I’m such a Debbie Downer! I can’t help it. After I became a Christian when I was 18, I haven’t been able to attend or see a New Year’s celebration with out being struck by how ridiculous it all is. Do not these people, I always think, realize that they are celebrating being one year closer to their death? Is that not the ultimate buzz kill? Of course it is! So, let’s just stuff the thought down whenever it might bubble up a bit, and PARTY! Yet we cannot escape the uncomfortable fact of our mortality, no matter how hard we try, and people try very hard. What a bummer this death thing is—puts such a crimp in our plans. In our health obsessed, airbrushed culture, thinking about death too much is an indication of some kind of psychosis, and talking about it too much is impolite, not to mention awkward. Blaise Pascal understood this modern condition some 350 years ago:
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.
And New Year’s Eve parties are one gigantic exercise in mass repression. But try as we might, death stalks us at every turn, and as Pascal further says, “The last scene of the play is bloody, however fine the rest of it. They throw dirt over your head, and it is finished forever.” Really, we go into the dirt, and that’s it? Yep? Except it isn’t, at least if Christianity is true, and it is! How can I be so confident? Well, there are lots of reasons, but I’ll briefly present two here: explanatory power, and the resurrection of Christ.
Speaking of death, what best explains why death exists? New Year’s Eve party goers don’t care, and would think you rude for asking. But is there any more important question? For all of recorded history, people have recoiled from death as if it is something unnatural and wrong. Fear of death is a cliché. Doesn’t it make sense to ask why there is something we all treat as if it’s the most horrible thing of all? Does not 2020 prove that? Are not mask-wearing revelers proof positive that everyone is terrified of death, while at the same time think they can somehow make themselves immune to it? And the more secular the person, the less willing they are to address the meaning of death. For those religions and philosophies over the millennia who have even bothered to try to explain death, the only plausible explanation is found in Genesis 1-3. In fact, it makes perfect sense of our experience of death. That is one reason for my confidence.
The other is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead three days after being brutally killed on a Roman cross. The evidence for the resurrection is compelling, and I would argue overwhelming. Any other explanation for the empty tomb (which pretty much all historians and scholars agree was in fact empty), like the disciples stole the body, requires more faith than that Jesus came back to life after three days in a tomb. If you know anything about first century Jews, you know they would be the very last people on earth to make up a story about God becoming a man, dying on a tree, and then coming back to life in the middle of history. The only plausible explanation for those first century Jews’ transformation into Christians is an actual, historical resurrection of Jesus. The church was built against all odds by Jews who preached a resurrected Messiah from the very beginning, and thus death for those who embrace this risen messiah is only the end of the beginning.
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