The Two Paths

I have knowingly faced only one life-or-death choice in my lifetime.

It was a little more than six years ago. Annette and I were spending our vacation with friends on Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

I had awakened one morning to find Annette nearly passed out on the floor of the bathroom, where I learned that she had spent much of the previous couple of hours vomiting and feverish.

Her pajamas were soaked with sweat, and she could barely communicate with me. I was terrified, and when the paramedics arrived and told me she needed to be flown off the island in a helicopter, my fear rose exponentially.

As they put her on a stretcher to carry her down the stairs and out of the house we had rented, she moaned in pain, and I began to understand that the choice I made could well determine whether she lived or died.

The paramedics said she was suffering from a gall bladder attack, and they told me she needed immediate medical care at a major hospital.

The question for me was whether they should call for the Nightingale helicopter from Sentara Norfolk General Hospital or the medivac helicopter from Vidant Medical Center in Greenville, N.C.

Choosing the hospital in Norfolk would mean she would be close to home and family, but it would be a three-hour roundtrip for the helicopter, meaning three hours before Annette arrived at the hospital.

Choosing the Greenville hospital would get her there in half the time, but it would mean being far from home and family, and because I could not fly with her, it would mean that I would have to take a long ferry ride, followed by a long drive to get to her. She would be at the hospital hours before I could get to her.

The Norfolk option meant that I would travel roads I knew well and that were well-traveled by others. The Greenville option meant that I would have to follow a route that I was unfamiliar with and that traversed a pretty remote part of North Carolina.

In the end, the decision was an easy one. When the paramedic who had asked me which hospital I wanted him to call looked at me and said, “She’s very sick, and she really needs to get to a hospital as soon as she possibly can,” I said, “Send her to Greenville.”

Based on what they told me later — that she had almost died on the helicopter and that the medical professionals in Greenville had been able to administer lifesaving medication to stabilize her as soon as she had arrived — I knew that I had made the right decision.

And as I sat by her hospital bed later that evening — after a long ferry ride and then feeling my worry and stress rise with each mile that I drove toward Greenville — I thanked God for the wisdom I had seen in that paramedic’s eyes as they had loaded Annette onto the stretcher.

It is, by God’s grace, pretty rare for most of us to be faced with life-and-death choices. Life would be terrifying and terrible if the kind of stress and worry that I experienced that day were more than a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime kind of event.

But the Bible is full of such choices. In fact, what we’re going to see today is that the choice between life and death is the major theme that runs throughout Scripture.

It all started in the Garden of Eden, way back in the Book of Genesis. There, we see the first man and woman, created by God in His own image to have fellowship with Him. They were given every fruit-bearing tree in the garden, including the Tree of Life, for food and commanded only to abstain from eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had warned them would bring death.

And we all know how that turned out. They chose death over life, doing the one thing God had told them not to do because they wanted the power to declare good from evil for themselves.

They chose to trust in themselves, rather to trust in God.

And, because of their choice, physical death entered the world, and they also experienced spiritual death — separation from the God who had created them to be in fellowship with Him.

We see this choice between life and death presented to the nation of Israel in the land of Moab, as they prepared to go into the Promised Land, when Moses reminded them of their covenant of obedient faith in God.

He laid out for them a list of blessings that would come upon them if they kept that covenant and a lists of curses that would come upon them if they broke it. We see this in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 30:15–16 NASB95

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity; in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it.

Deuteronomy 30:19–20 NASB95

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.”

Just as with Adam and Eve, the choice for the people of Israel was to trust in God or to trust in themselves.

And just as Adam and Eve had done, the people of Israel chose to trust in themselves, rather than trusting in God.

They broke the commandments God had given them, because they did not trust that He had given those commandments out of His great love for them, out of His desire for them to have good lives in the Promised Land.

And so, the curses that God had promised through Moses came upon the people of Israel, and their land was taken from them, and they lost the fellowship they had with Him when He withdrew His presence from the temple in Jerusalem.

God created Adam out of the dust of the earth, but Adam and Eve fell from grace in the Garden of Eden. God had created the nation of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, but Israel had fallen from grace in the Promised Land.

But the story of the Bible is not just a story of creation and fall. The story of the Bible is a creation-fall-redemption story. It is the story of God working tirelessly through history to redeem His fallen people.

We see the first evidence of that in God’s words to the serpent who had tempted Adam and Eve in the garden.

Genesis 3:15 NASB95

And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

This was God’s promise that Satan’s efforts to destroy God’s good creation would ultimately fail and that the devil would ultimately be destroyed.

We see God’s redemptive plan even in that message from Moses to the Israelites in Moab, when he told them that, even after they had been exiled from the land and cut off from God, because of their faithlessness He would one day restore them.

Deuteronomy 30:1–3 NASB95

“So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.

Deuteronomy 30:6 NASB95

“Moreover the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.

From the beginning, the all-knowing Creator of the universe knew that the story of His creation would not end with the fall, but with redemption and renewal.

And from the beginning — from before the beginning — He knew that redemption and renewal would come through His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, whose Sermon on the Mount we have been studying for the past few months.

And as we look today in Matthew 7:13-14 at the first of four concluding warnings in this message of Christ, we will see that we are faced with the same choice as Adam and Eve, the same choice as the people of Israel encamped in Moab, the choice between life and death.

Now, I want you to remember that when Matthew provided the setting for the Sermon on the Mount back at the beginning of chapter 5, he said Jesus went up onto the mountain or the hill, away from the crowds that were following Him, and that His disciples came to Him there to hear what He had to say to them.

Most of the Sermon on the Mount was directed toward the people who were already following Him in some measure of faith, rather than to the crowds who were simply interested in Him because of the news of His miracles.

