For whom would you die? That may seem like a foolish question – because the answer for most of us likely is “nobody.”
But there have been instances when a person has risked his/her life for someone else.
A man went into the Red River during a flood in an attempt to rescue a man who was drowning and lost his own life.
There have been accounts of a soldier who threw his body over a hand grenade to save the life of his buddies.
A mother who was bearing a child refused treatment for her cancer in order to save the unborn baby from harmful radiation. She died not long after the baby was safely delivered.
Doctors and nurses have gone to the African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia, putting their lives at risk to treat patients with the Ebola virus. Some have themselves contracted the disease, resulting in death.
On Remembrance Day, we honoured the many servicemen and women who went overseas to face the
uncertainty of war but were willing to put their lives on the line to defeat the enemy forces in the First World War and Second World War, and other more recent conflicts.
You might be willing to sacrifice your life for someone you love. In the New Testament it says, husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it.
Since Jesus was willing to die for the church, a husband should love his wife to the point of being willing to die for her.
This teaching by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 25 lays to rest the critic’s argument that the New Testament teaches that wives are inferior to husbands and must be their servile drudge.
On the contrary, this teaching may mean that some of us husbands need to rethink our relationship with our wives and become more devoted.
Would you be willing to sacrifice your life for someone you dislike? Maybe a person has been mean to you, bullied you, treated you with disdain and worse.
You probably wouldn’t go out of you way to help him/her, let alone risk your life for him. That is a very human response and no one would blame you.
A passage in the New Testament book of Romans, chapter 5c verse 7 seems to agree with this when it says: “Scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die.”
So it is that for a righteous person and a good person you might risk your life, but not likely for an evil person.
Thankfully God is divine and His love and compassion is beyond our human compassion. He loved us while we were hateful and unlovely.
“But God demonstrates His love toward us, in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us,” and also,” Christ died for
the ungodly.”
We may not be able to sacrifice our lives for a miserable person, but Christ gave Himself as the Saviour of miserable sinners when He died on the cross of Calvary.
Lorne Moorhead is a retired pastor living in Flin Flon.
