Is Your Life Defined by a Ladder or a Cross?
In a deleted scene from Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) tells Vincent Vega (John Travolta) that she needs to find out what kind of person he is before she'll go to dinner with him. Here's what she says:
My theory is that when it comes to important subjects, there's only two ways a person can answer. For instance, there's two kinds of people in this world, Elvis people and Beatles people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis. And Elvis people can like the Beatles. But nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice tells me who you are.
There are other important things in life that can tell us what kind of person you are: chunky peanut butter, or smooth? Regular cola, or diet? It seems to me that the same is true when it comes to reading the Bible. Do you read the Bible as a helpful tool in your climb up toward moral betterment or as the story of God coming down to broken, sinful people?
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In a very real way, our lives are defined by how we answer that question. Specifically, our lives are defined either by a cross or by a ladder. The ladder symbolizes our ascension-our effort to "go up." The cross symbolizes God's descension-his coming down.
There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.
In Genesis 11:4, the people make a decision. "Come, let us build ourselves a city," they said, "with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves." This is humanity in a nutshell. We want desperately to be known, appreciated, lauded, and extolled. We want to secure our own meaning, significance, and worth. We give our all to these objectives.
But then something funny happens.
After the people go to work to build this tower that reaches "to the heavens," v.5 says, "But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building." I find this verse to be a great and sobering picture of our futile attempts to "make a name for ourselves," to do something great in our own power. The momentous achievement that the builders are so proud of is so small and insignificant to God that he has to "come down from heaven" to even see what they're up to. All their efforts, all their hard work, have resulted in a tower that not only doesn't reach the heavens, but that can't even be seen from them!
None of our best attempts and none of our self-righteous strivings (and make no mistake, that is exactly what they are) can get us up to God.
We are like the tower-builders: addicted to a ladder-defined life. We think that a life of ladder-climbing is a life of freedom: free to move at our own pace, up or down depending on our decisions, responsible for our own progress. We climb our ladders for the same reasons that the people of the world built their tower: to make a name for ourselves, to ensure our own legacy, to secure our own value. We love to imagine that we're on a higher rung than someone else, a better father than someone else, a more accomplished follower of Christ than someone else. But ladder-climbing actually and inevitably leads to slavery. Paul Zahl, in his great book Who Will Deliver Us, describes the ladder-defined life like this:
If I can do enough of the right things, I will have established my worth. My identity is the sum of my achievements. Hence, if I can satisfy the boss, meet the needs of my spouse and children, and still do justice to my inner aspirations, then I will have proven my worth…conversely…if I do not perform, I will be judged unworthy. To myself I will cease to exist.
The life of slavery happens when we try to "do it ourselves." We become imprisoned by our failures (often real, sometimes perceived) and to ourselves, we cease to exist. This isn't freedom, it's bondage.
But there is good news: our towers of Babel don't remain standing.
God loves us too much to leave us in the hell of unhappiness that comes from trying to do his job. Into the slavish misery of our ladder-defined lives, God condescends.
His first act is an act of judgment. He scatters them-he dis-organizes them, literally. God takes away their faith in themselves, the very misplaced faith that enslaves them. When everyone in the world spoke the same language, God came down in judgment, breaking the world apart. But at just the right time, he came down again, this time to reconcile that sinful world to himself. He replaces our ladder with his cross. His final descent was to save us, and to set us free.
So how do you read the Bible? Is the Bible a manual for living the ladder-defined life? Or is it the announcement of the one who came down and hung on a cross in order to rescue us from our efforts to make it on our own?
God is not at the top of a ladder shouting, "Climb." He is at the bottom on a cross whispering, "It is finished."
