On Living and Dying

“For man does not know his time. . .” Ecclesiastes 9:12

A year and half ago a friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer. He was young—only forty-five at the time, and the father of two little children. This past Monday I attended his memorial service.

I’ve been fighting a cough for a couple of months now. It seems that every year around this time my allergies flare up and I get a nagging cough that just won’t go away. This year however, it’s lasted longer than normal. So after too many nights of keeping my wife awake, I finally broke down and went to the doctor. He poked around my throat, asked a bunch of questions, and then told me it was probably allergies. He wrote out a prescription for allergy medication and then told me that if the cough didn’t go away soon, I should get a chest x-ray. Not that he thought I needed one he said, but just in case. He said didn’t want to be sued if I ended up having lung cancer. Lung cancer. Well thanks for putting the thought in my head.

That night while getting ready for bed I realized that the doctor’s off-hand remark, coupled with my friend’s recent passing, had stuck with me more than I realized. In the back of my mind were subtle thoughts of “What’s to keep me from getting cancer? It happened to Dave. He had little kids. I have little kids. Why shouldn’t it happen to me too?” The unconscious—now conscious—thought of death hung over me like a cloud. And then it occurred to me: the curse of death has hung over my life from the moment I was born. It hangs over all of us, all the time. There is never a moment that we live that we are not one step away from eternity. For the most part we can ignore it—push it back into the shadows and pretend it’s not there. But it is there. Some of us see it coming, like a telegraphed punch. But for others, death takes us unaware, suddenly, and too often unprepared. Either way, the reaper’s hand comes for us all. We live under the curse of our first father, and though we insolate ourselves from its reality, the fact that our lives grow ever shorter is a truth that we cannot, in the end, ignore. Nor I think, should we.

At nine-teen years of age, the great North American theologian Jonathan Edwards penned a number of resolutions by which he sought to govern his life. Two in particular stand out:

6. Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.

9. Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.

Edwards understood two important truths. First, he understood that we must not let our fear of death prevent us from living. Christ has come to vanquish death. We bear now in these jars of clay the first fruits of his resurrection—his very Spirit. We are more than conquerors and have the hope that these mortal tents will be swallowed up by immortality. Christ has broken the back of death, and will one day finish off what remains of its sting. We need no longer fear death as the ultimate end. Even in the face of death we have a future and a hope.

Yet Edwards understood an equally important truth. The sting of death has not yet been fully removed. Redemption has not yet completed its work. Death remains for each of us the last great hurdle of our journey. While we need not fixate on our pending death to the point that it paralyzes us in the present, we must reckon with its reality and order our lives accordingly. We will not get endless chances to make things right. We will not have unending opportunities to be what God has called us to be. We get one pass at life in this age. As it is written, “It is appointed only once for man to die, and after that, judgment.”

Some of us can become too preoccupied with our death. Most of us don’t think often enough about it. How long do I have? How long do you have? Only God knows. May we live with all our might while we do live, so that we will be prepared for death on the day it comes.