But by the time Jesus had reached the conclusion of this message, much of the crowd He had left behind had found Him again on the mountain and were now listening to what He had to say. In fact, when the message was concluded, in verse 28, Matthew again refers to the “crowds” who were amazed at His teaching.

And so, we see Jesus, beginning in verse 13, broadening His message so that it would have application to all who were listening, and not just to those who already had placed their faith in Him as the promised redeemer.

He gives them four warnings that each represent the choice between life and death. We’ll look at the first of those four warnings today.

Matthew 7:13–14 NASB95

“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. “For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Note here that Jesus describes two gates, two ways or paths, two destinations, and two groups of people.

First, there is the broad path and the wide gate that lead to destruction.

This is the well-beaten path of the way of the world, and this path is a lot like I-95 as you near South of the Border. If you’ve ever driven that interstate through North Carolina and into South Carolina, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The billboards along I-95 start telling you to look for this tourist trap beginning at the Virginia-North Carolina border to the north and at the Georgia-South Carolina border to the south.

South of the Border now has about 175 roadside signs to entice people through its gates, but the broad way that leads to destruction has many more.

They say things like “Look out for No. 1,” and “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” and “Follow your heart,” and “To thine own self be true,” and “Speak your own truth,” and “God just wants you to be happy,” and “Jesus was just a man who taught how to live a good life,” and “When you stand before God, He’ll see what a good person you have been,” and “There are many paths to enlightenment,” and so many other lies.

The broad way was engineered by the devil himself, who laid the first asphalt lane when he told Eve, “God knows that in the day you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The broad way is the easy way.

John Stott describes it like this: “There is plenty of room on it for [diverse opinions and lax] morals. It is the road of tolerance and permissiveness. It has no curbs, no boundaries of either thought or conduct. Travellers on this road follow their own inclinations, that is, the desires of the human heart in its fallenness. Superficiality, self-love, hypocrisy, mechanical religion, false ambition … these things do not have to be learnt or cultivated. Effort is needed to resist them. No effort is required to practise them. That is why the broad road is easy.” [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 194.]

And, as with most things that are easy, people flock to the easy, broad road. Jesus said many enter through the wide gate on that road, bound for destruction — bound for hell, where everything good will be destroyed forever.

“Love and loveliness, beauty and truth, joy, peace and hope” will not exist in that place, despite all the signs along the broad way that promised those things and more. [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 195.]

But there is another way. This is the hard way that leads to life.

It is a hard way, because it is the way of sacrifice and even persecution. Those who tread this path are called to crucify themselves — to offer themselves as a living sacrifice to the sinless one who sacrificed Himself on a cross to pay the just penalty for their sins.

This path also has signs, but each one reads simply, “One way.” There is only one way to enter through this narrow gate, and that is through faith in Jesus, who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

He is the way. He is the only path by which we can approach His Father as subjects of the kingdom of heaven.

He is the gate itself. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that he is not only the Good Shepherd, but also the door of the sheep.

John 10:8–9 NASB95

“All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. “I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.

His way is truth, not lies like you’ll find on the broad path. He tells you that you have no righteousness within you, that you are spiritually bankrupt.

But then He says that you’re blessed when you understand this, because then and only then are you in a position to receive the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus.

His way is life, because those who enter the kingdom of heaven through the gates of His righteousness receive eternal life — life in everlasting fellowship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the way it was always meant to be.

But the gate is narrow. Indeed, it can admit only one person at a time, and each person who enters must leave behind his or her baggage.

You can enter the wide gate with whatever you want to bring — your sins, your pride, your self-righteousness are all welcome there.

But to enter the narrow gate, you “must leave everything behind—sin, selfish ambition, covetousness, even if necessary family and friends. For no-one can follow Christ who has not first denied himself.” [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 195.]

“I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.” That’s what Moses told the people of Israel in calling them to put their faith in God.

And here, Jesus gives you and I the same choice — life and death, the blessing and the curse. This is the life-or-death decision that each of us must make while we are still in our mortal bodies.

I said earlier that the story of the Bible is a story of creation, fall, redemption, and renewal. This is also true of each one of us.

Each one of us was created in the image of God to be in fellowship with Him. But each one of us is fallen — fallen because we inherited the sins of our father, Adam, but also fallen because each of us sins against God in our own ways, both great and small.

And our sins create a chasm between us and God that we could never bridge. And so, because He loves us, God sent His Son to redeem us.

To redeem something means to gain or regain possession of it through a purchase. Each one of us rightfully belongs to God, because we are God’s creations, God’s creatures. But by our sins, we gave ourselves to sin.

And the penalty for sin, from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, is death — the physical death that we see destroying everything and everyone in creation and the spiritual death that separates us from the God who created us to be in fellowship with Him.

But as our redeemer, Jesus paid the price on our behalf. Hanging on a cross at Calvary, He took upon Himself the sins of mankind and the just penalty for those sins. The innocent one died for the guilty ones.

But His death and resurrection only count for us because of His righteousness, because of His sinless life as a man. He did what we could not do so that we could become who we never could have been.

Hanging there with His arms outstretched on the cross, Jesus offered a choice — eternal life through faith in Him or death by rejecting Him.

There are only two paths — the hard one and the easy one. There is no middle way. There are only two gates — the broad one and the narrow one. There is no middle gate. There are only two sets of people — the many and the few. There is no neutral group. And there are only two destinations — destruction and life. There is no third alternative. [[John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 196.]

Which path are you on? Which gate will you enter? Which group of people do you travel with? Which destination are you headed toward?

The choice is yours. This is the life-or-death choice that each one of us must make while we are in our mortal bodies.

How will you choose?