Philippians 1:19–26
19 for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, 20 as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. 21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. 22 If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. 23 I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. 24 But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. 25 Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, 26 so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.
Max Anders tells the story of a man who was walking along a beach and found a magical lamp. He rubbed the lamp and a genie came out. The genie told the man that he would grant him one wish for having set him free from the lamp. The man thought about it and then said that he wished he could have a copy of the stock page of a local newspaper dated one year from that day. So—poof!—the genie disappeared and the stock page of a local newspaper appeared in the man’s hands.
As the man sat on the beach reading the stock page and making investment plans, the top of the page bent over and he saw, on the other side, the obituary page from one year in the future. At the top was a name that caught his attention: it was his own.[1]
The two realities that are inescapable to our existence are (a) life and (b) death. The question is this: How should we conceive of these two realities? Life is inescapable to those who possess it and death is as well. These realities can overwhelm you if you do not think of them rightly.
N.D. Wilson writes:
With an average life expectancy of 78.2 years in the US (subtracting eight hours a day for sleep), I have around 250,000 conscious hours remaining to me in which I could be smiling or scowling, rejoicing in my life, in this race, in this story, or moaning and complaining about my troubles. I can be giving my fingers, my back, my mind, my words, my breaths, to my wife and my children and my neighbors, or I can grasp after the vapor and the vanity for myself, dragging my feet, afraid to die and therefore afraid to live. And, like Adam, I will still die in the end.[2]
That is an interesting way to look at it, and a helpful way. Paul, writing from prison, considered his life and his death and he too came to terms with it. In fact, he makes one of the all-time great statements about life death. He is hopeful, as he writes to the Christians of Philippi, yet he does not know if he is going to live or die. He writes:
19 for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, 20 as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.
So there is a note of uncertainty as to what exactly is going to happen to his body. Yet, he is optimistic either way. Whether Paul lives or dies, he is going to experience great good. And it is in this context that he writes his great sentence about life and death.
21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
Paul is defining the twin realities of life and death as a win-win situation! Whether the Christian lives or die, it is gain! How is this so?