Objection: The Crosses in Life Must Precede the Crowns

Instead of getting discouraged when the pressures of life start weighing us down, we should rise up in faith and quench every fiery dart of the wicked one.  We don’t have to accept living defeated lives for a single second.  Prior defeat is not a prerequisite for walking in victory.

There is biblically no such thing as “the crosses in life” anyway!  There is only ONE cross you must take up.  (An entire objection reply is devoted to this; click here for the cross-reference.)  Jesus never referred to crosses in the plural.  And as you can see in the aforementioned objection reply, your “cross” is NEVER sickness.  (I don’t think that the lyrics of the song with the objection phrase in it even meant it that way, but a certain anti-faith website decided to pick up on the crosses-before-crowns idea and run with it.  This is yet one more example of the danger of getting your theology from popular Christian songs rather than from the Bible.)

You do not have to suffer before you can enjoy victory.  God GIVES you the victory; you don’t qualify for it by suffering first.  You reign in life though the Lord Jesus Christ, not by “earning your stripes” by suffering.  You WILL face trials, but you overcome them by faith rather than by staying in them and thinking that somehow if you suffer enough, you’ll see victory later when God decides that your suffering should end and now you can have a crown.  That is a horrible misrepresentation of how our loving Heavenly Father operates.

Jesus never told people to stay sick until they had enough “crosses in life” to precede crowns.  He healed people right away!

While we all will have to bear the cross of persecution for Jesus’ sake, we do NOT have to bear sicknesses, which are a completely different matter.  You have not been redeemed from persecution, but you HAVE been redeemed from sickness!

If sickness is some kind of cross that you must bear before you get a crown, what about all the people who just DIE from their illnesses?  They never get a “crown” in this life in the form of victory.  Sickness is NOT a setup for a later crown; it is a tool of the devil to steal from you, kill you and destroy you.  You should resist it just as aggressively as you would resist sin, which is another of the devil’s works.