What’s the Benefit of a Virus? Death

I can imagine that the title of this post would make people think there is something seriously wrong with me. There is! I’ve been afflicted most of my life with contemplating my own death, and, as I hit my early teen years, obsessing over what in the world it might mean. It blows me away that people will do everything they can to ignore the most obvious, and disturbing, fact of our existence: we die. It seems to never occur to them to ask what death means. Or why is there death. Maybe it’s a good opportunity to address this question with a pandemic known as the Coronavirus making its way across the world. Nothing like a scary pandemic to get people thinking about their mortality.

It is very easy in a culture awash in secularism, where God is at best a purely personal and subjective concern, for people to live as if this life is all that matters. Yet everyone knows they’re going to die; nobody gets out of here alive. For most people, though, it’s merely a theoretical concern. Until it isn’t. As I’ve contemplated my own mortality, and that of others, I’ve often thought that nobody can fathom their own death. The founder of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, wrote that “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death.” I even believe that on death’s doorstep we refuse to accept it is actually happening to us. For some reason John Lennon comes to mind whenever I think about that. In the song “Across the Universe” from Let it Be, John sings the chorus, “Nothing’s gonna change my world,” except, I add, a bullet in the chest. I imagine as he realizes what’s happened to him, in that split second before he passes out, thinking, “This thing is impossible! I can’t be dying!”

I am convinced that this incredulity we have in the face of death is powerful evidence for the validity of the Christian view of reality. Even Jesus when he stood before Lazarus’ tomb (John 11) wept even as he knew he was about to bring him back to life. As the author of life, to him it’s extinction was terribly, horribly, wrong. He reacted to it the way we instinctively feel when confronted with death: this should not be! Contra Disney’s great “circle of life,” there is nothing natural about death. But if all we are is lucky dirt, then what’s the big deal!

The only plausible explanation for death is found in Genesis 1-3. Man created good, created eternal with access to the tree of life, but warned by God not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If he did, God warned, he would “certainly die.” He did, and we do. We see why in chapter 3. Tempted by the serpent that the fruit of the forbidden tree would allow them to “be like God, knowing good and evil,” Eve and Adam ate. Thinking we can be like God hasn’t turned out so well. When a virus comes along to remind us of this very bad decision, it is an opportunity to wonder about a solution. And I don’t mean a vaccine.

One of the downsides of living in the modern world is the illusion that science and technology can conquer this ancient plague called death. For most of history, until the 20th century, life was in every way apropos of Thomas Hobbes’ famous words: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If human beings made it through childbirth, and then not die as children, chances of making it to what we consider senior citizen status was not good. I’m a huge fan of modern medicine, and all the other blessings that have come from the explosion of scientific knowledge, but what all of that cannot do is change the fundamental fact of our existence: we’re all gonna die. Just maybe a nasty, invisible, tricky microscopic thing called a virus can remind us that death is the ultimate question mark of our existence. And that an answer for it has been provided. We read these amazing words in the 25th chapter of Isaiah 700 years before Christ: