A Culture of Death

We live in a culture of death.

Everything in our world is banking upon the reality of death.

• Medicine believes in death and fights it with every scintilla of science and every cent of one's hoarded resources.
• Government believes in death. Social Security tables are betting for it. 
• Courts believe in death. Wills are probated daily.
• The insurance industry believes in death. They make billions on our hedging against its inevitability.
• Even the church believes in death. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: "To rake in everything or to throw away everything, this is the attitude of one who believes fanatically in death" (Ethics, p. 92).

We hoard. We dispose. All of it in preparation to die.

But Jesus!

Jesus Christ is the only human being who ever raised Himself from the dead. Oh yes, we hear resurrection stories about how God has brought people and even organizations back from the dead. But Jesus is very God and very man. He raised Himself from death. He became victor over death. He descended into Hell and seized the keys of Hell and death.

Jesus believes in life. He neither hoards or disposes. He is never in want. He is plenty.

I just lost a friend. He died in his sleep at 44 years of age. In that moment of death, he was with the Lord Jesus. My friend is more alive now than ever. I don't know the physical location of that place. Some people say, "He is in a better place." Understatement. My friend has found ultimate reality--eternal life.

Bonhoeffer wrote: "Within the risen Christ the new humanity is borne, the final, sovereign Yes of God to the new human being.  Humanity still lives, of course, in the old, but is already beyond the old. Humanity still lives, of course, in a world of death, but is already beyond death. Humanity still lives, of course, in a world of sin, but we are already beyond sin. The night is not yet over, but day is already dawning" (Ethics, p. 92).