Remembrance Day brings into sharp focus a conundrum, that humans are willing to sacrifice their lives. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Christian or non-Christian, or which side you’re on in a war; the instinct to give up our lives for a cause we believe to be right is shared by all.
We acknowledge that instinct on Remembrance Day as we remember the men and women who gave up their lives to free the world of a brutal evil. But where did such an instinct come from? It flies in the face of Evolution for a start, which talks of creatures and plants doing whatever they must to survive. But all through our history humans have put aside their instinct to survive, and in the prime of their lives they do what Evolution would never support a species doing. Where in Evolution, for instance, does a species give up its life when it’s at the top of its game?
So where did this conundrum of self-sacrifice come from? Well, from God, of course, because it helps us to understand him. We see God best “in the face of Christ,” 2 Corinthians 4:6, and what we see in Christ is God willing to give up his life in his prime too, and for the same reason we are willing to give up our lives – to rid the world of evil.
What Christ did rings a familiar and honourable bell in a human heart, because the most honourable thing a human being can do is give up his life for others, especially in his prime. But it’s in us to do that. It’s instinctive in us to give up our lives to crush evil. And we recognize that instinct every year on Remembrance Day.
Remembrance Day, therefore, shines a light on the amazing phenomenon of a species being willing to give up its life, and it also shines a bright light on God – because we’re not so different, we humans and God, are we? He was willing to rid the world of evil by self-sacrifice, and so are we. It makes it very easy for us to understand God, then, because tucked away inside us is the same heart he has.
No wonder the Christian message “commends” itself, or rings true, “to every man’s conscience,” verse 2, because the sacrificing of a life to rid the world of evil is what we already believe as good and true as well. Remembrance Day isn’t really such a conundrum, then, because self-sacrifice is a desire God has given us to help us understand him.
Buck To Basics 