But the rumors began a couple days later on Sunday morning. Jesus was alive again, and was telling His followers that because He lived, they would also lived. And the word spread that Jesus had defeated death.
Soon, His followers were declaring with confidence that Jesus had come back from the dead. They claimed He taught them for forty days and then went to Heaven. They claimed He was God Himself walking upon the earth. And many thousands of people believed.
Job 14:1-12; I Thessalonians 4:13-18; John 5:19-30
Soon, a young man named Stephen was debating conservative Jews in the streets, showing them that Y’shua of Nazareth was the long-predicted Messiah, the Savior of Israel. Then, one day that summer, the crowd could not take Stephen’s words any longer. They grabbed him, took him to a spot, and began to stone him. Stephen, a devout earlier follower of Jesus died that day, speaking loudly on behalf of what he knew to be the Truth – that Jesus was the Son of God, God walking on earth in a complex way, believing that Stephen, too, would come back from the dead, and this had given Stephen his courage to stand as the stones were thrown at him…
Over the centuries, people have believed that Y’shua of Nazareth – Jesus – was indeed God’s Son. They took Him at His word that He had defeated death. They listened to His words that people who followed Him would have eternal life, a life beyond the grave. Some of those people died violently because of that belief – others died peacefully in their sleep. But for most of them, someone was near them who loved them, and prayed that God would not take them away. Someone prayed that God would allow them to live a bit longer on this earth. Yet they died.
Why does this happen?
Why does God let "good" people like Stephen die?
We try to explain it in many ways. “God needed another angel”, we say. “God wanted grandmother with Him” “God decided to take Grandpa.”
But we hurt. We asked God to leave Grandpa, yet Grandpa died. Grandma died. Even Ole’ Yeller died – despite our prayers. And we prayed hard, we prayed harder than we ever thought possible – and they died.
Why? What did we do wrong?
There are those on television that tell us if we only had faith like a mustard seed, our prayers would be answered. There are those who tell us that we must just have faith and anything will be given to us. There are those who look at us after we have prayed through the night, our tears soaking our pillow, our eyes puffy and red – and they tell us we did not have enough faith in God – and we feel guilty because there were times during that long night when we did doubt, so it must be our fault.
But there is a problem with this idea. It treats God like a video game puzzle to be solved. Get the right words, the right combination of prayers, and God will open the doors for us. This idea makes us far too powerful and God far too weak. It ignores the fact that the Bible says God grants our prayers when they “are in accordance to His will” – not when they express our will.
It is a fact that, as far as we know, no one has lived over a hundred and eighty years since the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jeanne Calment holds the official record, living in Aries, France for 122 years, from 1875 to 1997. Three men have claimed to be 146, 163, and 171 years of age, but these ages can not be verified. Everyone dies. Everybody dies. Everybody becomes a body.
The only questions are “when?” and “why?”
I can’t answer the “when” question for any particular person. I’ve seen people struggle about “pulling the plug” and who expect Momma to die in a few minutes. And then Momma lives for another couple of months. And I’ve seen Momma die right away. I had a neighbor who came home on hospice. After eighteen months, they took him off hospice. One evening, a couple months later, he went out, got on his riding lawnmower, and died ten minutes later, mowing on flat and level land. We don’t know and certainly don’t have any control over the time someone transfers to the Church of Heaven.
According to the Book of Job, “Man born of woman is short of days and full of trouble.” And “Man’s days are determined and the number of his days depends upon [God].”
So, can we accept that God has determined our days far ahead of time? God does determine our final hour and can change it at will. But is it possible that God has a much bigger plan working than what we can see? After all, God plays thousands of years ahead – setting in action plans that began centuries ago to result in events in our lifetime.
Sometimes a death isn’t about your loved one that just passed on – or even about you. Sometimes it is about the nurse or doctor who was watching quietly from the corner as you sang “Amazing Grace” to Grandma while she was in her final coma. I have seen so many funerals change so many lives, leading people whose hearts were stony icy walls to God suddenly melt and talk to me at the funeral dinner about how they were reconsidering their positions, how they were planning on taking their families to church the next week. Biblically, you may remember that a young man named Saul was watching Stephen as he died. Saul, who would later become known as Paul, the greatest apostle and church planter in the history of the church. Stephen's faith at his death surely affected Saul/Paul deeply.
But we also should recognize that death was not in the original design for this world.
