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Death is our Great Enemy, more than anything. It makes a claim on each and every one of us, pursuing us relentlessly through all our days.
Of course we know intellectually and rationally that we are going to die, but deep down we repress it, we act as if we are going to live forever. And, according to the psalmist, that’s not wise.
Medical progress supports the illusion that death can be put off indefinitely. It is more rare than ever to find people who are, as the ancients were, reconciled to their own mortality.
Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God’s love, which can go into death with us and take us through it and into His arms.
a believer always beats death whether they die or not. Jesus Christ has defeated death, and now all it can do is make us more happy and loved than we’ve ever been.
Death is not the way it ought to be. It is abnormal, it is not a friend, it isn’t right. This isn’t truly part of the circle of life. Death is the end of it. So grieve. Cry. The Bible tells us not only to weep, but to weep with those who are weeping (Romans 12:15 NASB).
Indeed, if he is to guarantee resurrection for all who believe in him, he must put himself into the grave. On the Cross that’s what he did.
For many years, people preserved meat by salting it. (If you have ever had country ham you know this is still a method of preservation.) Salt cured the meat so it didn’t decay. Similarly, unless you salt your grief with hope, your grief will go bad. When we grieve and rage in the face of death, we are responding appropriately to a great evil. But Christians have a hope that can be “rubbed into” our sorrow and anger the way salt is rubbed into meat. Neither stifling grief nor giving way to despair is right. Neither repressed anger nor unchecked rage is good for your soul. But pressing hope into
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unlike all other major religions, Christianity promises not a spirit-only future, but a renewed heavens and earth, a perfected material world from which all suffering and tears, disease, evil, injustice, and death have been eliminated. Our future is not an immaterial one. We are not going to float in the kingdom of God like ghosts. We’re going to walk, eat, hug, and be hugged. We’re going to love. We’re going to sing, because we’re going to have vocal cords. And we will do all this in degrees of joy, excellence, satisfaction, beauty, and power we cannot now imagine. We’re going to eat and
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George Herbert says, “Death used to be an executioner, but the Gospel makes him just a gardener.”
“Pretty soon you’re going to read in the Chicago papers that Dwight Moody is dead. Don’t you believe it. I will be more alive than I am right now.”
Just because we know a loved one is with Christ and eventually we will all be together doesn’t mean that somehow we should all just be happy now and should stifle our grief and even our anger. Not at all. Jesus didn’t stifle his! Nevertheless, don’t express emotion in a completely untempered way that would damage you or people around you.
