The Restoration of Life

Christianity doesn’t offer to help us come to terms with death. Unlike secularism and religion, Christianity doesn’t offer comfort for breathing corpses, positive-thinking for a meaningless life, or pills to quiet the voices in our hearts that tells us there is something terribly wrong with “me.” Yes, sadly, when it comes to dying and death, the message of some Christians is only to light a candle at a memorial service and tell everyone that God is here for those who remain in the world and will be there for us after death, just as He is there for the dearly departed. (Please note my perfect imitation of Rev. Lovejoy.) Really? That’s what passes for the Good News of Christ?

The Christian message is not about comfort. It doesn’t offer us 7 Steps For Gliding Through Life Into Eternity or How To Rid Your Life of Tribulation and Suffering!  No. Its message addresses our tragic deformation and present relationship to death: not just death at the end of our lives, but the death that oozes out of our very pores as we go about pretending that life divorced from God is meaningful, and that suffering and death are normal.

The Norm is that death is more powerful than life? The Norm is to be subjugated to disintegration and death? Why then do our hearts recoil in the face of The Norm? Why is it that, deep within our souls, we long for something more than this? Why do we look at suffering, disease, and death, and sense that something is not right with the world or with us? Where did this “Not right” within us come from?

Why do we know that beauty is better than ugliness, love better than hatred, and life infinitely better than death: Because the God of beauty, love, and life created us in His image. And no matter how corrupted or deformed that image is within us, there is enough left to tell us that life, not death, is what we were created for: that death is abnormal, that death is our enemy.

The Restoration of Life

The message of Christianity is that the God who is Life came into this world to save people who had freely chosen to subjugate themselves and the world to death. The God of Life conquered death and offered us eternal life, here and now, not just after we die.

The Life of God did not come into the world as a Philosophy, an Ideology, an Institution, a Religion, or a set of rules to live by: this Life was made manifest in a Person, the Perfect Man – Jesus Christ. This God who took upon himself flesh, lived for us, died for us, was buried for us, and was resurrected for us. This God-Man defeated death so that life, once again, has meaning and purpose, so that Life is now The Norm, and time itself is filled with eternity, light, and love.

Christ died

Christ rose again

Christ has conquered death

Life reigns

“And this is life eternal, that they might know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17.3) In knowing God through Christ, we are united with the God who is Life eternal. By turning away from the death of separation from God and being united with Him, death is no longer an enemy, but is Christ himself. For in him, “all things are yours …. the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.” (1 Corinthians 3)

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

The True Face of Death

Death is loss, loss of life. Life is good. Loss of good is an evil. Therefore death is an evil. Loss of a great good is a great evil. Life is a great good. Therefore death is a great evil. Not to see this is a great blindness. Blindness is a great evil. Therefore not to see death as a great evil is a great evil. –Peter Kreeft, Love is Stronger Than Death

Our culture does everything in its power to cover the true face of death. “Life’s Good. Death’s Good. It’s All Good.” We hide our instinctual horror at death’s face behind beautiful chapels playing soft elevator music in the background, and with manicured cemetery lawns. We use euphemisms such as, “sleeping,” “eternal rest,” and “passed away,” so as to shield us from the terror of the finality of death. But whatever veneer or façade we use, as it was written of Jesus, so it will be true for us: he suffered, died, and was buried. Dead.

The New Testament never speaks of the human soul as being immortal or eternal. This is why we do read of “resurrection.” God alone is eternal. Throughout Scripture, we humans are seen as dependent upon God for every breath we take. To say that our souls are immortal is to say that we are not dependent on the God of Life, but have life within ourselves, regardless of and independent from God.

Throughout scriptures God is revealed as the source and giver of life. Nowhere is He seen as the author or creator of death. Death was not His doing but ours. Death is revealed as being contrary to God: The Enemy of God. For death to be “natural” would mean that God intended it from the beginning of creation. He did not.

The story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis shows us that death is the outcome of our choice to no longer be dependent on the life of God. We took God’s gift of the freedom to choose between Life and Death and we chose to subjugate ourselves to death.

Death is a poison we freely drank: a poison that inevitably and irreversibly leads to disintegration and death.

I believe that this is another reason – The Reason, in fact – why we seek to avoid thinking about the meaning of death, seek to cover its horror with beautiful chapels and beautiful words. When we witness death we sense that something is wrong with the world: that this (death) is not right, not how it should be. And then the horror of all horrors: What if it’s not a case where there is something wrong with the world? What if there is something wrong with me?