In the original design, we walked in a garden with fruit growing on the trees and bushes. There were two trees in that garden – the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating from that second tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led to our fall, with the punishment being banished from the garden so we could no longer eat from the tree of life, the tree that kept us living. And it was after that we saw our lifespans begin to shrink from nearly a thousand years to the seventy, eighty, or ninety years that we have today. All people die – death was not in God’s original design, but death was the result of disobeying God.
Why should God care so much about our obedience?
Imagine the face of the nicest older person you know…the sweet old man or woman who is always pleasant, who greets you with a smile, who is always a joy to be around. They did not get to be that way naturally – they practiced. They practiced for sixty, seventy, or eighty years. And they probably listened to the Holy Spirit, read their Bible, prayed, and listened some more to that Spirit.
Now imagine the scowling face of the most terrible older person you know… the one who is always crabby, never has anything nice to say about anyone, the one who gossips and gripes and cuts people down all the time. They also did not get that way overnight – they have practiced. They have focused upon themselves for sixty, seventy, or eighty years.
Now imagine both of these people after practicing for ten thousand years in eternity. The sweet man or woman is now angelic, saintly, almost Christ-like. And the terrible person is demonic. Hell, while it has its share of fallen angels, does not need fallen angels to be a terrible place – only selfish people who refuse to bend the neck to God, and who have continued to practice being selfish for hundreds and thousands of years.
This is why God cares whether or not we will follow His Son’s path, learning from His Son’s example. For the slightest character flaw, after a thousand years of self-focus, will be magnified into something terrible, but, given enough time, a willing disciple of Christ can change from the most evil personality into someone pleasant and attractive to be around. How good we are today is far less important than whether we will choose to follow Christ, whether we can be taught. So to God, the goodness or badness of a person doesn’t matter in the short term, for God always has the long term.
And we can see this when we look at the entire list of 613 laws in the Old Testament. All of us break them repeatedly – we have enough trouble truly following the basic ten commandments without slipping. And God is perfect. If we can rate ourselves as good or bad, we might give ourselves a seven or eight. But God rates as a thousand, and asks us to be a thousand, not a ten. Our self-given eight might beat another's seven, but does that really matter when perfection is a thousand?
And so, when we adopt God’s perspective, we see that none of us are particularly good. It is only in relation to other humans that we try to boast of goodness.
Some people live much shorter lives. And these young deaths are particularly distressing to us – particularly if we consider these young people to be “good” – which, as we have just shown, they are not – only relatively to the people around them.
But our Christian faith and the promises of Jesus tell us that those who choose to follow Jesus will join Him after the earthly death, to live in a just land, a wonderful place where the tree of life grows beside the waters of New Jerusalem, a place where we can live eternally and enjoy that life. And this is where those people who know Jesus go to.
Our problem with death is that we are selfish. We were comfortable with these other people, they brightened our day, they lifted us up, they did things for us – and so we grieve when they die. WE miss them – they no longer care. WE want them – they have what they want. Our loss is not defined by the interaction between God and our loved one – it is defined by our history between ourselves and our loved one – we aren’t so concerned about them – as about us!
I know people who have allowed their lives to be defined by another’s death. They lost their father or mother at an early age and they never moved past it. They lost their Grandmother years ago and they are still angry at God about that. They lost their husband or wife a while back, and it still hurts.
Yes. It hurts. We blame the one who died, we blame God, we blame ourselves for not doing more. But death entered our world through the sin of Adam – we could be like the guy who said that as soon as he gets to Heaven, he’s going to look up Adam and punch him in the nose!
Death entered our world through Adam. Furthermore, the first death of a human was when Cain killed Abel and Abel's blood cried out to God from the ground. A human caused the first human death - not God. And this is the world we live in. God doesn’t “take” someone from us, God doesn’t “need another angel” – we don’t even turn into angels when we die. God doesn’t say one day, “I think that I want to punish John Doe, so I’ll kill his mom today.” God grieves about death just as we do – except God was much closer to our loved one that we were. God's grief is much deeper.
For example, we saw that Jesus cried at Lazarus’ tomb, even though He knew He was going to raise Lazarus in five minutes. Death was not in the original plan – but death had to enter the world if we were to have the freedom to choose, if we were not to be God’s little robots. Death entered when Adam chose to disobey God. And every person born since then has been in rebellion to God.
