So let the winds blow. Let the earth itself open beneath us. We place our hope in God alone, who is our fortress. And He is enough:
God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
Even though the earth be removed,
And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though its waters roar and be troubled,
Though the mountains shake with its swelling.
PSALM 46:1-3
[1] George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case against God (New York: Prometheus Books, 1979), 81.
[2] Allan Laing, “Wave That Beggared My Belief,” The Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), January 4, 2005.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), 31.
[4] Erwin Lutzer, Where Was God?: Answers to Tough Questions about God and Natural Disasters (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2006), 100.
[5] Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2007), 278.
[6] James Montgomery Boice, Romans Volume 2: The Reign of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), 906.
[7] Donald Grey Barnhouse, God’s Heirs: Romans 8:1-39 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1959), 153.
[8] Annie Johnson Flint, quoted in Mrs. Charles Cowman, Streams in the Desert (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1966), 148–149.
[9] “The American Colony in Jerusalem,” Library of Congress, December 1, 2008, www.loc.gov/exhibits/americancolony/amcolony-family.html.
[10] Lutzer, Where Was God, 104.
[11] Mark Mittelberg, The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2010), 137.
[12] Adapted from Ray Stedman, Let God Be God: Life-Changing Truths from the Book of Job (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishing, 2007), 69–70.
[13] Hannah Whitall Smith, The God of All Comfort (London: James Nisbet and Co., Limited, 1906), 252–253.
CHAPTER 6
HOPE AFTER LOSS
* * *
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for You are with me.
PSALM 23:4
In the mid 1970s, high-tech workers in Los Angeles began constructing a new generation of spaceships. The first to be launched was the space shuttle Columbia, the flagship of NASA’s new fleet.
Columbia blasted off April 12, 1981, and orbited the earth thirty-six times. Twenty-seven missions followed, but Columbia’s final trip was a flight to tragedy. While reentering earth’s atmosphere at nine o’clock (EST) on the morning of February 1, 2003, the shuttle broke apart. A piece of insulating foam the size of a small briefcase had peeled off during launch sixteen days earlier and punctured one of the vessel’s wings. The intense heat of reentry caused gases to penetrate the wing, triggering the catastrophe that killed the seven astronauts. Debris fell across large parts of Texas and Louisiana as thousands of people gazed upward in horror.
Several years later, a poignant report emerged about the destruction of Columbia. While the mission was in progress, NASA specialists studying the punctured wing questioned whether the damage was fatal. Wayne Hale, the space shuttle program manager, recalls these words of flight director Jon Harpold: “You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS [thermal protection system]. If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?”[1]
Harpold’s question was a speculative one—should the crew be told if it was determined that the damage meant doom. Further analysis, however, led mission control to conclude that Columbia’s reentry would be safe. The crew was given a full report of NASA’s conclusion, and no one on the ship or on the ground had any expectation that the damage would prove fatal.
So neither NASA nor the Columbia crew ever knew the situation was hopeless before their spacecraft broke apart 207,000 feet above Texas. Evidence shows that even in the final moments of the flight, the crew was still desperately trying to regain control of the ship and safely reenter the atmosphere.
But the hypothetical question raised by Jon Harpold remains a haunting one. What would you do if you knew the crew was doomed? Would you tell them, causing indescribable mental anguish but giving them time to say their good-byes, reflect on life, and perhaps make peace with God? Or would you remain silent, making their final hours a time of exhilaration and anticipation of reunion with their loved ones?[2]
In a way, the plight of Columbia resembles our own: we’re flying through space on a spinning planet, and every person is subject to sudden death at any moment. None of us will escape. The difference is, we all know we are going to die, and we have the opportunity to prepare!
Our Attitudes toward Death
Death. Your favorite subject? It’s not mine, either. I’m not trying to cloud up your day, but I want to point out that for many people, death is the ultimate fear and the ultimate confusion. When someone dies, I hear a lot of people saying, “He’s in a better place,” even though before the death they tried with all their might to pray him away from that place.
Woody Allen once said, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”[3] Apparently he has given the matter some thought, because this comment is also attributed to him: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I would rather live on in my apartment.”