The bad news is that there is something wrong with us. We broke faith with God. We ripped ourselves away from a relationship with the God of Life, so as to go our own way. We divorced God. This is why we don’t want to speak about death, why we avoid, at any cost, seeking out its meaning, why we work so hard to cover death’s face. At the core of our souls, we know we are guilty and that the cause of disease, suffering, and death, lies within us.

Here is the good news. In our guilt and blame we find hope. As Peter Kreeft points out in his book, Love is Stronger Than Death, there is nothing wrong with the Cosmos. There is nothing wrong with God. Death is not natural. Life is not insane or guilty: I am. And if there is something wrong with me, maybe there is hope that my wrongness may be righted.

We may seek to put a different face on reality so that it appears other than what it is, but we do not, thereby, change reality. Our only hope is in facing reality, facing the fact that Death is pointing his guilty finger in our faces. And this is the beginning of hope. I say, “beginning,” because it is only the first and necessary step in discovering the meaning of death, and the possibility of changing or transforming our relationship to it.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

Death: The Last Enemy To Be Conquered

My first encounter with death was when my Uncle Harry died. When my dad told me, I went into my bedroom weeping and retching. I was so traumatized there was no way I was going to his funeral. As I was only a boy, my parents were very caring and respectful, so did not force me. The closest thing I could come to explaining to dad what I was feeling was—terror.

As I grew older I was haunted by thoughts of my grandfather dying. (Monte, Sr.) However self-centered and juvenile, I frequently begged God to rapture us all to heaven before this could happen. (As an aside, I think many of the people who profess a belief in the “soon return of Jesus Christ for His Church” are actually whistling in a graveyard, hoping there won’t be a coffin in their futures.)

Death is Not Natural

During my formal studies in psychology one of the bon mots that we were taught was to “Teach people that death is natural.” What intrigued me was that I was hearing this from a professor who was a Christian.

Professor: Mr. Wilson, I can see that you disagree.

Mr. Wilson: I do. I think death is bloody well the most unnatural thing we will face in life.

Death is not natural. It showed up as a consequence of our free will choice to follow after God or to go our own way. God offers us life in and under Him, but we prefer death and going our own way.  

St Paul goes so far as to assert that death is not only unnatural, it is an enemy: “the last enemy to be destroyed.”

“But Monte, I want to die. In death I am freed from sickness and suffering, and from this evil world. I don’t fear death, I desire it.” Sounds quite spiritual, doesn’t it. The problem is that people who say such things usually have yet to first face the fact that death is an enemy. And how do you think God responds to those who speak and live as if the world and life that He gifted us with as something to escape as quickly as possible?

Tell me, when Jesus was in the garden praying in the shadow of his death on the cross, was he saying, “Whoopee, I am about to be outta here”? Or did he pray, “If there is anyway around this, Father, I’ll take it…let this cup (death) pass from me”?

When Jesus’ friend Lazarus died did He let out a shout of glee? No. He wept. Death is agony. Death is not natural, not what God intended for us.

Death is a terrifying enemy. YES, it is far more than this, or, rather, can be. But until we first face the reality of death being unnatural and an enemy, all of our rejoicing and celebrating that Brother Wilson is now with Jesus, are akin to Jesus skipping the bloody agony of the cross and going straight to heaven. As Peter Kreeft wrote, “Death cannot be a friend; it can only become a friend, after first being an enemy.”

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

Death and Your Worldview

I was brought up to believe that, for Christians, death is an escape hatch from this dark, terrible place of disease, poverty, and every manner of suffering imaginable. Eternal life with God is what matters. Life here on earth, at best, is an Intensive Care Unit where we wait for God to pull the plug on our life-support system. 

To those people who believe this way, there is our pre-death life on earth that is relatively meaningless, other than to prepare for death and the after life, and then there is their after-death existence, where they will find true meaning and eternal life with God.

These Christians strike out into the world advocating the reality of everlasting life with God, yet at the same time surrenders to the meaningless of this life and this world. All we can expect in our pre-death life is suffering and evil. Their fundamental message, then, is to worship the Creator of this world but reject His creation.

The unbeliever, however, defends this world, scoffing at any notion of eternal life. However, by rejecting God, whether consciously or unconsciously, their defense leaves them asserting that we humans are an accident, an insignificant mist that is here today and gone tomorrow. No matter what else they might say about finding meaning in this life and only in this life, it is all undone by the presupposition that all of this—the world, life, and death—are accidents.