Now, we must look at death through God’s eyes, through the perspective that says that 20 years – or 90 years is but a blink of an eye compared to eternity. If you ask a fifteen year old how long life has been, they’ll say both very short and very long. If you ask a ninety year old how long life has been, they’ll say both very short and very long. It is a matter of perspective – soon enough, we’ll join our parents and grandparents and all those who have died before us with Christ – it will be a long time, it may be decades – and it will also be a blink of an eye.
Good people die because all people die. Adam’s sin led to death’s arrival. Our real problem is that we aren’t expecting death – we live in a world where we pretend death doesn’t happen to those near us.
We may pray and ask for several years more for our loved one; we may pray and ask for healing. But ultimately, the mature Christians recognizes the wisdom and goodness of God and asks for their loved ones to be healed, in this life or the next, and accepts that God knows what is best for them…and for us, although it may be hard for us to see and understand for many years.
A man died and the wife asked “How will I ever make it? He did everything for me“ And God said, “You depended too much on Him. It is time for you to learn to walk and do while depending upon me.”
You see, the life that left our world at the Fall entered the world again when Jesus chose to teach us, to speak to us about Father’s love for three years and then to show Father’s love by self-sacrificing Himself, a man who was perfect and sinless willingly dying where we should have died. Because He was fathered by the Holy Spirit, Jesus was of God-stuff, of infinite value. Because He was Mary’s Son, He was fully human, and His death meant something to humans.
But we also should recognize that death was not in the original design for this world.
In the original design, we walked in a garden with fruit growing on the trees and bushes. There were two trees in that garden – the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating from that second tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led to our fall, with the punishment being banished from the garden so we could no longer eat from the tree of life, the tree that kept us living. And it was after that we saw our lifespans begin to shrink from nearly a thousand years to the seventy, eighty, or ninety years that we have today. All people die – death was not in God’s original design, but death was the result of disobeying God.
Why should God care so much about our obedience?
Imagine the face of the nicest older person you know…the sweet old man or woman who is always pleasant, who greets you with a smile, who is always a joy to be around. They did not get to be that way naturally – they practiced. They practiced for sixty, seventy, or eighty years. And they probably listened to the Holy Spirit, read their Bible, prayed, and listened some more to that Spirit.
Now imagine the scowling face of the most terrible older person you know… the one who is always crabby, never has anything nice to say about anyone, the one who gossips and gripes and cuts people down all the time. They also did not get that way overnight – they have practiced. They have focused upon themselves for sixty, seventy, or eighty years.
Now imagine both of these people after practicing for ten thousand years in eternity. The sweet man or woman is now angelic, saintly, almost Christ-like. And the terrible person is demonic. Hell, while it has its share of fallen angels, does not need fallen angels to be a terrible place – only selfish people who refuse to bend the neck to God, and who have continued to practice being selfish for hundreds and thousands of years.
This is why God cares whether or not we will follow His Son’s path, learning from His Son’s example. For the slightest character flaw, after a thousand years of self-focus, will be magnified into something terrible, but, given enough time, a willing disciple of Christ can change from the most evil personality into someone pleasant and attractive to be around. How good we are today is far less important than whether we will choose to follow Christ, whether we can be taught. So to God, the goodness or badness of a person doesn’t matter in the short term, for God always has the long term.
And we can see this when we look at the entire list of 613 laws in the Old Testament. All of us break them repeatedly – we have enough trouble truly following the basic ten commandments without slipping. And God is perfect. If we can rate ourselves as good or bad, we might give ourselves a seven or eight. But God rates as a thousand, and asks us to be a thousand, not a ten. Our self-given eight might beat another's seven, but does that really matter when perfection is a thousand?
And so, when we adopt God’s perspective, we see that none of us are particularly good. It is only in relation to other humans that we try to boast of goodness.
Some people live much shorter lives. And these young deaths are particularly distressing to us – particularly if we consider these young people to be “good” – which, as we have just shown, they are not – only relatively to the people around them.
But our Christian faith and the promises of Jesus tell us that those who choose to follow Jesus will join Him after the earthly death, to live in a just land, a wonderful place where the tree of life grows beside the waters of New Jerusalem, a place where we can live eternally and enjoy that life. And this is where those people who know Jesus go to.
Our problem with death is that we are selfish. We were comfortable with these other people, they brightened our day, they lifted us up, they did things for us – and so we grieve when they die. WE miss them – they no longer care. WE want them – they have what they want. Our loss is not defined by the interaction between God and our loved one – it is defined by our history between ourselves and our loved one – we aren’t so concerned about them – as about us!