We treat death as the ultimate obscene word. Rather than simply saying, “He died,” we plug in an endless supply of euphemisms: “Passed on.” “Went to a better place.” “Was called home.” “Went to sleep.” “Departed this life.” Or if Shakespeare is your thing, “shuffled off this mortal coil.” The poet John Betjeman wanted to know, “Why do people waste their breath inventing dainty names for death?”[4]
In his book The Hour of Our Death, historian Philippe Ariès notes that death used to be taken more casually as a part of life. Young people weren’t shielded from it. Folks died at home, and the body was put on display there. People came by to weep and mourn their loss, but no one pretended a death hadn’t occurred, as we often do today when we gather in little groups in the parking lot after funerals and nervously tell jokes.[5]
Because of our discomfort, we airbrush the whole experience. We pretend people aren’t going to die, and we change the subject when they wish to discuss it. Then we dispatch them from this life in white, sterilized hospital corridors, cutting them off from home and the familiar. Most of us go to great lengths to avert our eyes from the reality of death.
Joseph Bayly says that death is the great leveler of the mighty and the lowly. It plays no favorites and cuts no deals:
Dairy farmer and sales executive live in death’s shadow, with Nobel Prize winner and prostitute, mother, infant, teen, old man. The hearse stands waiting for the surgeon who transplants a heart as well as the hopeful recipient, for the funeral director as well as the corpse he manipulates. Death spares none.[6]
Right about now, you may be thinking about skipping to the next chapter, hoping it will address a more “manageable” fear. I feel your trepidation, my friend, but just hear me out. What if I promised you that we could forever change the way you look at death—perhaps move it out of the fear category entirely? Isn’t it taking up too much space in your anxiety closet? It’s the idea of facing the unknown that frightens people. So let’s take on this subject and, with the Bible as our guide, pull death out of the terrifying darkness once and for all.
The Fact of Death
The Bible isn’t afraid to speak of death: it calls it what it is. Words such as die and death occur nearly nine
hundred times in the New King James Version of the Bible. The biblical terms for death are often graceful and poetic: “gathered to my people” (Genesis 49:29); “gather[ed] . . . to your fathers, . . . gathered to your grave in peace” (2 Kings 22:20). Who isn’t moved by the image of “the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4)? I consider the following to be the most beautiful verse in the Bible concerning the death of God’s people:
Precious in the sight of the LORD
Is the death of His saints.
PSALM 116:15
From the time of Adam’s fall, death in the Bible is presented as a part of life. The writer of Hebrews sums it up succinctly: “It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). The countdown to death begins at birth. You and I are dying at this very moment. Given that fact, how is it possible that the Bible can treat the death of believers so lightly?
The answer lies in a paradox: though death begins when we are born, life begins when we are born again by the Spirit of God through faith in Christ. Many Christians have the mistaken notion that eternal life begins when they die. But that is not biblically accurate. Eternal life begins when we are born again into the Kingdom of God. Jesus Himself defines eternal life this way: “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).
If you know God through Jesus Christ, then you are experiencing eternal life right now even though you haven’t physically died. And if you are experiencing eternal life right now, death is no more than a brief interruption to that which you are already experiencing—life that has no end.
The New Testament is filled with passages conveying this positive, transitional perspective on death:
Jesus refers to death as being “carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22).
Jesus tells the repentant thief who died beside Him, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Paul describes death as being “absent from the body and . . . present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8).
More than a dozen times death is described as “sleep”—the temporary status of the body from which it will be awakened in resurrection at the end of the age (John 11:11; Acts 7:60; 1 Thessalonians 4:13).
Paul says to die is gain since we’ll be with Christ, and he calls death “far better” than being on earth (Philippians 1:21, 23).
When we die, our bodies (our “earthly house, this tent”) will be destroyed, but we will inherit “a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Death is “the last enemy that will be destroyed” (1 Corinthians 15:26).
Those who die are “blessed” and have the ability to “rest from their labors” (Revelation 14:13).
Jesus describes the separation of death as merely temporary: “A little while, and you will not see Me,” he says. “And again a little while, and you will see Me” (John 16:16).
The Bible, then, gives us the full truth about death. It isn’t something to fear, but a journey begun at birth, culminating in our final destination: being conformed to the image of Christ for all eternity (Romans 8:29).
The Faces of Death
The word death means “separation.” The Bible speaks of three kinds of death: physical death, which is separation of the spirit and soul from the body; spiritual death, the separation of the human spirit from God in this life; and second death, the separation from God for eternity.
James describes physical death in this way: “The body without the spirit is dead” (James 2:26). The death of Rachel, the wife of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob, is expressed as “her soul . . . departing” (Genesis 35:18). Solomon describes the separation this way: “The spirit will return to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7).
