On Courage

Life is fatal. Everything that lives, dies. We knew when we came to this planet we were risking death. But even if we hadn’t come, all of us would still have died. Eventually. Each of us judged that it was a risk worth taking for the hope of what we might find when we got here.

— Chief Petty Officer Alejandro “Alex” Guerrero — Forager

Everything that lives, dies. Most of us spend our lives studiously ignoring this reality. A few of us are obsessed with it. Alex Guerrero has made peace with this verity, and therein lies the foundation of his uncommon courage.

Merriam-Webster defines courage as “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.” I think “danger” and “difficulty” are superfluous in that characterization. Danger and difficulty inspire fear. Courage—and cowardice—are about how we respond to that fear.

Do you anticipate death? Most of us don’t. There is something in our nature that expects eternity. How many people do you know, or even know of, who have lived more than 150 years? Everyone dies, eventually, and yet most of us don’t spend our lives consumed with the prospect. Quite the opposite, we live each day as though we’ll live forever. Because we expect it. (I realize some who are reading this are in the other camp. Please keep reading—there’s hope here for you too.)

But there’s a conflict. Most of us have known people who are older than eighty or ninety. We see the trend in the quality of life as age increases. And, frankly, most of us aren’t comfortable with the idea of living even to that age. How do we reconcile these: our desire—even expectation—to live forever, and our antipathy toward getting old?

To answer that question, we first have to ask more foundational questions: How did I come to exist? How did life itself come to be? How did the universe originate? Why am I here?

These are, by definition, philosophical questions. Any system of philosophy is ultimately an effort to answer these questions. That is true of Christianity, Judaism, Atheism, Scientific Naturalism, Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, Darwinism, or any other philosophy.

But which system of thought has the right answers? Will any of them do?

The short answer is no. If you’d like a more comprehensive treatment of that topic, and why Christianity is the most reasonable answer, I highly recommend I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll focus on what I believe is the most rational philosophy.

Alex Guerrero found his answers in Christianity. It teaches that there is a being, a person, who is beyond nature. He is not nature; he is not a part of nature. He is outside of nature. Nature is a thing he created—a thing he created out of nothing. He made the whole of the universe: galaxies, stars, planets, continents, oceans, atoms, subatomic particles, quarks, and whatever quarks are made of. And he created life. Plants and animals, you and me.

So what does Christianity tell us about this expectation of eternity and the antithetical antipathy toward growing old?

The Christian Bible tells us that God created us for a reason. That we are, in fact, the pinnacle of all that he created. The rest of it—plants and planets, atoms and animals, quarks and quasars—he created solely because he wanted to create us, and he knew we would need all those things.

Why did he create us? We may never fully comprehend the answer to that question, but at least in part, he wanted to be able to express his love, and that required the existence of someone besides himself. And he wanted people who could reflect that love—to each other and him.

The Bible tells us we are unique in all creation in that we are “created in the image of God.” That word “image” doesn’t mean that we’re copies of God, but that we have some limited characteristics that are reflections of God—much as a photograph is an image of reality, but does not itself become the reality. The picture is real, but not the same reality it represents.

So in what way, or ways, are we like God? We’re not omnipotent, or omniscient, or omnipresent. What characteristics of humans are reflections of God?

I don’t know that anyone can offer an exhaustive or authoritative list, but there are at least a few things we can draw from the Bible. One is that he created us to be eternal. Not in the same way that God is eternal. He is self-existent while our existence will always be rooted in him, and he exists outside of time while we had a beginning and will forever be constrained by the progress of time. But for the rest of time, we will exist. This is why eternity is in our hearts. We expect it because he created us for it. (At this point some of you are saying, “Wait a minute. We just agreed that everyone dies.” Stay with me. I’m getting there.)

But there’s also another way in which we reflect the character of God, and it is equally relevant to our current predicament. He gave us free will, the freedom to make our own choices. But it is also so much more than that. We are not automatons constrained by algorithms written by programmers—or even by our education or environment.

We have the capacity to consider a thing and to want it—and to choose to act to acquire it. I’m not talking about greed or envy. Both find their root in free will, but so do generosity and sacrifice. Love and hate are both exhibits of the exercise of free will.

Love would have no meaning without free will. If my wife makes me a cup of coffee because she’s been programmed to make coffee, that isn’t love. To quote the inimitable Mr. Spock, “One does not thank logic.”

Hate would have no meaning without free will. The wolf does not kill out of hate. It acts out of hunger, and an instinct that tells it what to eat when it gets hungry. Choosing not to kill is not really an option for the wolf.

God gave us free will so we could know what love is. So we could recognize it when he demonstrates it to us. And so we could express love—to each other and him.

But that gift comes at a price. Giving us the freedom to choose love meant also giving us the freedom to choose hate. And when we chose hate we chose to separate ourselves from God because love is intrinsic to who God is. In him there is no hate, and he cannot be a party to it.

