The fear of death
The fear of death
What do we do with death? In many ways it is the great question of life. This life will end in death. We go to funerals, but one day people will attend our own. Yet death is not something which people generally like talking about. In fact, the Bible speaks of those who all their lives were subject to bondage through the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15). The natural man usually tries to disguise this in some way or other.
Some make light of the subject. When he was dying, Oscar Wilde is supposed to have commented that the wallpaper was awful: 'One of us will have to go'. This might appear to be facing death with fearless humour but it is actually a kind of phoney bravado. It simply reflects a refusal to face facts with the seriousness which is their due.
Others try to ignore the subject. I once met a man in hospital who was little more than forty years old, yet he was obviously dying of cancer. He told me that the doctors had given him two weeks to live. I asked him what he thought about death and what takes place after it. His reply was staggering for its lack of reality: 'I don't think about it'. He died within ten days, and faced the God he refused to think about.
Yet others live in abject terror of death. Sitting next to me on one plane-trip was a man in his mid-twenties who was shaking and sneaking surreptitious sips from a bottle of whisky. In a rather incoherent way he explained to me that he was terrified of flying. I must confess to having no natural love of being thousands of metres above the ground, but to face death half-inebriated has even less appeal. Occasionally I have been with people on their death beds when they have cried out and screamed that the devil was coming for them. It has been terrible to watch.
C.S. Lewis said that he once saw an epitaph which read:
Here lies an atheist, All dressed up but With nowhere to go.
Lewis commented: 'I bet he wishes that were so'. We can make fun of death, we can ignore it, we can live in terror of it, or we can comfort ourselves with the delusion that it leads to nothing or perhaps to reincarnation and other opportunities to live again. How different is the Christian approach to death! There is some fear, yes, and sorrow too. But the Christian rests on the fact that Christ has died for sinners and is risen from the dead, never to die again. By faith, his victory is also ours.
We may not die quite like Stephen — with angelic faces, full of the Spirit, seeing the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, commending our spirits to God, and praying for our enemies. But for the Christian, death has been defeated once and for all by Jesus Christ. As Thomas Watson put it: 'Death, to a pardoned sinner, is like arresting a man after the debt is paid'.
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