The Reason for Everything, by Rick Warren (Thoughts on the Side) Part 3

The following reading is quoted from Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, chapter 7, The Reason for Everything. This is part three, covering the section “What Will You Live For?” You can find part one here, and part two here.

Living the rest of your life for the glory of God will require a change in your priorities, your schedule, your relationships, and everything else. It will sometimes mean choosing a difficult path instead of an easy one. Even Jesus struggled with this. Knowing he was about to be crucified, he cried out: “My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Thy name.” (John 12:27-28).

Jesus stood at a fork in the road. Would he fulfill his purpose and bring glory to God, or would he shrink back and live a comfortable, self-centered life? You face the same choice. Will you live for your own goals, comfort, and pleasure, or will you live the rest of your life for God’s glory, knowing that he has promised eternal rewards? The Bible says, “Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, . . . you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” (John 12:25).

There are many discussions and debates between theologians whether Jesus was able to sin. The theological terms for this are impeccability (unable to sin) or peccability (able to sin). Don’t ask me for the etymology of the words, I don’t even know the etymology of etymology. Thankfully, we don’t need to get into that argument here.[1] Jesus being able or unable to sin is a far cry different than saying that He actually did sin. And Warren here is dangerously close to that.

Now, he isn’t the first to get dangerously close to this – and certainly not the first to actual propose that Jesus wasn’t perfect. One commentor who does this, seemingly without recognizing what he is writing, is James R. Edwards. In his comments on Mark 14:36, he wrote the following:

The plea of Jesus suggests that he is genuinely tempted to forsake the role of the suffering servant. Nevertheless, his will to obey the Father is stronger than his desire to serve himself.

Jesus had a sinful desire – a desire to serve Himself? No, that’s not at all what is meant by Mark, but that is what Edwards writes, whether he saw that or not.

Here we must look at the whole of the Gospel narratives in Scripture. Always Jesus had His face set towards Jerusalem – the cross. His life is in the shadow of His crucifixion, and once more He is aware of it – as He said in John 12:27, which Warren cited. Throughout John, the tension builds up to the hour of the glorification of the Son of Man (Jesus). And now, in John 12, Jesus says that the hour has come across the horizon. And the battle going on in Jesus is not a battle between submission and selfishness – a battle between obedience and sin. We may need to change our priorities, our schedules, and our relationships. But Jesus didn’t. Jesus’ priorities were straight. His schedule was always on target – going to the cross to accomplish the purpose for which He came. And His relationship with His Father had never been in anyway off, faulty, or disrupted in any sense. He had no desire to live a self-centered life – but we do. And that’s why we needed Him – the Savior who could share His perfect relationship with His Father with us, to cover us in His spotless righteousness, so that we could know God.

Jesus is about to be made sin for sinners – to die in their place and take on the wrath of His Father. It is simultaneously the thing He wants to endure for the joy set before Him, and the most disturbing thing to His soul – image being as perfect and as in right standing with God as Jesus has always been, and then facing the reality of death, of experiencing God’s wrath for sin, as someone who wants nothing more than to enjoy fellowship with the Father. Wouldn’t a part of you also recoil from such an experience because of the desire to go on experiencing the Father’s heart for you? As the Father says from heaven in John 12:28, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” It’s as if the Father is saying that Jesus is doing a good job of revealing who God is – Jesus wants to keep hearing that, He loves delighting His Father – and then the Father says that He will keep on doing it on the cross. And this voice came for the sakes of those standing by (John 12:30) – Jesus has revealed God, and He will do it on the cross, so that we can be in a trusting, loving relationship with God our Savior. God let’s us in on this for our sakes. Jesus and the Father speaks that we might know something more of Himself and what He is doing on the cross. On the cross the depths of God are revealed – perfect love conquering absolute sin in a perfect Savior.

The rest of Warrens chapter, while I have a few thoughts, are not different from what I have already written. Therefore, I want to end this mini-series here. I hope it was helpful.

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[1] If for some reason you do feel the urge to take a look at this issue, Robert Letham dedicates a large part of chapter 18 in his Systematic Theology book to it.