Have You Ever Wondered ...

... Whether We Can Save Ourselves?

Probably most people today feel that the world isn’t right the way it is. There are so many things that seem wrong: starving children and droughts; drugs and prostitution; mistreated animals; abortion and failing families; wars and terrorism.

What can be done about it? There’s many a religious leader, many a thinker who has offered their suggestions of what needs to be done: children need to be educated in peaceful coexistence from early on; loving families need to be strengthened; international alliances need to be built; military might needs to be beefed up.

Religious people will relate these problems and solutions to some higher Power. They point out that the problems mentioned above are far too big for humans to shoulder on their own. Besides, these people of faith will say, it’s not just our inter-human relations that are damaged. Our relationship with the spiritual world is out of whack as well. Indeed, spiritual problems might be at the bottom of human tragedies and decay.

These people will then perhaps also suggest that human beings need to receive supernatural strength and guidance to do better in both areas. And those who rightly prepare themselves for an encounter with the divine, or are at least open to it, will be blessed by such extraordinary help to help themselves. They will receive the power; they will receive the plan. Then they can make themselves right with the spiritual world. This will in turn enable them to right the human world.

Admittedly, there might be some debate between religious people as to which of their gods are the right ones. There might also be debate as to whether this world can be improved endlessly, or whether there will be a decisive act of the gods at the end to usher in some better world or “paradise.” But the basic agreement will remain: equipped with divine power and wisdom, steeled by spiritual disciplines like prayer and meditation man can save himself and perhaps even improve the world significantly.

The problem with this approach has of course become painfully evident in the past millennia of human history: It’s never worked! There hasn’t been the magic silver bullet, the panacea, the cure-all. To be sure, at times people thought they got it right. Human life as a whole was getting better. Yet only a few years later, the neat order collapsed again and turned into yet another cycle of failure and violence. Just think of the First World War, once dubbed the “war to end all wars.” As for scientific progress – has it fundamentally changed our lives for the better, or even for the good? And more often than not, religious people are relegated to the status of well-intentioned onlookers. Their “plans,” their “powers” prove flawed and powerless, at least on a global scale.

But does spirituality or religion at least work in our private, individual lives? Well, it’s true, there are healthy families – and you might have been fortunate to grow up in one. True, there are people who manage to turn their lives around, from drug addict to entrepreneur or caring father – maybe you’ve been able to do that as well.

Yet if we take a more honest look at our personal lives, if we look beyond the nice facades we so carefully maintain before others, we will often find ourselves to be hurting or broken individuals. We will realize that we too have certain unhealthy habits. And at times, we find ourselves to be simply overcome by fits of sick behavior like rage or binging.

We think we have to live with this because we can’t, or don’t want to, change it. We might even consider this normal. That’s life – everybody has their problems. We might also consider our problems less significant than those others have to deal with. But then, again, as we said initially, what’s normal in this life-out-of-whack might not be good at all. And even being better than others also isn’t truly being good yet.

We realize at times that this state is anything but stable. As long as there are those troubling things, those imperfections in our life we are not at rest. We might have to learn to accept our flaws over long years of therapy and conscientious efforts on our part. Only then will we be able to say: Yes, that’s me, and I accept myself as I am. And god loves me too.

Yet our conscience might rebel against this acquired self-acceptance for a long period of time. It might pipe up again and again, reminding us that “it” ought not to be so. At times there might also be friends and relatives who do their part of reminding. Then we become defensive about what we like, about how we live; only admitting by our hurt defense that we aren’t at ease with who we are, at least not yet. There’s still a wound in our soul – and no one had better poke their little dirty finger into it!

This is of course especially troubling for religious people. After all, haven’t they gotten the “plan” and the “power” to make all things, including themselves, well and whole? Why is it not working? Is the plan a hoax? Is the power a fantasy? Or am I just lacking the openness or the faith? Am I the only one who isn’t getting it? How are others doing? Most important of all: what is god saying about my lack of success? Mustn’t my sluggish self-improvement also reflect on my relationship with the Supreme Being?

Sweeping programs aimed at self-improvement thus get bogged down in the miry details of daily life: that one step of the 14 ones prescribed in the glossy manual just never really materializes. The $1000 bill we thought we had to spend on life improvement turned out to be a $10 bill instead, and a counterfeit one for that.

Now it is time to return to our initial question: are we able to save ourselves or, at least, to make this world a truly better place? Our shared human experience seems to suggest strongly: No, we can’t. It doesn’t work. If we’re honest, we have to admit that there remain certain imperfections in our lives. And those imperfections somehow get in the way to salvation.

The Bible, God’s Word, actually acknowledges and confirms this human experience. This might come as a surprise to people of faith. Surely, they might say, unbelievers, the uninitiated, they won’t get it right. Because they don’t have received from above what it takes to be right with him. But what about us, what about those who do believe, who do strive to make ourselves right with god?

Of course, it is true: those who don’t believe won’t be saved because they don’t care about God. The Bible teaches this in no uncertain terms: “There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one” (Romans 3:10-12). They are indeed the ones “having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). They have no God; they don’t even do any good.

It is interesting to look at these two Biblical texts in their historical context. Paul, the author of the letters to the Romans and to the Ephesians, wasn’t primarily writing about modern atheists who openly profess that there is no god at all. Paul was writing to folks who lived in a world filled with various religions, Judaism and the small and big religions of the Roman Empire. So one would think that there was a lot of “seeking after God” going on; but just no “finding of God” seemed ever really to happen, at least not in Paul’s view. Paul also wasn’t writing to a colony of delinquents. His addressees lived in two of the most refined cities of the Roman Empire. But still, no “doing good” went on among those who also didn’t seem to be able to find God.

Christians might now say: See, it’s all about having the right God. Certainly, those who don’t believe in Jesus will not be able to make themselves right with God! But we who do believe in Jesus, we will! Jesus gives us the true power and the right plan of action, and he gives it for free. Isn’t that awfully nice of him? How can you say that we can’t save ourselves, provided we have the right equipment? People just need to try hard enough.

Well, we’ve already gathered strong evidence suggesting that even by “trying harder” things often don’t get better, let alone good. But here’s the key biblical reason why this can’t and won’t work. Jesus did not come into the world to empower us to save ourselves by fulfilling a law (“plan”), even if it’s the true law of the true God. Jesus came into this world to save us. Paul, again, puts it like this: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15).

This Jesus accomplished by shedding his precious blood on the cross. Paul says it like this: “God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.” This means, salvation is not a long process of self-improvement with an uncertain outcome. Salvation is a perfect gift from God from A to Z.

In other words, we cannot be saved by doing better than our neighbor. We can’t even be saved by truly doing good – regardless of whether we do it out of our own powers or out of the powers God’s given us; regardless of which good according to which law we’re talking about. This would conflict with Jesus’ mission in this world. Paul puts it like this: “if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain” (Galatians 2:21).

And as God saves us individually, so it is also God who “saves” his entire world. Despite all the destructive forces we see at work in this world today, we can confidently look forward to “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” God has promised to bring this about by himself (2 Peter 3:13).

To summarize it all: God doesn’t just want to give us the powers and the plan to work things out for ourselves or for this world. He simply wants to give us the perfect salvation he has already worked out for us in Jesus Christ, his own Son. This wonderful gift he gives through his gospel as it is preached here at Trinity Lutheran Church in Carver.

Come and hear this good news again for yourself!

Rev. Dr. Holger Sonntag, Pastor