A Serious Subject

The evening before last, we received a call from the son of one of our neighbors, giving us some sad news. Our neighbor had been suffering for some time with some rather poor health, even though he and his wife are not really all that old; they are the same age as David and I (and we happen to share the same first names!) The son related that his Dad had been in a coma since last Wednesday, and was not expected to live. He is under hospice care.

Right away, my thoughts were carried back to the rather recent past when my own parents were going through this. My Mother passed away in October of 2005 at home, after a battle with cancer, and my Dad, May of 2007 in a nursing home after a brain stem stroke three years earlier.

For most of us living in the 21st century, death is foreign to us. Because of great advances in medicine and other improvements in life, death just isn't a frequent visitor. Mothers and babies rarely die in childbirth, invasion and war is foreign to us. There was a time, however, even as recent as my own parents childhood, when people died from diseases that have been nearly eradicated now. We live without the reality that death will come upon us all.

We are living in a wonderful age; our lives can actually be extended longer than that of our ancestors, and can be lived with less pain and hardship. But I must point out that there is a bad side to this age of wonder. Because we are not faced with it on a real and frequent basis, we ignore it, being under the delusion that we have lots of time to deal with it. Young people go about their lives flippantly thinking they will live forever; but death still comes. It might take it a little longer to get to each of us, and life might be filled with lots of wonderful experiences until it comes, but it awaits each of us at last.

Perhaps one of the reasons this subject is avoided in life and we literally hate it's face is because it is not natural. That right. Death is not natural even though it always happens. We were not created to die. We were created to live. That's why we shrink back from it.

If you open up a Bible to the book of Genesis to the first and second chapters you will read the account of God creating all the lovely world for one purpose; to sustain the life of man who would be the crowning glory of this remarkable creative expression of God's. Man was made for the purpose of glorifying God! His end was not death~it was life! "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."(Gen. 2:7)

With this fact in mind, we must wonder, "well, what happened?". In the same book of Genesis, chapter 3, we read the account of how Eve, who being innocent of any sin, was tempted to disobey God~ and she did. She believed the lie of Satan. Sin was then born into the world, and thus death, because the Bible tells us in Romans 6:23, "The wages of sin is death..." How awful... sin is awful...a lot more awful that we realize.

Since that time, every person born into this world have been born sinners, and have also inherited the same fate: death. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:" (Romans 5:12)

But something must be remembered; this death that we are considering is just a picture for us. It is an illustration, if you will. It is showing us that there is spiritual death, and that is far worse that physical death. Now I realize this is a very unpopular subject, but just think of the doctor that has to deliver the bad news that someone is dying! That is not a desirable position to be in unless he is able to prescribe a cure! And there is a cure for spiritual death!

One of the biggest mistakes modern man is making, is this: he is denying the reality that he is a spiritual being and not just a physical being. And because of that, a person's reason alone is not able to answer the basic answers in life; it isn't enough to fill the void and emptiness that is within our souls. Man, in reality is a spirit; created to be in God's image, yet given a physical body to live in a physical, sensory world.

I hope you will go back and read the passages I mentioned in your Bible. I hope you will read them with an open mind, one that is willing to know the truth!