The last couple of weeks I’ve heard of more death and sickness within the lives of friends and family than I have in a long time, or possibly ever. This is probably due to the fact that my connections continue to widen and get deeper as I grow older; thus my circles of interaction are getting much bigger. Death just seems like such a strange part of life. Creation was created for life. It wasn’t created to die. And do, all of us, all of our experiences deal with life. Sure, we study history and hear of death. Sure we all watch the news and see the atrocities that happen across the world and see death on a screen, but when we actually feel it, touch it, and see it face to face, it so much more tangible.
Friday afternoon as I walked up to the casket of a lady at our church who died suddenly last week, I couldn’t think but marvel at what a weird practice that is. Morticians take a body and fill it with chemicals and the like to make it appear as if the person is just taking a nice snooze. I realize that’s not exactly what’s happening, but on the surface level it sure appears that way.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s part of the mourning process. It was good to say farewell to this dear old lady. However, I most definitely wasn’t saying goodbye to her. She’s already gone. It’s more just a chance to look at something almost like a picture or some other kind of image and think about the good memories we’ve had with that person. I think back to four years ago and the death of my grandpa. I knew that the person in that casket wasn’t my grandpa. As much as the morticians tried to make it appear like my grandpa, he was gone.
As I process the news of death that I’ve heard ranging from an eight year old to an eighty odd year old, I can’t but help but try and comprehend a little more about this death thing. As I’ve studied in a two week module course on Genesis, the coursework has taken me back to the opposite of death: the beginning of life. I’ve found the study time fascinating. It’s given me the chance to look at the ancient Israel cultural context and think about what the book of Genesis is actually trying to convey.
In chapter 3 of Genesis, God tells some things to the serpent, Adam, and Eve. Each of these individuals will face some things in the span of their life time. Yet, as God’s created creation, there’s nothing to suggest that this is because they sinned. Creation was always destined to die. I realize that can be a pretty big theological statement. However, what modern Evangelicalism has taught us about the so called ‘fall’ is also a pretty large theological statement that I think requires some further thinking.
The authors that our class have been utilizing speak of the relationship that existed when God created life. It was a relationship of love and of intimacy. Little changed in regards to this when Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge and of good and evil. When that happened, Adam and Eve were given aspects of divine knowledge that they had not had before. Now, they began to comprehend life in the way that God created it. God continued to tell them of what this life would be like. The serpent would be cursed and would roam on its belly. Eve will have pain whilst giving birth, and she would be subjected to the men in her life at times. Adam learns that life will be hard, and he’ll have to work for food. So how does fall language come about from this passage? If anything, God is telling them more about life than they had heard before. I definitely agree that this is our first look at a sinful choice, but there would be many more made in the future that reveal to us what sin is like in much greater detail. God created his creation with a choice, their choices would lead to more sinful decision making. The knowledge that they gained helped them to comprehend that they are indeed human, and as God said, they would indeed return to dust in something called death.
In some respects this has challenged my views on death. I tended to think that death came about because of sin. In many ways I don’t think this to be true anymore. Death was always going to happen. Creation simply can’t live forever as creation. I used to take hope in the fact that death wasn’t natural and that we were intended to live for eternity. Somehow that was comforting to me. I think now though, I’m beginning to take comfort in the fact that we do die, but God has something else in store for us. There is redemption that will be coming, and we’re told about this through much of Paul’s writings. Romans 8 has been hitting home to me over the past year or so. I think that verse 20 really lets us know that death is a part of life, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it.” Is that him there referring to God? I think so. Naturally, as part of life, death will come. But thankfully, we weren’t just created to die. Death does not have to be the final answer. That passages goes on to say, “in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” We now find glorious hope from these words. It’s tough to believe in this hope, because we haven’t experienced it yet. But that is what makes hope something to really hold on to. It’s not a hope that fades away, like the hope promised by political figures. It is a hope in the redemption of our bodies to an everlasting future in God’s kingdom.
So while I sit and think about all of the death I’ve been hearing of lately, I surely am saddened by it all. Gunmen destroying life. Disease slowly eating away at our existence. Old age creeping up on us. It is absolutely devastating. It’s devastating because we were created for life. That’s all we have experienced as ourselves. Death will come my friends. But death will also not have the last word. Redemption into God’s kingdom is a hope that we can grasp and hold on to, a hope that is real.
