontal).

What does this depravity mean? It means that natural, pre-salvation man is a:

Corrupt and disgusting, (Psa. 38:5; Isa. 1:6)

selfish, lie speaking, (Psa. 58:3)

filthy cloth covered, (Isa. 64:6)

unable to do good, unable to obey, unable to repent, (Rom. 8:7-8; John 6:44)

chain covered, (Jn. 8:34)

dead, (Rom.3:23; Eph. 2:1)

unrighteous, deceiving, God cursing, blood shedding, miserable, (Rom. 3:11-18)

Satan following, (Eph. 2:2)

idol factory (Rom. 1:18-25)

and hostile war minded enemy of the one Holy God (Rom.8:7; Col. 1:21).

It is not enough to say that men are bad by nature. Men are evil by nature. Jesus is the one who called us so (Matt. 7:11; Parallel, Luke 11:13).

Because of this complete reaching, soul crushing depravity; we do not deserve to be loved or saved. What we deserve, the wages we have earned, is death (Rom 6:23) and God readies his bow and whets his sword for the destruction of the wicked (Psa. 7:12-13), which all of us apart from grace are (Eph. 2:3). We are not worth love; we are worth destruction.

The cross is not evidence of our worth; it is evidence of our filth! It is evidence of how great and invaluable was the measure that God went to in order to save a disgusting people like us. The cross is evidence of how merciful God is for even making the promise in Genesis 3 to send the Messiah.

The grace of God in sending Christ absolutely and unquestionably cannot by Biblical evidence be rooted in the worth of man. Man has no worth.

How then has God grounded his grace? He has grounded it in his own good pleasure, in the purpose of his will and the desire to make his name wonderful and to vindicate the righteousness of that Holy Name.

Let Scripture speak! May God open our ears!

22 Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. 23 And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. 24 I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. 28 You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezek. 36:22-28)

Who is this house of Israel? It is spiritual sons of Abraham, and the true (that is, only) sons of Abraham are those who believe and profess Christ! (Eph. 3:28-29). We were prefigured here and were it not for the voice and Spirit of God spoken over the people, we would be still as worthless and disgusting as a valley of dry bones (Ezek 37).

Know that when God foreknew us and when he acted to save us, he did so do glorify himself, and based off of the council of his own will and un-influenced, self determined purpose. (Ephesians 1:11)

It is true and certain that “God [is] rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us” (Eph. 2:4). But we must must must understand and profess that that love has its fountainhead and spring in the eternal decree and purpose of God to love and save. That is why Paul goes on to say in V5, “even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved” (Eph. 2:5)

We cannot love God or anybody until God loves us first. (1 John 4:10, 19)

God always acts first in regards to our salvation, he must because we are not worth being saved.

It must be understood that Jesus did not save us because we were worthy of being saved. Rather, Jesus saved us while were enemies and unworthy and because he has saved us, we are being made worthy (2 Thes 1:5, 11) and he is not ashamed to call us brothers (Heb. 2:11).

Do you yet see the problem with song lyrics like these? They presuppose something that is not only untrue, but unbiblical and destructive. They teach us to drive home that chorus in our lives. Rather than raising our eyes to God to say “You are worthy,” it teaches us to lower our eyes to the mirror and say to our reflection, “You are worthy.” Lets talk about our worth in Christ! Do it, and do it often! But lets be careful to emphasize the “in Christ” part and purposefully declare our unworthiness apart from Christ. We boast not in our great worth, but in God’s great mercy at the cross of Christ, which presupposes our unworthiness, for if we were worthy, mercy would not be mercy.

Tabitha greatly reminded me of an excellent illustration by Paul Washer emphasizing this very thing. The story goes (Paraphrasing),

“There is a place in Africa where men pay a woman’s father a dowry of cows when he wants to marry her. The number of cows a man will pay is determined by how lovely or skillful the woman he wants to marry is. The most a man can give in this village is 10 cows, and few women are ever bought for 10 cows. In this village there was a father who had a daughter and she was very ugly, and she was not skillful or proficient. The father was sure that he would never be rid of her, and he would have given her up to a man for the smallest of prices, but no one would have her. There was a young man who seeing the girl and knowing her state decided within himself to love her and teach her to be a good wife. So he went to the father and he offered the father 10 cows for her. The father is astounded and asks why the man would pay 10 cows when he would happily take a chicken. The man replied, “I have always wanted a 10 cow bride.”

I said at earlier that “Jesus did not die for anyone because they were worth dying for, but those for whom Jesus died are now worth that death.”

You see, the girl was not a 10 cow bride but by the act of purchasing her, the man made her a 10 cow bride.

In declaring where the holy tree of mercy has its root, and the thunderstorm of grace its cloud, nothing in all the world will speak as loud as Scripture. He who has an ear, let him hear.

“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8 which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight 9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:3-10)

Praise God for his undeserved mercy and his holy and wonderful purpose.