Death

This blog is supposed to be mainly about the news of our growing family, to keep our family and far away friends updated on recent happenings dealing with the baby. However, I recently learned that Papa, my grandpa on my dad’s side, has moved into hospice care. I wasn’t really sure what that was, but apparently that’s where you go to have people take care of you until you die. With this news, I felt the need to look in the Bible and search for God’s truth about death, and I wanted to share it with you.

A lot of times, people try to make themselves or others feel better with phrases like, “He’ll be with his wife again soon.” or “He’ll go when he’s ready to let go.” The problem: these are lies.

Heaven is about God

Although we will recognize others in heaven, the point isn’t to reunite with our loved ones.  That will not give us eternal joy. The point is to finally be with the Lord.

Take Matthew 22:23-33 for instance. The Sadducees ask Jesus what will happen at the Resurrection in this scenario: a woman marries a man who ends up dying, so she marries his brother (this was common back in those days). The brother dies, so she marries the next brother, and so on 7 different times until she dies. They want to know whose wife she will be at the time of the Resurrection. In verses 29-30, Jesus says, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”

And Revelation 4 is titled “The Throne in Heaven”. I’m going to put it here in the blog, and I really encourage you to read it even though it will be copied and pasted from biblegateway.com, because it is a little long. (Emphasis added by me.)

1After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, "Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this." 2At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. 3And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircled the throne. 4Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads. 5From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits[a] of God. 6Also before the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal.

   In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. 7The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. 8Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stop saying: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come." 9Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, 10the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say:

 11"You are worthy, our Lord and God,

   to receive glory and honor and power,

   for you created all things,

      and by your will they were created

      and have their being."

Finally, from Isaiah 66:23: “From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,” says the Lord.

There are many other verses and passages from the bible that tell us about heaven, but as you can see from the three that I have mentioned, heaven is all about worshiping the Lord. He is more important than the people we love on earth. That is a hard concept to accept, but it is better to understand the power and worthiness of God.

Who spends eternity with the Lord?

A lot of you have heard the verse John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” If you grew up in church, like me, then it’s easy to say, “Oh, well I believe that stuff. I was taught about Jesus, so of course I believe it.” I thought that way for a long time, up until the month before my sophomore year of college when God gave me that life-changing faith. The thing is, I had my definition of “belief” wrong. I thought to believe something meant that you thought it was true. “I believe… the grass is green.; the sky is blue; Texas has crazy weather.” But true belief comes with faith, which is way bigger than just thinking a particular fact or idea is true.

In Hebrews 11:1-3, we read, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” If we have the kind of belief mentioned in John 3:16, if you really have faith in something, then you put your hope in it. You base your life around it, and because of that faith and that love for God, you change your decisions to be more aligned with what God wants and commands than with what you desire.

That sounds a lot simpler than it is, but it’s supposed to be a struggle. If it weren’t, if it were easy to just snap our fingers and act exactly as God commands in the bible, then we wouldn’t need Christ. But no one on earth can act as perfect as God, to whom we are to compare ourselves. If I compare myself to Osama Bin Ladin, then heck yeah I look awesome! But he is just a person. We aren’t supposed to compare ourselves to people, we are supposed to compare ourselves to God, and compared to the perfect Lord, none of us are good enough to get into heaven.

Thankfully, so so thankfully, God sent His perfect Son to die a very brutal death that mirrors how disgusting our sin is to Him. He was the last person who deserved to die; I mean he was PERFECT! He loved God and He did what God commanded every time and He WAS God.

Jesus’ death covered our imperfections, our sins, so that we aren’t sentenced to death for them. Christ absorbed the wrath of God so that those who believe in Him do not have to bear it. We don’t have to DO anything to get into heaven to be with God. We CAN’T do anything. Eternal life can’t be earned, because, again, no one is good enough to get in. But with belief in Christ, the kind of belief that consumes your life, then we can be with the Lord forever.

We don’t choose when to die; God is in control of our lives.

In 1 Samuel 1:19-20, we read, “Elkanah lay with Hannah his wife, and the Lord remembered her. So in the course of time Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son.” If you read earlier in the chapter, you’ll see that Hannah had a hard time getting pregnant. God gave a son to Hannah. God wanted him, Samuel, to be born, and He made it happen. God was in charge of this life before he was even conceived.

In the Psalm 139: 13 and 15 we read, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.” Your eyes saw my unformed body- again, God knew us from the beginning, before we were even born.

Did your mom ever say to you, “I brought you into this world, I can take you out”? Well, of course God is the one who brought us into this world, and following simple logic, God is the one who will take us out of the world. I didn’t choose to be born, and when it’s time for me to die, I won’t be the one who chooses when I die. I could die tomorrow, and that will have been God’s choice. To say that we have anything to do with those decisions is greatly insulting the power and sovereignty of God.

In Conclusion…

Now, please know that I am not writing this post to say that I know everything, because I definitely don’t. I’m writing it, because I used to buy into those comfort phrases. Heck, I probably even said some of them to people. The reality is that I just didn’t know what the truth was because I was lazy in reading my bible. Referring to Matthew 22 again, Jesus says, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” This is one reason why it is so important to read our bibles and study scripture, so that we will know God’s truth instead of coming up with our own “feel good” mantras.

Would you rather know the Truth and take comfort in the Lord, or would you prefer to indulge in a superficial happiness that is based on lies? We may be quick to answer the question with the former, because we want that to be our answer, but many times we are guilty of the latter, a dangerous practice, because we simply do not know the scriptures.