Hidden in the Gospel: Truths You Forget to Tell Yourself Every Day by William Farley

Author:William Farley [Farley, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596387485
Publisher: P&R Publishing
Published: 2014-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

6

Hope for the Hopeless

The resurrection is the next aspect of the gospel to preach to ourselves. To appreciate Christ’s resurrection, however, we first need to think hard about death.

Death is ugly. It is unpleasant. A few years ago, I went to the hospital to visit a man who had only a few days to live—an old friend who I had known in better times. He was dying of a disease that affects the nervous system. Sadly, I arrived too late to pay my last respects. He had just entered a coma from which he would not recover.

I will never forget the scene. He was thin and emaciated. He had lost a hundred pounds. His skin was yellow and flaky. Although he was in a coma, his eyes and mouth were open, as if mocking his unconscious condition. He drooled uncontrollably. His browning eyes testified to the gradual shutting down of his liver. He breathed with loud raspy sounds; each breath was an effort. His frame was stiff and rigid. The room smelled of death.

Ours is a culture of youth and life. We will do almost anything to avoid thinking about scenes like this. We rush corpses to the mortuary so that no one will see them. We marginalize our stooping, wrinkled elderly to long-term care facilities. For many, the elderly are social lepers, and we pretend that it will never happen to us—but it will. There are only two options: premature death or the ravages of old age. Neither is pleasant.

How does the non-Christian cope with all this? Normally he just accepts death. He has no other option. He has no concept of resurrection. To him, death is just part of living. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the father of the scientific method, wrote, “It is as natural to die as to be born.”1 We take the same attitude when we say, “In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

But Christians should never think like this. According to the Bible, death is an aberration. It is not part of God’s original plan. It is a blight on creation. It is a perversion of the intended order. It is God’s just judgment for sin. This is the Christian worldview. Christians see death differently. They despise it, because it reminds them of the horrors of sin. It says, “Sin is horrible. Look at what it does to us. Sin is awful. Look at how much God hates it.”

This chapter is about better news. Christ’s resurrection has conquered death. It began what Peter called the “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21 NKJV). That includes the restoration of immortality. Growing Christians do not listen to their nagging fears about death. They preach the resurrection to themselves.

Paul was convinced that Christ’s resurrection was “according to the Scriptures.” He wrote,

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

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