The life of a believer is precious. The life of a prophet is more visibly precious still. To attack an unarmed believer because of his faith is persecution. To kill a prophet because he speaks the truth is an offence repeatedly condemned in Scripture.
Then the believer takes a sword.
At that moment something changes. He remains a believer, but his material life loses the protection belonging to a believer who is simply living, preaching, serving, or bearing witness. He has entered battle. He now is destined to be killed. Anyone fighting on the other side may now kill him, and Scripture adds no condemnation whatsoever despite him being a holy warrior.
The enemy soldier may already be condemned as an infidel. That is a separate matter. He may be condemned for torture, cruelty, treachery, or other abuses. Those too are separate matters. The question here is exact: what additional condemnation does he receive for killing an armed holy warrior in battle?
None can be found.
Suppose an enemy soldier has not yet killed anyone. He is an infidel and therefore already stands under the condemnation attached to unbelief. Now he enters battle and kills one holy warrior. Nothing is added. He kills ten. Nothing is added. He kills one thousand. Still nothing is added merely because those one thousand dead men fought on the side of God.
If the killer later becomes a believer, those deaths do not obstruct his entrance into Paradise. He may join the army he once fought, be killed in another battle, and be called a martyr beside the very men he previously killed.
If he never becomes a believer, he remains under the condemnation of unbelief. Yet Scripture does not say that his hell becomes harsher because he killed one thousand armed believers rather than none. His unbelief determines his fate. The battlefield deaths add nothing of their own.
The result is startling. Before taking the sword, the believer possesses one of the most protected identities in Scripture. After taking it, his death may leave no additional mark whatsoever upon the judgment of the man who killed him.
The most precious life has become the cheapest life.
This does not mean that answering God’s call was sinful. It means that the call contained something far more terrible than military glory. The believer was not invited to acquire superiority over the infidel. He was invited to abandon the material privilege of being protected as a believer. He placed his sacred life into a condition where it could be destroyed without its sacredness adding even one word to the condemnation of his killer.
The holy warrior’s blood may be praised. He may be promised reward. He may be called alive with God. But his blood has no price against the opposing soldier. It cannot add a single charge to the soldier’s account.
Kill a cow and someone may require payment for the cow. Kill a slave in a society where a slave has an established legal price and the owner may demand compensation. Murder a civilian and blood guilt, punishment, compensation, or vengeance may arise.
Kill an armed holy warrior in battle and his holiness adds nothing.
The killer remains what he was before. If he was an infidel, he remains an infidel. If he later believes, he becomes a believer. The thousands of sacred lives he destroyed do not alter that transition. Their deaths are not entered as an additional price.
This is the true terror hidden beneath the glory of holy war. The banners, prayers, promises, weapons, and ranks may tell the warrior that he belongs to the superior side. Yet the battlefield reveals that belonging to God does not make his material life more costly to destroy. The enemy’s weapon enters his body exactly as his own weapon was intended to enter the enemy’s body. Heaven does not announce that a uniquely valuable life has been taken and that the killer must now pay an additional price.
The warrior has taken the sword. He has made himself killable.
Perhaps he survives the first battle. Then he is fortunate. Another soldier’s life was taken instead. But his survival does not change the value placed upon his combatant life. If another war comes and he answers the call again, he once more places himself in the same pitiless condition. He continues until war ends, obedience ends, or his fortune ends.
The victorious warrior has not disproved the cheapness of his life. The sword simply collected someone else first.
This is why taking part in holy war is one of the most tragic things a person can do. The warrior may imagine that he is approaching honour. In reality, he is approaching the condition of the cross. He is making himself available to be stripped of strength, family, future, dignity, and life. He is entering a place where the wrong person may crush the right person into the earth and where the righteousness of the victim adds no special condemnation to the victor.
Jesus entered this condition voluntarily.
Before his arrest, two swords appeared among his followers. Jesus was about to be counted among transgressors. Although he did not use a sword and stopped the violence when one of his disciples used it, he allowed himself to be seized from a group in which swords were present. The one true Son of God was handled as a member of a dangerous company.
The result was the cross. Soldiers mocked him, struck him, stripped him, divided his clothing, nailed him down, and watched him die. Scripture pronounces no special condemnation upon any individual Roman soldier for physically carrying out the execution. The material life of the Son of God was allowed to become the cheapest life in the world.
Jesus did not go to the cross because his life lacked value. He stepped up as a ransom body for a disciple who acted as a holy warrior by using the sword to defend Jesus. Symbolically Jesus stepped up in place of any of us who are quick to fight for any cause even if it a holy one. In exchange of the disciple and us being spared He offered himself. Thus he was apprehended not an innocent man but the one who took arms as a rebel. This is the tragedy of the sacrificial lamb. He went because the most valuable life could descend until no material privilege remained attached to it. His value before God did not prevent human hands from treating him as disposable flesh.
The call to holy war directs the warrior toward the same terrible destination by another route.
Jesus goes without a sword. The warrior goes with one. Jesus offers himself directly. The warrior first enters a struggle in which he hopes to overcome others. But if he continues, battle after battle, the final destination remains the same. His strength will fail. His weapon will fall. The enemy will stand over him. The believer who entered expecting sacred honour will discover that his earthly life has been made completely available for destruction.
Holy war is therefore not an escape from the cross. It is a masked call to it.
The warrior is not being offered a more powerful form of discipleship. He is being sent toward the same helplessness Jesus accepted voluntarily. The sword merely conceals the destination beneath the hope of victory.
This destroys the attraction of holy war. If the final demand is that a person surrender everything, what does the sword add? If the warrior must eventually become as helpless as the crucified Jesus, why should he first pass through the bodies of other people? If his own sacred blood will add nothing to his killer’s condemnation, what superiority did military participation ever give him?
A person should flee this route at any cost unless he truly understands what it requires.
He should not enter because he desires honour. He should not enter because he enjoys the idea of killing infidels. He should not enter because he imagines that God will make his life more valuable than theirs. He should not enter expecting that heaven will impose an additional punishment upon whoever destroys him.
He must understand that the call to take the sword is a call to make himself pitilessly killable.
If he is not prepared for the cross, he is not prepared for holy war.
And if he is prepared for the cross, he must confront the final question: why take the long road through bloodshed when Jesus has already revealed the direct one?
The believer can walk voluntarily toward self-surrender, as Jesus did. Or he can enter the ranks of holy warriors and be carried toward the same surrender through terror, defeat, and death.
Both roads end with the cheapest life on earth.
Only one reaches that place without first making someone else die.