When God Speaks You Die
The Israelites were afraid of approaching God. In Exodus 20:19 they decided they would rather have Moses as an intermediary between them and God than hear from God themselves:
And they said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen. But don’t let God speak directly to us, or we will die!”
They were afraid of what would happen to them if God spoke to them directly. They were afraid that if they heard from God themselves with nothing separating them from God, they would die.
And they were right.
When God Speaks You Die
When God speaks to you directly, when you hear Him for yourself, you do die. But it’s not a bad thing. You die to yourself.
What does it mean to die to yourself?
To “die to yourself” essentially means to let go of the person that you used to be and allow God to transform you into the person He created you to be. Ironically, laying down our selfish desires and hedonistic whims allows us to be free—free to pursue things that actually matter, like God.
We become what we focus our attention on (2 Corinthians 3:18), and when we focus our attention on worthless things (Isaiah 44:9-20), we actually become worthless (Psalm 115:4-8). Instead of chasing emptiness, fulfillment can be found when we direct our focus to what really matters, like the psalmist says in Psalm 119:37:
Turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things,
And revive me in Your way.
Dying to Yourself in Scripture
There are a lot of passages in the Bible that discuss this paradox of dying to yourself to be alive in Jesus Christ. Here are just a few:
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.
My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him. We are sure of this because Christ was raised from the dead, and he will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. When he died, he died once to break the power of sin. But now that he lives, he lives for the glory of God. So you also should consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus.
The Power of Christ’s Sacrifice
Remember when I said at the beginning that the Israelites were afraid that they would die if there was nothing separating them from God?
The irony is that we would die in God’s presence if there wasn’t anything covering our sin. And by covering, I don’t mean hiding—I mean atoning for. When Jesus died for us He shed His perfect, spotless blood for us so His perfection could cover our imperfection. He became a living Way for us to hear from God directly, with no intermediary in between, and the veil in the temple tore when He died as a sign that He had removed everything that separated us from God. He died so we could live—and then He rose up from the grave and proved that even death was subject to Him.
His sacrifice and resurrection mean that we no longer have to live the way we used to live. God can speak to us directly now, without an intermediary, and when we hear His voice we can respond and be transformed, from glory to glory, ever more into His perfect likeness and away from the empty lives we used to lead. Following in His footsteps by dying to ourselves sets us free to turn our eyes from worthless things and be made new in Christ.
Like He says in the first part of Revelation 21:5:
“Look, I am making everything new!”