Life After Inevitable Death
written at Thursday, April 26, 2012
I have always wondered of the significance
behind some of the life and death accounts, or genealogies in Genesis, most
recently on Genesis 5. Again and again in the chapter, one always seem to come
across the commonly occurring, "And then he died...and then he died...and
then he died..." And this occurs through most of the chapter.
In scanning the passage, I had concluded that
the only thing significant about the repetition was in fact its, well,
repetition. It was as though the passage was trying to bring across the this
morbid and wry message of, "Life is hard, then you die." I tried to
look further, one observation was that the life spans of the characters in the
passage were pretty long, Adam lived till the age of 930 years old.
But no matter how long the life spans were,
these characters eventually died, death was certain and inevitable. Death takes
hold of the human race. I think too, that in many occasions, we think of our
faith as almost exclusively in terms of what it does for us now, rather than
preparing us for eternity such that it transforms how we live now.
While death is inevitable, there is one bright
exception in the chapter. "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more,
because God took him away." - Genesis 5:24.
And so it struck me, that it is almost as if
God is showing us that death does not have the last word. That those who walk
with God one day escape death; that even for those who die, there is a hope, in
God's grace, and indeed, life beyond inevitable death. But of course, as the
passage above indicates to me, it is tied to a walk with God. It takes the
rest of the Bible to unpack what that means.
Life After Inevitable Death
written at Thursday, April 26, 2012
I have always wondered of the significance
behind some of the life and death accounts, or genealogies in Genesis, most
recently on Genesis 5. Again and again in the chapter, one always seem to come
across the commonly occurring, "And then he died...and then he died...and
then he died..." And this occurs through most of the chapter.
In scanning the passage, I had concluded that
the only thing significant about the repetition was in fact its, well,
repetition. It was as though the passage was trying to bring across the this
morbid and wry message of, "Life is hard, then you die." I tried to
look further, one observation was that the life spans of the characters in the
passage were pretty long, Adam lived till the age of 930 years old.
But no matter how long the life spans were,
these characters eventually died, death was certain and inevitable. Death takes
hold of the human race. I think too, that in many occasions, we think of our
faith as almost exclusively in terms of what it does for us now, rather than
preparing us for eternity such that it transforms how we live now.
While death is inevitable, there is one bright
exception in the chapter. "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more,
because God took him away." - Genesis 5:24.
And so it struck me, that it is almost as if
God is showing us that death does not have the last word. That those who walk
with God one day escape death; that even for those who die, there is a hope, in
God's grace, and indeed, life beyond inevitable death. But of course, as the
passage above indicates to me, it is tied to a walk with God. It takes the
rest of the Bible to unpack what that means.
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Knowing
What matters supremely, therefore, is not
in the last analysis, the fact that I know God,
but the larger fact which underlies it --
the fact that He knows me.
J. I. Packer
