If the rich man would pay the poor man to die for him, the poor man could make a living.
Do you love paradoxes? Even a paradox that depends on wordplay can stick like a burr in a wool sock. And a good conceptual paradox hits like ma la numbing hot spice delivered right to the brain. Sublime. Maybe that feeling is good for us. If you love it, you know you do.
If we believe not, yet [God] abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself. 2 Timothy 2:13
Whether in philosophical or biblical theology, there are discussions around things that God (or a Godlike being) can’t do. This includes not just snarky examples like, “Make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it,” but significant statements about God’s character, and what we can expect from God.
Broadly speaking, God as described in the Bible is a maximally competent being, but there are explicit statements about things God cannot do. And one thing God cannot do is to deny himself. Before going further into what that means, let’s bring in another scripture:
And [Jesus] said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. Luke 9:23
The same thing God cannot do, is what Jesus says anyone who will come after him must do. What God will never do is what you or I or any person must do, according to Jesus, if we want to go after him. We deny ourselves. We say no to, negate, contradict ourselves. We resign and walk away from ourselves. We disown ourselves. We disavow being identified with or even knowing ourselves. We falsify ourselves and do something totally out of character for ourselves. We get over ourselves.
Then, once that’s done, we can proceed to follow Jesus. It’s a first step, and arguably a step to take daily if we want to keep going on the same path that Jesus is on.
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
What Jesus says in Luke 9:23 (compare Matthew 16:24 and Mark 8:34) opened up for me in a really exciting way only when I stopped hearing it as a morbid religious commandment to be miserable, and started hearing it as an invitation to a deliciously paradoxical way of living a different life. But watch that first step. It’s a doozy.
Jesus loves nerds