Original Entry: April 21, 2008
McMinnville, OR
Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ephesians 5:1-2
Here is a hunting quiz to test your trophy awareness. Let’s pretend you are hunting Mule Deer somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Methodically you cut across a basin and hear a “snap” noise across the canyon. As you throw your glasses up you see three bucks moving parallel to you in the adjacent the basin. They are all mature bucks and from the side their antlers look about the same. They are slowly feeding out of the basin completely unaware of your presence. You decide to shoot, but something suddenly spooks them and they quickly crest the ridge heading into the neighbor basin. Just then they stop, all three standing broadside, offering only a side view of their antlers.
Which one do you shoot?
I would shoot the last one.
With over 30 years of hunting big game it seems like the bigger bucks almost always send the smaller bucks out of the canyon first as a sacrificial offering. The big buck will either send the smaller bucks out first, then follow, or exit in a completely different direction using the younger bucks as a decoy.
Those ole boys are big and old for a reason!
Men often work in the same way. If I am bigger and stronger then I can sacrifice you for my benefit. This is no other than the school yard rules where the local bully calls the shots and the weak suffer.
A real man’s trophy hunt is for God, his Creator, and as such the rules have changed. Ephesians 5:1 tells us “to imitate God”. With Jesus as our model for manhood we realize that he exemplified sacrifice in that “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8)!
Jesus confronts a man’s school yard bully attitude. This changes the prayers of as father for his sons to “let my boys be protectors of the weak,” a prayer that I pray daily for my boys when I drop them off at school. The upside down school yard attitude must be turned from upside down to right side up. Selfishness is now replaced with selflessness for the godly man as he offers his life as “an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma (2).”
The “you-die-first” attitude of the school yard bully becomes an “I’ll-die-first” lifestyle when the bully is transformed by the attitude of Jesus.