I know people who have allowed their lives to be defined by another’s death. They lost their father or mother at an early age and they never moved past it. They lost their Grandmother years ago and they are still angry at God about that. They lost their husband or wife a while back, and it still hurts.
Yes. It hurts. We blame the one who died, we blame God, we blame ourselves for not doing more. But death entered our world through the sin of Adam – we could be like the guy who said that as soon as he gets to Heaven, he’s going to look up Adam and punch him in the nose!
Death entered our world through Adam. Furthermore, the first death of a human was when Cain killed Abel and Abel's blood cried out to God from the ground. A human caused the first human death - not God. And this is the world we live in. God doesn’t “take” someone from us, God doesn’t “need another angel” – we don’t even turn into angels when we die. God doesn’t say one day, “I think that I want to punish John Doe, so I’ll kill his mom today.” God grieves about death just as we do – except God was much closer to our loved one that we were. God's grief is much deeper.
For example, we saw that Jesus cried at Lazarus’ tomb, even though He knew He was going to raise Lazarus in five minutes. Death was not in the original plan – but death had to enter the world if we were to have the freedom to choose, if we were not to be God’s little robots. Death entered when Adam chose to disobey God. And every person born since then has been in rebellion to God.
Now, we must look at death through God’s eyes, through the perspective that says that 20 years – or 90 years is but a blink of an eye compared to eternity. If you ask a fifteen year old how long life has been, they’ll say both very short and very long. If you ask a ninety year old how long life has been, they’ll say both very short and very long. It is a matter of perspective – soon enough, we’ll join our parents and grandparents and all those who have died before us with Christ – it will be a long time, it may be decades – and it will also be a blink of an eye.
Good people die because all people die. Adam’s sin led to death’s arrival. Our real problem is that we aren’t expecting death – we live in a world where we pretend death doesn’t happen to those near us.
We may pray and ask for several years more for our loved one; we may pray and ask for healing. But ultimately, the mature Christians recognizes the wisdom and goodness of God and asks for their loved ones to be healed, in this life or the next, and accepts that God knows what is best for them…and for us, although it may be hard for us to see and understand for many years.
A man died and the wife asked “How will I ever make it? He did everything for me“ And God said, “You depended too much on Him. It is time for you to learn to walk and do while depending upon me.”
You see, the life that left our world at the Fall entered the world again when Jesus chose to teach us, to speak to us about Father’s love for three years and then to show Father’s love by self-sacrificing Himself, a man who was perfect and sinless willingly dying where we should have died. Because He was fathered by the Holy Spirit, Jesus was of God-stuff, of infinite value. Because He was Mary’s Son, He was fully human, and His death meant something to humans.
If He had not died on the cross, then truly, we would have had no hope. But because of His death and resurrection, we can look forward with confident hope, for we are like Him. The entire story of Jesus, indeed the entire Biblical story, is the story of God working out a way to make death meaningless without removing our ability to choose death over life, something that Adam choose to do. God has been working ever since Adam to remove death from the human condition. And God has succeeded.
We, too, have been born of woman and, if baptized, have the Holy Spirit of God in us. And so we, too, who follow Christ, look forward in hope to a resurrection in a new and improved body, living eternally with Christ.
But we need food and drink to sustain us. The blood of Abel soaked into the earth and contaminated the earth, so all food grown on the earth is spiritually contaminated by the blood of countless humans who have been killed by other humans.
And so Christ gives us His body and blood that we might have spiritual food and drink, having the spiritual antidote to the poison of the blood of Abel, replacing the spiritually tainted earthly molecules of our body and blood over time with the holy molecules from His body and blood, this sanctified bread and this holy grape juice. And so we have Holy Communion, as God's antidote to death. Will you join in this festive meal that celebrates the life that arrived with Christ?
We, too, have been born of woman and, if baptized, have the Holy Spirit of God in us. And so we, too, who follow Christ, look forward in hope to a resurrection in a new and improved body, living eternally with Christ.
But we need food and drink to sustain us. The blood of Abel soaked into the earth and contaminated the earth, so all food grown on the earth is spiritually contaminated by the blood of countless humans who have been killed by other humans.
And so Christ gives us His body and blood that we might have spiritual food and drink, having the spiritual antidote to the poison of the blood of Abel, replacing the spiritually tainted earthly molecules of our body and blood over time with the holy molecules from His body and blood, this sanctified bread and this holy grape juice. And so we have Holy Communion, as God's antidote to death. Will you join in this festive meal that celebrates the life that arrived with Christ?
Amen.
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