“Let yourself have fun and let yourself fail. Who cares? We’re all going to die. Just have a go.” A heavily edited excerpt from an interview my cousin, Connor Swindells, recently gave to a national newspaper. At 26 and on the edge of stardom, you might think that death would be the last thing on his mind, but it isn’t.
In fact, no human being has ever had an answer to the problem of death. It hovers over us like a dark cloud throughout our lives rearing its ugly head from time to time when we lose someone close to us.
So, we do one of several things; ignore it, refuse to think about it and bury our heads in the sand choosing instead to live for the moment, or we become obsessed with health and safety to ensure we live as long as possible, or even, in extreme cases, we arrange for some kind of preservation of the body, just in case the scientists find a way to restore life in the future. If you are hoping for the latter, by the way, it will never happen!
We can’t beat or cheat death and, at the risk of stating the obvious, it gets us all in the end.
I often meet people who are upset about a particularly serious accident or tragedy where lots of people have died. The terrible incident at Aberfan, where a rubbish tip on hills above the village merged with springs of water causing a catastrophic collapse of slurry that killed many children at the village school and some adults, have been mentioned a few times this year even though it was decades ago.
People ask how God can be loving yet not have intervened as these, and other tragedies, unfolded. One man told me that if he had been God, he would have moved the trajectory slightly as the slurry descended the hill, so it avoided the school at Aberfan. I had no answer to this particular observation, and I’m not sure the man was expecting one, it was more like he was thinking out loud.
Reflecting, I wondered whether the man would still have been upset if he had been able to change the course and a group of different people had been killed instead of all the children. What if one of the new victims had been a relative of his, or the parents of one of the children that had survived and was now an orphan?
We can easily fall into the trap of thinking like this man. Perhaps we think the saddest aspect is because most were children that had barely started life. But is there ever an age that makes it easier to lose a loved one?
Some of the angriest people I meet in the street are still holding a grudge against God for allowing one of their grandparents to die decades earlier. Often, they had lived to their 70’s or 80’s but the person still believes God was unfair in allowing it to happen.
They are asking, “Why Me?”
Leaving aside the issue of us being unable to assess the fairness of God due to our comparatively minuscule minds and the fact that we cannot see the bigger picture.
The reality is that if God intervened to prevent your relative or friend dying in an accident or from an illness, others with people who love them are dying in similar circumstances all around the world every second of every hour, of every day. These people might well ask why your loved one was saved and theirs was not.
If fairness is what we are concerned about, would that be fair?
Taking this to its logical conclusion, the result would be that God would be forced, or expected, to intervene in every situation where someone’s life was at risk, otherwise He would be showing partiality, or favouritism, to one person over another.
Then, we would all live forever!
Maybe at this point you are thinking that this sounds like a good idea and wondering why God didn’t set things up in this way in the first place.
Actually, He did…. but we messed it up.
Our first parents rebelled against God and rejected His rule over them. So, God gave them over to their own ideas and, because of their sin, He cursed the Earth with suffering, sickness and…. wait for it…. death.
The Bible makes it clear that we ultimately die because of our sin, “the wages of sin is death…” and that we all are guilty of sin, “for all have sinned”.
God can’t just overlook sin, or He wouldn’t be just and fair. He can’t just intervene every time someone is in danger or there would be no penalty, or consequence, for sin which also wouldn’t be just and fair.
This would be a pretty diabolical position for us all to be in, and this post would be seriously depressing, if it weren’t for one important fact.
God loved us so much that He had a rescue plan. A plan to defeat the curse of sin, suffering, sickness and death that He had placed on the Earth due to our rebellion. A plan to send His Son Jesus to live a perfect life on our behalf. A plan for Jesus to die on a cross, taking the punishment you and I deserve, and to be buried in a tomb. A plan for Jesus to defeat the curse of death by coming back to life.
I said earlier that no human being has an answer to the problem of death. This is true, but thankfully God does.
Jesus was able to stand in our place, pay for our sin and reverse the curse of death because He was sinless. If we repent (turn away from our sinful lives), ask for forgiveness, and trust that Jesus died for us on the cross, we are promised eternal life in Heaven as a free gift.
Effectively, we can receive the benefit of Jesus defeating death and live forever with Him.
The alternative, which I don't recommend, is to stand before God on Judgment Day carrying all of our unforgiven sin. God has to punish us at this point, or He is not just. The punishment is eternal in a place called Hell.
Either way, death doesn’t have the last word, God does.
Will you face Him joyfully having been forgiven through Jesus or will you suffer His righteous anger for all eternity?
“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
(1 Corinthians 15 vs 55-57)
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