 | Charlie Traffas has been involved in marketing, media, publishing and insurance for more than 40 years. In addition to being a fully-licensed life, health, property and casualty agent, he is also President and Owner of Chart Marketing, Inc. (CMI). CMI operates and markets several different products and services that help B2B and B2C businesses throughout the country create customers...profitably. You may contact Charlie by phone at (316) 721-9200, by e-mail at ctraffas@chartmarketing.com, or you may visit at www.chartmarketing.com. |
Religion
2009-08-01 13:52:00
Did He die to make us holy?
Question: I heard a Protestant preacher say that our Lord Jesus died on the cross for us: to make us holy. He added: the fact that we can now get into heaven, as the result of his dying on the cross, is a side-benefit. I thought this is most interesting. Can you comment how your particular faith regards that statement?
Answer: Each of the preacher’s statements by itself is true. Jesus died to make us holy. Jesus died so that we can now get into heaven.
Whoever strives to become holy will surely enter heaven! The phrase “. . .a side-benefit” is a useless comparison. It seems to divide something indivisible. It’s similar to asking: “Which is better to have: six or half-a-dozen?” I suggest the preacher may have gotten carried-away by his own eloquence, like the frequent expression: “uh.”
Holiness is sharing in God’s own life through God’s grace. All persons are called (invited) by God to the perfection of charity, which is the life of God. Jesus taught: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). In order to reach this perfection, the individual person should use the strength and grace given them by God: so that, doing the Will of the Father in everything, they may wholeheartedly devote themselves to the glory of God and to the service of their neighbor. This invitation is a free gift of God, not forced on his creatures, a gift to be accepted or rejected by each individual, to whom God has given also a free-will to choose good or to choose evil. Those who choose the good, become the friends of God (saints), and they go to heaven. Those who choose to ignore and oppose God’s Will, by doing evil, will not go to heaven. In the end evildoers will go to hell. Read Jesus’ parable about the final judgment in the Gospel of Matthew (25:31-46).
The preacher could have added many other reasons why Jesus died on the Cross, e.g. to make reparation to his heavenly Father for all the sins of the whole world in every time and place; to give us the supreme example of self-sacrifice in God’s love for us; to open the gates of heaven, which had been closed to human souls since the sin of our first parents; to demonstrate the immensity of God’s love for all humanity; to fulfill the Old Testament and inaugurate the New Covenant of mankind with God; to express God’s understanding of all human weakness by allowing his Son in human nature to take upon himself the totality of human pain and suffering -- so that no one can say “Why does God allow this to happen to me?”; to identify with human beings and take away the horror of death: in view of the resurrection and life everlasting. All of these reasons why Jesus died, those mentioned by the preacher in the question, and by me in this paragraph, are of supreme importance to God the Father. And there are still other reasons, none of which I would depreciate with the term “a side benefit.”
