Death bothers me. Do you remember when you first encountered it? While my dad was in Southeast Asia, serving our country, my mom, my two older brothers and I moved to Rolla, Missouri to live down the street from Gibson’s on Stephendale Court. I attended kindergarten there that year. Miss Jones was my teacher. My goldfish and my parakeet died that year. I remember thinking if we thawed the goldfish bowl, the fish would live. Robert Kennedy died that year. So did Martin Luther King, Jr. The greatest loss for me personally was when Opal Wright, my grandmother died in that same year. I remember deep sadness. With all the talk about Vietnam, I am sure that I feared that my dad would also die.
What about God? Does death bother him? God is the living, life-giving God who breathed life into Adam and Eve. He felt it deeply when Abel’s blood cried to him from the ground after Cain murdered him. How must God have felt for the forty days of the flood when almost all living things perished? I know that a holy God must judge sin. The soul that sins will die. But how does God feel when things die? We don’t have to wonder. God told the exiles in Ezekiel’s day, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11). Peter tells us that “God is not willing for anyone to perish, but wants all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died (John 11:35). God is holy. He is also love.
I remember when my dad came home. Life had won. I talked to him last night, fifty-seven years after he returned. During the flood, the ark actually worked . . . it floated. A boat full of life surmounted the springs, the flood, and the waves. God did not give up on life when the world flooded, but made a way for people to live. Would we have been on the ark if we lived in that day? If we choose to reject God’s offer of eternal life, we too will perish, separated from God. But if we choose to trust in God’s plan to save us, we will live. Just as the ark floated, Jesus found a way to save us through the cross and resurrection. Except for the people alive at Jesus’ return, everyone will die. But no one must live eternally separated from God, unless they choose to do so. “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Receive the gift. Choose life.
