We recently visited relatives and spent some time with my wife’s mother and father who both live in elderly facilities, and also visited my mother who does as well. I don’t know how other people respond to being around a lot of older people, but it depresses me. Seeing people aging and their bodies having to endure the ravages of time is not something I can just blow off, like it has no implications for me and everyone around me. I know, they know, you know, we all know, they will be dead soon, but it’s not a pleasant topic to contemplate, so people, old and young alike ignore it. It’s even less acceptable to discuss openly, and if you do, people will think you morbid or negative.

For me, though, the topic is never far from my mind, and I have a story that is so indicative of that. When our granddaughter was about to be born (Jan. 22, 2022), I told my wife, “Just think, in 2100 she’ll be 78 years old!” And she replied, perfectly, “Can you just let her be born first!” It was hilarious. But as I told my daughter, who knows me very well, as soon as Eleanor was conceived, she was condemned to death. And given she isn’t shocked by my Woody Allen like obsession with death, she shook her head in lamentable agreement. But unlike the atheist Mr. Allen, for those of us who trust in the resurrection of Christ, death for isn’t the end, but only the end of the beginning of blissful life eternal with our Savior and all those who have preceded us in Christ. How do we know this? That’s a big question, but before I get to that, we need to establish that our mortality is something we need to think about all the time. I know, it’s a tough sell, but bear with me.

When I’m around much older people (I’m no spring chicken!), like in a retirement community, I don’t think about people much differently than if I’m in a restaurant in a chic part of Miami Beach, for example, where I’m surrounded by young, good looking “kids” in their 20s or 30s who are in great shape. It’s less depressing and easier to get sucked into the illusion that life isn’t a death sentence in such an environment, but it’s a lie, a bold-faced horrific lie that the devil uses to lead people to hell. I can hear Satan whisper in their ears, “Hey beautiful, hey, handsome, isn’t life great now? No need to worry about what happens after this life, get all you can, eat, drink, and be merry because, well, it’s fun!” I’m convinced most young people, I’d say prior to entering their 40s, are under the illusion that death happens to other people, not them. As Fraud argued, human beings cannot imagine their own deaths. It is, literally, inconceivable to us, unless that is, we are reminded of that fact, over and over and over again.

This widespread illusion in the modern world, or should I say delusion, is a “gift” of the secularism we’ve inherited since the seventeenth century Enlightenment. There have been many deleterious consequences of this movement in Western intellectual thought, but the most pernicious is related to epistemology, or how and what we can know. In our secular culture, thinking about or focusing on anything beyond this life is waste of time because, well, we really can’t know anything about it; we are bound, most people assume, to the physical world. This kind of thinking began to seep into the stream of Western thought with the work of Immanuel Kant (1774-1804). Simply put, Kant stipulated that there are two realms, one called the “noumenal realm,” and the other the “phenomenal realm.” The latter is material reality, the one we can know, while the former is the meta-physical realm (above, outside of the material), and beyond our ability to know. (Here is a great short video of R.C. Sproul describing how Kant paved the way for agnosticism, that we can’t really know, which is the faith choice of our age).

Given we are all drenched in a secularism that programs agnosticism into us from birth, most people figure why bother with that after life stuff; we can’t know it anyway, and it’s all guesses and “faith.” Which is why we need to remind ourselves, all the time, that death can find us at any moment. For example, no matter how well we take care of ourselves, what great shape we’re in, how perfect our bloodwork is, an airplane can fall on our house tomorrow, that’s it, we’re gone. Echoing Isaiah, the Apostle Paul says, “God gives all life and breath and everything else,” and he can take that breath anytime he pleases. So it’s best we approach life in humility and treat it as the precious gift it is, one for Christians that will continue forever, a life without pain, sorrow, sin, sadness or death. Yes, that is as inconceivable to us as our own deaths, but that is why faith (i.e., trust) is required, and there are an infinite number of reasons why this faith is justified.

In a recent post where I laid out some of the reasons that compel me to accept the trustworthiness of Christianity, I assert that “everyone lives by faith, which I define as  trust based on adequate evidence. I trust based on more than adequate evidence to me that Christianity is true.” The question is who and what will we trust. I trust the man who rose from the dead, who claimed he was “the resurrection and the life,” and that whoever believes in him will live even though he die, and whoever lives and believes in him “will never die.” Do you believe this? I do. And Isaiah 25 gives us a glimpse into what this promise will look like when it is fulfilled:

⁶ On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷ On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

⁹ In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

This is a program even Woody Allen should sign up for: no more death.