While on the cross, Jesus confirmed this separation between the spiritual and the physical as He experienced it, saying, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit’” (Luke 23:46). Matthew 27:50 adds that Jesus “yielded up His spirit.”
We also see the distinction between physical death and spiritual death in the account of the church’s first martyr: “They stoned Stephen as he was calling on God and saying, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit’” (Acts 7:59). When Stephen’s spirit left his body, his body fell into the state we call physical death—which isn’t the cessation of one’s existence, as we can see by the heavenly reception of his spirit.
In physical death, the spirit and the soul leave the body and move either into the presence of God or into isolation from God. There are no exceptions; the statistics regarding death are 100 percent—except for Christians who are alive at the moment of the Rapture (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). As the saying goes, death is still the number one killer in the world.
Spiritual death refers to our separation from God. Because of our sin, we have fallen short of the glory of God. We are separated from Him. Even though we are alive physically, we experience a separation the Bible describes as death: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). When sin entered the world through Adam, it spread to everyone, so that all unregenerate men and women are dead spiritually—separated from God (Romans 5:12).
The last form of death, second death, is the final banishment from God—the final misery of the wicked in hell following the Great White Throne Judgment (Revelation 20:11) at the end of the Millennium. John describes this second death in the book of Revelation:
The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
REVELATION 20:13-15
I have tried to bring understanding to this subject by using a little mathematical formula: if you have been born only once, you will have to die twice. But if you have been born twice, you will have to die only once (and you may even escape that one death if Jesus returns to the earth during your lifetime).
All of us are born once (our physical birth), but if we are not born again through the Spirit and the Word of God (John 3:3-8; 1 Peter 1:23), we will die twice: once physically, when our bodies expire, and again at God’s final judgment. However, if we are born the second time through trusting in Jesus Christ as our Savior, we will die physically, but then we will never die again. This is what our Lord means when He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die” (John 11:25-26).
I must note here that death also brings about another kind of separation—the separation from loved ones, which we feel physically, spiritually, and emotionally. The psalmist writes,
Loved one and friend You have put far from me,
And my acquaintances into darkness.
PSALM 88:18
Some years ago, I confronted cancer and the possibility of my own death. My greatest fear was that I’d leave my wife and my children alone. I could see the fear and worry in their faces, and that grieved me. By the grace of God, that separation didn’t come. But for some people, the pain of loss in this life is only a foretaste of the greater pain to come when believing and nonbelieving loved ones are separated forever.
In his book Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life, Eugene O’Kelly describes his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer at age fifty-three. In 2002 he was the CEO of KPMG, one of the largest accounting and financial services companies in the world. He received his terminal diagnosis in 2005 and died four months later, leaving behind his wife and two daughters. Yet he had reflected very deeply on this eventuality when his first child was born, years before the diagnosis:
On the day my daughter Gina was born, the nurse placed her in Corinne’s arms. I moved closer to my wife and baby girl, awed by what lay before me. My newborn daughter was staggeringly beautiful. . . . Before I co
uld touch her, she reached out, startling me, and grabbed my finger. She held on tightly.
A look of shock darkened my face.
That day and the next I walked around as if in a fog. Corinne picked up on my odd, distracted behavior. Finally, she confronted me.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded, “You’re acting very strange.”
I looked away.
“What is it?” she asked. “Tell me.”
I couldn’t hide it any longer. “The moment she grabbed my finger,” I said, “it hit me that someday I’ll have to say good-bye to her.”[7]
The believer, however, has a radically different perspective. We grieve, of course. We miss our loved ones with every fiber of our being, and our suffering is real. But we also know that the separation is not what it seems, that life consists of more than the visible. Deep in our mourning, our souls are kindled by the eternal hope of reunion with those we have lost, after which there will be no more parting.
Non-Christians only meet to part again; Christians only part to meet again.
There’s a vast chasm of difference between those two outlooks. As Paul points out, we need not “sorrow as others who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Dr. S. I. McMillen and Dr. David E. Stern observed the truth of this in their book None of These Diseases: “After sitting beside hundreds of deathbeds, we have seen this recurring pattern. People with a strong faith tend to die in peace. People without faith tend to die in terror and torment.”[8]
In his book Fear Not!: Death and the Afterlife from a Christian Perspective, Ligon Duncan explains that believers are animated by a hope that affects positively this life as well as the one to come:
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