Paradox

I love paradoxes.  I like to try to wrap my my mind around great intellectual puzzles, to take seemingly contradictory ideas and make sense of them.  One such paradox is the one spoken by Jesus in Luke 21:10-19. First I'm going to talk about the passage in general, and then specifically about the paradox so oft repeated in the gospels.  Jesus informs his disciples that they will be persecuted for their faith, but also that that same persecution will be an opportunity for them to bear witness.  Now, I don't know about you, but the idea of suffering does not always sit very well with me.  I like to be comfortable.  So, being persecuted for not doing anything wrong just doesn't seem fair.  But Jesus tells us to expect it.  And, not only that, he tells us to seize that opportunity to do more of what got us into the pickle in the first place--bearing witness to him.  That doesn't seem like the wisest idea to me.  But God is all about being counterintuitive, going against the grain, doing things that make no sense to our minds.  So, Jesus tells us to be brave for His sake, proclaim His name, and not worry about being hated and even betrayed by the ones who are closest to us, because, he tells us, he's got it covered, he knows what he's doing.  But here comes the major paradox--"some of you they will put to death....But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives." How does that make any sense?  Some of us will die, but we will gain our lives?  I think the answer can be found in another saying of Jesus in Mark 8:34-38. 

Jesus is speaking about two different lives, one being our body and one our soul.  Our short physical life on this earth is but a blink of an eye in comparison to the eternity we have ahead of us.  We have a choice in this life how we will spend eternity--eternal life with Christ, or eternal death, punishment for spitting God in the face after he was merciful enough to provide a way back to him.  If we give up a few extra years on this earth because we are persecuted for our faith, we will not lose eternal joy in heaven.  But if, instead, we decide that we love this life too much, we can choose to deny Christ before men and then in turn be denied by Christ when this short life is over.  If we make the former choice, we truly will save our lives by losing them, but if the latter, what gain is there?  In the words of Jim Eliot, martyr for being a witness to Christ: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."  What are you holding onto? This life or then next?