On the Two Paths

 “Enter through the narrow gate; because the gate is wide and the path is spacious leading away into this destruction and many are those entering through it; because the gate is narrow and the path having been tightened leading away into this life and there are a small number of people finding it.”

Matthew 7:13-14

     I’ve been thinking about what this means this morning. There is a similar expression which the Didache, a first century Christian catechism originally written in Greek, starts with, “There are two paths. The path of life, and the path of death.” 

     The second thing I am reminded of is in Romans 6 where Paul says, “Don’t you know that to whom you offer yourselves slaves for obedience, you are slaves to whom you obey, either of the malfunction resulting in death or of obedience resulting in a state of being set right? Yet thanks to God that you were slaves of the malfunction yet you obeyed from the heart as far as which type of teaching to which you were handed over, yet having been freed from the malfunction you were enslaved to a state of being righted. I am speaking humanly because of the weakness of the soft tissues of your body. Because just like you offered the parts of your body slaves to being dirty and to this lawlessness resulting in this lawlessness, in this way now offer the parts of your body slaves to a state of being right resulting in a state of being holy. Because when you were slaves of the malfunction, you were free with respect to a state of being right. What fruit then did you possess at that time? Upon which you are at present ashamed, because the goal of those things is death. Yet at present having been freed from the malfunction yet having been enslaved to God you have your fruit as far as a state of being holy, and the result, the life of the Eternal One. Because the wages of the malfunction are death, yet the charitable gift of God is the life of the Eternal One by means of the Christ, Yeshua our Lord.”

      The narrow gate which difficult to find with the tightly squeezed path it leads to, is this path of offering yourself as a slave to God, that is explicitly or implicitly offering the parts of your body to be used and controlled by the Spirit of Christ, as Jesus Christ Himself did, doing and saying only what the Father did and said by means of the Holy Spirit through Him so that “the person who has seen Me has seen the Father.” The wide gate with the spacious path is the path of offering the parts of your body to the soft tissues of your own malfunctioning neurology, acting, speaking, and responding from your own erroneous psychology. 

    The first, more difficult path, leads to the life of the Eternal One. The second path leads to destruction and death. As Jesus taught in John 15, “Make your home within Me, and I within you. Just like the branch can’t bring forth fruit from itself if it should make its home within the vine, in the same way neither you if you don’t make your home within Me. I Am the vine, you the branches. The person making his home within Me and I within him, this person brings forth a lot of fruit, because separated from Me you can’t do anything at all. If someone shouldn’t make his home within Me, he was tossed outside like the branch and was dried up, and they collect them and toss them into the fire and they are burned to ash. If you would make your home within Me and My spoken words make their home within you, you will ask for whatever you would wish, and it will happen for you.”

     It’s important to note that these words, both in Matthew and in John, were spoken by Jesus to His disciples. They were spoken to those who had already chosen to listen to Him and to follow Him. And what Paul was describing was not directed to those on the outside, but to those baptized and joined to Jesus Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection.

     The two paths are the two paths which can be taken by His disciples, and Jesus said that only a few would take the path of the life of the Eternal One, but many would choose the wide and spacious path of death and destruction. Notice too that forgiveness isn’t in play here, but the results of which path you choose in this life which may bleed over into the next. We either choose the path of life, or we choose the path of death and destruction, and whichever path we choose is what we leave in our wake and what affects others around us. Jesus, in His submission and surrender to the Father, took the path of life, as hard and as stressful as it was, and He taught His disciples to pick up their own crosses and follow Him down it.