Living in a culture that is so obnoxiously secular, it’s easy to fall into a trap that somehow the life we now live is eternal life, that we have forever, that this life is the life that matters. I know that sounds silly. You may respond that of course everyone knows they’re going to die. Maybe. For most of us, though, as Freud argued, our own deaths are inconceivable to us. We can’t fathom that we’re actually going to ever die. I imagine we’ll refuse to believe it until the bitter end, but the end will come no matter how hard we deny it. Yet, deny it we do. So being reminded that we will not in fact live forever, that the Grim Reaper will come for us too, is an important aspect of living the Christian life. Again you may say, we shouldn’t have to be reminded of the obvious, but we sinners are a stubborn lot, and lying to ourselves is our default nature. So what has history to do with this?
I’ve always loved reading history, starting back when I was in high school. It’s always fascinated me that even though I know the people I’m reading about are long dead, as I’m reading about them they seem so alive. I imagine that they were exactly like me when they were alive, that they too thought they had forever, and believed that death would never really come for them. Maybe the other guy, but certainly not them. Yet here I am, hundreds or thousands of years later reading about them, people as dead as doornails, as they say.
Entering into their lives as if they were mine is one of the reasons I also love historical novels. Great story tellers can truly bring history alive, more so than just a recitation of people and events of the past. I just finished a book by English writer Hilary Mantel called Bringing up the Bodies, the second in a three-part series about the intrigues of life around King Henry VIII. Mantel is a great story teller, and as I was reading I was living the moments with the characters. They were so real, so seemingly now, but I kept thinking in the back of my mind, these people have been dead for almost 500 years! Yet even as death was more of an ever present reality in the 16th century than it appears now, I could image those people shoving back thoughts of their own imminent demise. Blaise Pascal wrote wrote these words in the 17th century:
In spite of all these miseries man wants to be happy, and only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how can he go about this? It would be best if he could make himself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to stop thinking about it. Being unable to cure death, misery, and ignorance, men have decided that in order to be happy, they must repress thinking about such things.
File this under the more things change . . . . A sickly man, Pascal died in 1662 at the age of 39. He died, however, with trust in his Savior, answering in the affirmative the question Jesus put to Martha the sister of Lazarus in John 11:
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though he die; 26 and whoever lives believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
He puts the same question to us: Do you believe this?
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