Women

Death Stinks! It really does. I've had about all the death I can handle in the past few months. Everyone seems to be dying-- friends, relatives, friends of friends, relatives of friends, the person down the road, the man behind the store counter. Death can be so sudden. In many cases, you could have spoken to the person or seen them one day, and the next- they are gone. Death is also final. The person is not coming back. That is the hard part. The relationship is gone; ended.

I have lost grandparents at an age that was too young to understand death, but I did understand the loss of comfort, warmth and security I experienced, with my grandmother, especially. I did understand the loneliness and the loss of walking the 4 blocks over to her house. I did understand the loss of unconditional love. I've lost a child, whose face I have never seen, yet whose tiny kicks I can still remember. I've had close friends die, leaving a void in my life; mere acquaintances die, leaving a tear in my eye. What makes death so hard? What makes life so hard to deal with through a death?

Death "stinks" because we were not created to die. We were not meant to die. That was not part of the original plan. We were created to live forever in a state of perfect life with our Creator! Eve must not have understood or been paying close attention to God's words, "In the day you eat thereof, (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) you shall surely die." (Gen. 2:17). As mothers, we tell our children the worst that can happen to them if they don't do things right--"Tie your shoe strings, or you will fall and break your neck!" Well, OK, we know that most falls from untied shoestrings do not result very often in broken necks, but usually in skinned knees, but we want them to take us seriously. The possibility for getting a pretty good hurt is there. God's warning to Eve, however, was not an exaggeration. He was very intent about the seriousness of the situation-"you shall surely die" (Gen.2:17; emphasis mine)

My son recently offered this comfort, "Don't cry, we will see so-and-so again." And therein lies our hope, and the answer to the above question. Jesus Christ is both the hope and the answer to all of our grief and our loss. (Rom. 7:25) The Bible says that there is a time for everything, including grieving, but we are not to grieve as those who have no hope, ( I Thess. 4:13-14) because Jesus is our hope. Jesus is our victory. In I Corinthians15:54-57 we read, "Death is swallowed up in victory. Oh death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" Well, we know that death does sting- it hurts. It is painful, but that is because death is the result of sin, which is just what verse 56 above says. If we continue to read verse 57, we see that the victory of death and the sting of death is not forever. We feel like death has been victorious when it snatches a dear loved...especially if the loved one is young. We feel the sting of death as our heart hurts at the separation. However, through Jesus' death on the cross to atone for our sins, and His resurrection that leads the way for our future resurrection, we see that Jesus himself became victorious over death. The sting, while very real, is overcome and overpowered by the work and the person of Jesus! He is the One who makes our physical death here on earth just a transfer from one world to another. When the Christian dies, he steps out of the physical world here, where he may have been looking one last time at his loved ones, and into the spiritual world, where he comes face to face with the One who created him, the One whom he has been longing for since his creation. Those left behind experience a sting, and as Eccles. 3:4 says, there is a time to grieve. As we saw earlier, we are not to grieve as those who have no hope. Our hope is that the passing of our loved one has transported them to eternal life with Jesus, and that we, too, will one day join them there because of our relationship with Jesus.