The meaning you give to death determines your ideas, ideals, perceptions, evaluations, and judgments regarding your view of this world. Your relationship to death creates a framework of beliefs, ideas, and attitudes through which you interpret and interact with the world and the people within it, as well as determine how you will order your life.  

If death is an escape from this world of evil and suffering into eternal life with God, then what is the only possible and logically consistent worldview available to you?  

If this world, your life, and your death are all accidents, then what is the only possible and logically consistent worldview available to you?

“Okay, Wilson, what is the meaning of death, to you?” To begin with, I agree with St Paul’s writings: Death is an enemy we humans brought into God’s creation, an enemy that Christ came into the world to defeat.

Next Post Death: The Last Enemy To Be Destroyed

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

A Meaninglessness Death: Mindlessness, Hedonism or Narcissism

He's a real nowhere man

Sitting in his nowhere land

Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

-John Lennon and Paul McCartney

If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus,

what is the gain to me, if the dead rise not?

let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.

St Paul, I Corinthians 15.2

We cannot control death. It is coming for us and there is nothing we can do about it. So what do we do? Some of us just flip the switch of consciousness to the off position. Some look at death, decide it is the annihilation of self, that life and death are nothing more than accidents of nature, and then go about creating a life of fun and games, dancing on the deck of a sinking Titanic. Others, who have also decided death is meaningless, refuse to embrace the fact that this means that life is also without any meaning. These are the people who seek to prove that they matter, that life can still be meaningful. While their counterparts are on the deck of the Titanic dancing and shooting champagne, these people are below decks, attending a seminar on how to develop self-esteem.  

Some of those who avoid thinking about the reality of their death and its meaning have placed their lives on automatic pilot. Life is lived mindlessly, without purpose or intention. These are the people who often turn themselves over to others. “Life and death terrify me. I don’t want to think of the meaning of it all, so, here: you think your thoughts through my mind, live your life through mine. It’s your responsibility.” Avoiding seeking to face the question of the meaning of their deaths and, therefore, their lives, they are choosing to allow others to do it for them. This, of course, makes their lives a redundancy, a waste of oxygen, as they have taken on the role of “mini-me” to some other guy’s “me.” Okaaay. I suppose willful ignorance and abdication are one option. Unless there really is a point to it all and then their life is all about missing the point, isn’t it.  

Many people take a quick glance at death and are hit with a despair that they then allow to choke out any further questioning and seeking of answers. “If it’s meaningless, I don’t want to know.” These people seek to numb their senses with food, or substance abuse, or fun and games, or work, or with one thousand trivial pursuits that bring momentary pleasure and serve to keep the despair at bay. “If I don’t feel it, it isn’t there. If I don’t dig deeper into the meaning of death, then I don’t run the risk of my despair increasing exponentially, if I discover that it’s meaningless. If I close my eyes and whistle while I walk through a graveyard, then…” Then what? Have death grab you by your neck and slap you in the face with the reality that there is – or was – a meaning to it all? And then? At that point, there are no more questions to answer and no answers to live by.

But what of those people who have come to the sure conclusion that death and, therefore, life are meaningless: who have completely embraced the belief that life and death are all an accident of nature? Many of them will live by the motto, “Let us, therefore, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we are food for the worms.” Others become angry and lash out at their own meaningless existence. (See Johnny Ringo in the movie, Tombstone.) They do not deny the meaninglessness they see and do not play the hypocrite by pretending this all means something.

Others, however, have a different response to what they believe to be the meaninglessness of death. These people refuse to see their selves as impotent, refuse to see that if their death is meaningless then so is their life. “I do count. I matter. I am valuable. And I will prove it. I will not ‘go gentle into that good night.’ I will not allow death to negate me, to tell me that my life doesn’t matter. I will make myself into a hero, the chief protagonist in a book that is all about …well, me, of course! One day, death will come but not before I justify my existence and spit in death’s face.” (See Ayn Rand)

No matter what you do, death and time will erase your memory from the earth and all your heroism, “meaningful” pursuits, and wars for The Right, The Noble, and The Ideal (as you define these terms) will ultimately be meaningless. Besides, your answer to the question is no less narcissistic than the hedonist who is over there eating and drinking and being merry. Life is all about you justifying your self, eh? You decide what is meaningful and what is not? You are the Final Arbiter, god of your universe? (See? You do believe in a god, after all!) In the end, death will spit in the face of your achievements, heroism, and self-justification. If death is meaningless, then your “meaningful” life is no more significant than an inedible piece of a 25 year-old fruitcake. Of so I believe. Just something you might want to consider … if death is actually meaningless, that is. 

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014