When You Fear Death

Our greatest fear should not be the fear of death, but the fear that we are not afraid of it. 

One of the most dangerous aspects of leprosy is that it can produce nerve damage that leads to a loss of feeling. As a result, a person with leprosy may not feel pain when their hands, feet, or legs are cut, burned, or otherwise injured. 

The same can happen to us spiritually. 

Our parents and grandparents lived with polio, smallpox, and world wars. In addition, there was a day when far more people died at home than at a hospital. Today, many younger people can live much of their lives without seeing someone else die. 

One of Satan’s most effective schemes in our culture is to use our relative distance from death to dull us to its reality in our lives. He does not want us preparing for eternity until it is here. 

He wants lost people to put off making a decision about Christ until it is too late. He wants Christians to become complacent in their faith and ministry until their lives are over. 

Thus, one of the ways God may be redeeming the coronavirus pandemic is by using it to remind us that “our days on earth are a shadow” (Job 8:9).  

As C. S. Lewis noted with regard to World War II, “The only reason why cancer at sixty or paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.” 

He adds: “If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we [are now] disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.” 

The Four Most Welcome Words In The Bible

Two biblical principles follow. 

One: Mortality is real and eternity beckons. 

The psalmist said to the most powerful people of his day, “Like men you shall die, and fall like any prince” (Psalm 82:7). Thus we need to be sure we are the children of God. 

“Now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). Living for eternity is the best way to live today. 

Two: God is with us in this life and the next. 

Jesus assured his disciples, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). 

In an email devotional, Max Lucado wrote: “Everything is changing! Flight schedules are changing. The economy is changing. The school schedule is changing. Changes, everywhere. 

“But what hasn’t changed? God’s love for us. The four most welcome words in the Bible are God is for us. GOD is for us—the unchanging Creator is FOR us. His love for us is constant and unchanging. He’s not plotting to take us down. He wants to build us up. He hasn’t turned away from us. He has turned toward us and is inviting us to run to him for peace and strength.” 

God is looking at you right now. 

Are you looking to him?