The Bible describes a tree in the Garden of Eden called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Adam was instructed by God to not eat from this tree. But Adam and Eve exercised their God-given free will to reject God’s instruction and eat of its fruit. In so doing, they learned the difference between good and evil—between living life according to God’s plan and rejecting his will to go their own way.

The consequence of this choice, as God had warned them beforehand, was death. That word death means separation. In contemporary use, we recognize it as separation of the spirit from the body. We were created to walk in eternity in the presence and fellowship of God in the garden. Now that we had learned we could choose to go our own way, we had to learn what it looks like to be separated from God—the source of life and love.

This would not be a “fall on the ground and feed the vultures” death. It would be to experience the struggle of living life apart from God. Instead of walking in a garden overflowing with life and beauty, we would toil in the dirt to fight for sustenance. And, instead of eternal youth and vitality, we would experience the slow-motion decay of our bodies as the pinnacle of creation coasted downhill in isolation from its creator. Thus we would “know” death, and come to understand the consequence of choosing to go our own way.

But this is not the end of the story. God doesn’t write tragedies. From the very beginning of his story, he had a plan. When he gave us free will, he knew we would eventually make the wrong choice. If it were otherwise, it wouldn’t be free will. But he created us for eternity and loves us too much to leave us to live it out in this fallen state.

This is the good news—the “gospel” of Jesus Christ. God became one of us. He was born into the world to a virgin mother. He was tempted in every way as we are tempted and yet lived a sinless life. Then, despite having no sin in him, allowed himself to be executed as a criminal as a sacrifice to pay the price for our sin. He died. He was buried. And three days later he rose from the dead, a fact witnessed and attested by a large number of people.

His resurrection demonstrated two things: First, that he had power over sin and death. And second, that we could rely on his promise that we too would be resurrected from death to a new life—with an imperishable body—restored into fellowship with God for the rest of eternity. All he asks is that we admit that it was our sin that separated us and that he did for us what we could never do for ourselves. Salvation is a free gift given by God not because we earned it, but because he loves us.

The day will come when we will all be raised from the dead to live a new life that will last for eternity. Those who have recognized their sin and who put their trust in Jesus to restore them into a relationship with God will spend that eternity in a restored universe, reunited with the God who created them.

Those who haven’t put their faith in Jesus will also be resurrected, but they will also be granted the freedom they’ve demanded—to live in eternity apart from their creator-God. This, the Bible calls hell.

The choice of where you will spend eternity is up to you. Choose wisely.

Alex chose to put his faith in Jesus. That explains why he doesn’t fear death—he knows death isn’t fatal—but it still doesn’t illuminate why he chooses to live life the way he does—why he regularly elects to sacrifice his own personal interest for the interests of others. Our most common fears are not about dying but about missing out.

We want things. Food, shelter, clothing. Money, power, sex. Things are not evil. Things are not good. Things are things. Good and evil are about the choices people make. (Which brings us back to free will.)

God created us to need certain things, particularly food, shelter, and clothing. He also created us to want things that go beyond what we need. That isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s what motivates us to be productive.

He commanded us to “be fruitful and multiply.”* In the same verse he said, “fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth." (Genesis 1:28, CSB)

As Swenson, the engineer, observed in Two, “[T]hat’s pretty much what we humans do. Tame the earth. Work the garden. If they’re not doing those things, it’s hard to argue they’re an analogue to human.” This is another way we’re like God: the Creator created us to be creative. It is our needs and our wants that drive us to fulfill this mandate.

Fear enters the picture when our free will faces a choice where we have reason to believe our needs or wants might not be met. Sometimes fear is a good thing; it pushes us away from bad options. Fear of damaging the concrete discourages me from jumping off the roof. But sometimes fear is a bad thing, pushing me away from doing right because I perceive relative benefit from doing wrong. (”Relative benefit” meaning either that I get something by doing the one thing or that I don’t lose something by doing the other.)

What does the Bible tell us about this fear? There is a beautiful passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is talking to his disciples:

Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his life-span by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:25-34, CSB)

Elsewhere God says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you … plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’" (Jeremiah 29:11, CSB) God knows you need things. He promises that if you put your faith in him, he’ll meet those needs. Guerrero seeks first God’s kingdom (his plan for how things should work in the world) and God’s righteousness (his definition of what is right), and he trusts God to take care of the rest.

Footnotes:

*Looking carefully at the context of this scripture, I don’t think he intended it literally. Why command us to multiply without also insisting on addition, subtraction, and long division? I don’t think you need a passing grade in differential calculus to get into heaven. The context indicates instead that he meant for us to reproduce—to have children and families—so that as we learned what it was to have children—and to have a father—we would better understand how he regards us—and how we should regard him.