God worked in my Dad’s heart; just look at this note that he wrote to himself!
Recently my Dad passed away. He was 89.What a wonderful man, who loved God.
He finally succumbed to the aging process, full of years, and ready to meet his Savior. My brother Jim and I were together with him when he made his last breath on this earth, weakened by disease, and feeble. Not the Dad that we knew, full of life. He would never have wanted to live on like that in this life. So God took him.
What a blessing for us to be by his side, watching his soul leave his earthly tent of a body.
When I was younger, in my teenage years, twenties and thirties, I couldn’t imagine life without Dad. We were SO close. I couldn’t imaging him dying. Life would be so different without him around.
Then it happened. And here we are. Life trudges on.
But here is the Good News: Hope conquered despair in my Dad’s passing!
When a loved one leaves you, it should make you think of your own mortality. The fact that someday it will be you leaving this earth.
Therefore, I want to share some key principles of what God teaches us on this subject of Death and Dying, through his infallible Word:
The Bible teaches– that neither sin nor pain, disease nor death were part of God’s original plan for us. God told Adam and Eve that if they ate from the tree in the middle of the garden that they would die. Gen. 3:2-3
Billy Graham said, “Death ultimately intrudes into our well-planned lives and changes things around, absolutely” Each man’s life is but a breath (Psalms 39:5). 1.75 million people on earth die/week; wow; hard to believe.
What happens at death? No world religion gives a credible answer to this question, but Christianity is different. The Bible, both in the Old Testament, and the New Testament, have provided definitive teaching on the subject of the afterlife. Read on!
We all die once– Hebrews 9:27 And just as it is destined that men die only once, and after that comes judgment, so also Christ died only once as an offering for the sins of many people…. This certainly speaks against religions that believe in reincarnation, like Hinduism.
The Christian will never see death as final– John 8:51 Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.” How refreshing.
Our physical bodies are like a tent– Peter says, “I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body, because I know that I will soon put it aside, as Our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things ( 2 Peter 1:13-15).
Life is short– What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a while and then vanishes. James 4:14b. Time moves by fast, doesn’t it. As the decades move on, relative time shortens. I think God is trying to tell us something.
Surely God would not have created such a being as man to exist only for a day! No, no! Man was made for immortality. – Abraham Lincoln.
The question is: where are you going to spend it?!