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I recently came across someone with a military background in life trying to tell a younger man that he needs to learn to take a life to save a life.
I think I really do understand what the older man was trying to say, but something in me wanted to protest more than a bit.
Why was that?
Take a life to save a life … yes or no?
Would YOU take a life to save a life … or not?
I suppose it's ...
Easier in the heat of the moment
It’s a difficult moral dilemma … unless, I suppose, you are a soldier engaging the enemy in close quarters combat with the responsibility to protect your comrades from the enemy all around you as you engage them in all-out warfare.
I imagine the choices are slightly easier then. But it must be harder in a cold courage situation.
Harder in a cold courage situation
In the short psychological drama ’Take a Life to Save a Life' (2016) directed by Jack Booth, journalist Naveen Reynolds faces the moral dilemma of whether terrorists who murder, rape and torture innocent people deserve to die.
It majors on the question of whether all killing is murder and whether killing some sorts of people is justified.
That’s an important question … but, again, it’s a tricky one.
Taking a risk to save a life seems a clearer moral issue
Every now and again I seem to wind up in a situation where I need to put myself out a bit to give assistance to somebody who’s been injured or who has become unwell.
Driving dodgy rural roads and visiting farms in the course of my work it’s bound to happen … but I seem to get more than my share somehow.
I was on a farm earlier this week where I was first to respond to a traumatic amputation a couple of years back, and this week on the very same spot I needed to deal with what seems to have been a cerebrovascular event ... some sort of disruption in the blood supply to a person's brain.
Let’s face it when that sort of thing suddenly occurs, you DO have to control the tightening of your stomach and the desire to melt into the background ... shrinking back as you're confronted with a serious injury or illness.
There's no doubt, it takes a bit of laying yourself open to step up and deal with the traumatic event.
It could stretch you, it could scar you mentally, you could end up a bit messy and you might fail to resolve things successfully, despite your best efforts. But in normal times it’s not going to cost you too much.
Would you take that risk to save a life?
Most of the time, most of us probably would.
But in COVID times … the risks of getting close to a casualty to administer first aid within the training you’ve received is a bit more risky. There are things we might have been trained to do before the pandemic that put us at significant risk and that probably shouldn’t be attempted outside hospital in these times of higher risk.
Which brings us to the MUCH higher risk question:
It's one thing to take another's life to save a life and another thing to affect your own life by stepping in to save another's life ... but would you lay down your life to save a life?
That's a very different ball game altogether!
Laying down YOUR life to save a life
In our Verse for the Day the Apostle Paul writes:
"“However,
I consider my life worth nothing to me;
my only aim is to finish the race and
complete the task
the Lord Jesus has given me
– the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.”
Acts 20:24
Now, of course you always have the right to NOT lay down your life to save a life.
It's up to you.
And the higher the stakes are for the other person ... well, that also seems to colour the picture. You'd probably take more risks to save a young one than you would to save an old codger (just be aware that I'm speaking personally here as 'an old codger'!)
Now, it's hard to really KNOW in advance how you'd respond in a hypothetical crisis situation, of course it is, but that's not the sort of thing Paul's talking about in our Verse for the Day.
He's talking about laying down the sort of choices he could have made to live the life he could have led and doing that day by day in the here and now, because his life is actually on the line for the Kingdom of God.
His ultimate sacrifice is actually a living sacrifice (see Romans 12:1), a day-by-day one, not just a hypothetical one waiting to see if the absolute crisis comes somewhere down the line and how he will respond if it does so.
In Paul's case, of course, we believe it did come to that for him in the end, but he'd been living those choices every day of his Christian life up until that point which no doubt stood him in good stead when the crisis came.
The Point
What characterises the life choices of the believer is that the Lord Jesus Christ laid down His rights for my wrongs ... and once you've really taken THAT on board, it colours all the personal choices you subsequently make.
Every day.
Not living the self-serving life we might have done, but making the choices that stand to save eternal lives for folks around us ... that's the Christian way.
It's not a matter of our lives being worth nothing, but of investing them in a way that means they come to be really worth something.
Paul's saying the key to THAT is counting his life worth nothing to him, compared to what investing it in THIS way makes it worth to so many.
The Take away
The call of the Gospel has always been to 'Come-Live-Die' ... to some extent or other.
So today, how do we understand that call, and how do we flesh out the answer to this question in the personal choices that we will make today?
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