Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
January 2010
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
The apostle Paul refers to death as ‘the last enemy to be destroyed’ (1 Cor.15:26). When it has struck us, nothing is left the same. In medical terms the heart ceases to beat; in Christian terms, the spirit is separated from the body (James 2:26). The family is left with the melancholy duty of organising the disposal of the body, and the potentially disruptive duty of distributing the worldly goods of the deceased. The tributes are paid, be they fulsome or straightforward, and those left behind have a lingering and growing anxiety that this is yet another reminder of their own frailty and mortality.
Indeed, we all have the same problem. In Adam all die (1 Cor.15:22), and since we are all descended from Adam we are all subject to death. We sin and we die. Unless the Lord Jesus returns first, we will know what it is to cease breathing, and to have our spirits depart our bodies. Some may be famous, popular, wealthy, gifted, and much envied – but we all die. Invariably there are regrets. When the mother of Edith Schaeffer died, Edith wept, and cried: ‘Oh, but I wanted to tell her about … ‘ When Joy Davidman died of cancer in 1960, C. S. Lewis brooded: ‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.’ When his beloved wife, Mary, died in 1790, John Newton was shattered: ‘the world seemed to die with her’. There is the human dilemma: death is both painful and inevitable. We ought to think about it, but we do not like to think about it.
Yet think about it we must. It was the rich fool in Jesus’ parable who thought that life would go on and on, with bigger and better storage barns, and more relaxation, eating, drinking, and making merry (Luke 12:12-21). It is alarming how often one hears eulogies along the lines of ‘He just wanted to have fun and enjoy’, as if hedonism were the pinnacle of the virtues. The judgment of God is as shattering now as it was then: ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ (Luke 12:20)
Others might consider the issue, but come to no conclusion. One of the distinguished Knox brothers, Dilly, died in 1943, and he composed his own epitaph:
A wanderer on the path
That leads through life to death,
I was acquainted with
The tales they tell of both,
But found in them no truth.
Others put their trust in advancing science. James Bedford, a psychology professor, died in 1967, and was cryonically preserved (frozen) in the hope that later science will be able to bring back the dead.
Any kind of hope will do in the panic. Some try to glean something from cancer statistics which might tell them that a certain treatment will give them a 60% success rate. They carry on in life in the hope that they do not belong to the 40%, in the meantime putting to one side the uncomfortable truth that the mortality rate has always been 100%. Hindus and many Buddhists trust in reincarnation, that there is a cycle of life, and they will return, either higher up the scale or further down. Western societies today are fond of the delusion that somehow someone or something will save everybody – or at least everybody except Adolf Hitler and religious fundamentalists. This can be dressed up in Christian garb, although Christ Himself said that the wicked will go into everlasting punishment while the righteous will go into everlasting life (Matt.25:46).
One funeral home sent me a brochure containing the ostensibly comforting words that ‘To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.’ More erudite and less sentimental, but no more convincing, is the ode of Horace: ‘I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze … I shall not altogether die … On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time’. Most of humanity would relate more to Woody Allen’s quip: ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.’
So far we have only seen a universal problem and a variety of unsuccessful attempts to solve it. In truth, we are all in the hands of the Creator who made us. Our days were written in His book before we were formed in our mother’s womb, when as yet there were no days (Psalm 139:16). The contemplation of the sovereignty of God led Richard Baxter to submit: ‘Lord, what thou wilt; when thou wilt; how thou wilt.’ This sovereign Creator is made known in His eternal Son, Jesus Christ, who died and rose from the dead. Hence He can say: ‘I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades’ (Rev.1:18). Those who have not turned to Christ in repentance and faith remain dead in Adam. Those who have turned to Christ in repentance and faith have moved from death to life. The last enemy is defeated, and the believer shares in the victory of Christ forever.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes