Death Will Lose Its Sting
“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ”
Most people find talking about death too morbid for discussion. We spend our lives avoiding our mortality. Yet, no matter how often we fool ourselves through various forms of entertainment, as Shakespeare coined the phrase, “death comes for us all.” Shakespeare must have been death-obsessed because he also declared that we are all worm food. Modern medicine helps stave off the inevitable, but death remains.
Modern medicine has lulled us into the false reality that we can elude death indefinitely. Perhaps that is why many today do not feel the urgency to consider divine intervention. Until recently, people faced death’s reality directly. Timothy Keller’s On Death reminds us that “The average family in the United States in colonial times lost one out of every three children before adulthood.” Before long-term care facilities, younger generations were forced to provide for their elderly relatives, with every member of the family reminded of the decay of daily life.
No wonder death is traditionally described in adversarial terms. Death takes all our loves, accomplishments, and joys we’ve worked a lifetime to achieve, and permanently snuffs them out. We cannot fix death, so we are left to ignore it as long as we can. Yet, death’s reality oozes into the cracks in our emotional façade. The ooze poisons our peace of mind and detracts from our joy. The poisonous ooze of death’s reality is where faith becomes meaningful and necessary.
The Christian faith is more than just a fictitious response to humanity’s fear of death. Our Triune God is more than just a travel agent who provides an eternal vacation from the pain that is our earthly existence. God is our all in all. God created us. In Jesus, God redeemed us and made us acceptable, despite our shortcomings. God, through the Holy Spirit, shares in every part of our lives and our world. Death is just one more step in the spiritual evolutionary process in the journey of life eternal. Thank God life does not end in our very short time on this realm. Open yourself to the wholeness of God, and death will find its proper perspective. Fear will diminish, hope and renewal will return. Continue to place your trust in God, and God will bring you eternal peace and trust.
