Fail-anthropist

On my way to work every morning I pass more than a few billboards showing the updated jackpots for multi-state lotteries.  I must admit it is very tempting to play for a chance to win more than one hundred million dollars.  Sometimes I daydream about what I would do with such a windfall.  Sometimes I bargain with God, praying that if He would just let me win, I would be a philanthropist.

As you know, a philanthropist is someone who spends his or her own money for the good of mankind.  The name comes from two Greek words:  phileo, or brotherly love, and anthropos, or mankind.  So ideally, a philanthropist would be able to show that he is a friend of all men, or that he loves mankind.  I could do that.

Unfortunately, there is no one person who is rich enough to help every person on earth.  So a philanthropist must be selective, even discriminating, on who should get the bulk of the funds available.  Should we underwrite cancer research?  How about children of prisoners?  Would we like to provide clean water to citizens of third world countries?  What about food for the hungry, or housing for the homeless, or education to help lift people out of poverty and ignorance?  There are so many needs, that even if I did come into millions, I would not be able to choose which charity is more deserving, or what people are more worthy of my help.

Sadder still is the fact that many philanthropists are not friends of people at all.  Many times they purchase a wing for a hospital to get their own name out there as a really giving person.  They give land to a community with the condition that the park be named after them.  They set up a Foundation or a Charity that bears their name, so that anyone who receives help from that institution would be indebted to them.  These people are better described by another term borrowed from the Greek: ego, or self, and maniac, someone who is crazy or out of control.

The only one with the means to help everyone, and the wisdom to know how much they need, is God Himself.  He recognized our greated need was spiritual, and out of His great love He sent His Son to die a sacrificial death so that we might have access to Him (John 3:16).  Yet when Jesus was here, the Jewish religious leaders accused him of mania, because He did not fit in their pre-determined box of what a religious person should look like.  They called him philos ton amartolon, a "friend of sinners." When He laid down His life for our sins, they rejected Him as Messiah, and saw his laying down his life as a sign of weakness, not of strength.  

The thing that the Pharisees (and some of us today) fail to realize is the depth of love that Jesus showed in laying down His life for us.  His love went way beyond philos, or brotherly love.  His love was better described by the word agapos, the highest form of love.  Romans 5:8 says, "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."  The great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon put it this way:

When Christ has renewed us by his Spirit, there may be a temptation to imagine that some excellency in us won the Savior's heart; but, my brethren, you must understand that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. Not that infant washed and swaddled, not that fair maiden with the jewel in her ear, and with the pure golden crown upon her head, not that lovely princess, presented like a chaste virgin to her husband; no, that was not what Jesus saw when he died. He saw all that in the glass of his prescience, but the actual condition of that fair maid was very different when he died for her; she was cast out, unwashed, unsalted, unswaddled, in her blood, a foul, filthy thing. Ah! my brethren, there is no filthy thing under heaven so filthy as a filthy sinner. When there was not a ray of beauty to be discovered in us, when neither without nor within a single thing could be found to commend us, but we were morally altogether abhorrent to the Holy nature of Christ, then—oh wondrous grace!—he came from the highest heaven that the mass of our sin might meet on him.

Isaiah 53:6 says, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all."  Think of the astounding mass of sin that must have been laid on Jesus, Him who knew no sin.  Again, Spurgeon says:

Now do not jump at it, and say, "Yes, the sins of the millions of his elect." Do not leap at that, get at it by degrees. Begin with your own sin. Have you ever felt that?—your own sin. No, you never felt the full weight of it; if you did you would have been in hell. It is the weight of sin that makes hell. Sin bears its own punishment in its own weight. Do you remember when you felt that the pains of hell get hold upon you, and you found trouble and sorrow? That hour when you called upon the name of the Lord, saying, "O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul!" Then you only felt as it were the little end of your sins, but all your sins, what must they weigh! How old are you? You know not how old you may be before you enter into rest, but all the sins of all your years he carried. All the sins against light and knowledge, sins against law and gospel, week-day sins, Sabbath sins, hand sins, lip sins, heart sins, sins against the Father, sins against the Son, sins against the Holy Ghost, sins of all shapes, all laid upon him; can you get the thought now? Now multiply that. Think of the sins of all the rest of his people; persecutions and murders at the door of such an one as Saul of Tarsus; adultery at the door of David—sins of every shape and size, for God's elect have been among the chief of sinners; those whom he has chosen have not been the best of men by nature, but some of them the very worst, and yet sovereign grace delighted to find a home for itself where seven devils had dwelt before, nay, where a legion of devils held their carnival. Christ looks abroad among the sons of men, and while a Pharisee is passed by, Zaccheus the publican is selected—and the sins of all these with their full weight laid upon him. The weight of sin would have crushed all these into hell for ever, and yet Christ bore all that weight; and what if I venture to say the very eternity and infinity of wrath that was due for all that mass of sin, the Son of God, marvellously sustained by the infinity of the Godhead within, bore and sustained the whole. I would like to stop a minute and let you turn it over, but when you go home perhaps you will spend half an hour very profitably in thinking that

"The enormous load of human guilt
Was on my Savior laid;
With woes as with a garment he
For sinners was array'd."

My friends, our ultimate aim should not be that of a philanthropist, as one who must love men.  Our highest aim should be that of agape-theist, one who loves the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.  Anything less is missing the mark.