A daughter lost

Over at Credo (one of my favorite online resources) Fred Zaspel offers a deeply moving reflection on the life and recent death of his beloved daughter. Please take time to read it and pass it along.

Nothing natural about death

From Russell Moore:

On a Saturday long ago, our Lord Jesus was a corpse. This isn’t natural.

Problem is, death seems normal to us. Darwinian naturalism, along with most contemporary philosophies, assumes that death is the natural ending point to life. The Christian gospel insists otherwise, seeing death as an alien invader of the cosmic order, a curse from the Edenic fall, and a strategy of an enemy spirit to crush God’s image-bearing humanity (Heb. 2:14-15).

In Scripture, death is personified as itself an enemy, indeed the final enemy to be placed under the feet of a triumphant King Jesus (1 Cor. 15:24-26).

Death in all its forms, from animal predation to “natural” disasters to “old age” expiration, all point to the cold truth that God is not ruling the cosmos through his human mediators in the way he intended at the start.

In the present age, all people still grow old, get sick, and die. There is a sundering of the body from the soul, a violent act that tears at God’s original creational purpose of breathing his life into the man of the dust (Gen. 2:7). When a man dies, his flesh reverts back to the dust of the earth, a seeming contradiction of God’s creation.

There is one Man, however, who does not owe death as the wages of sin. He cannot be accused by the ruler of this age, because He alone has an untroubled conscience before the tribunal of God. He’s not a corpse anymore.

The resurrection of Jesus is the first wave of a counter-revolution that will turn back death’s tyranny and satanic rule forever.

Death isn’t natural at all.

Evangelicals: Putting the "Fun" back in "Funeral"

Contemporary evangelicals don't do death well. After all, it's negative. And that seems to be the one great sin for contemporary Christians. And so evangelicalism has a host of euphamisms for such negative words as "sin," "wrath," and, the worst of all, "death."

Craig Parton has a great article in the latest issue of Modern Reformation:

If we are anything, we are a culture of entertainment and denial that has sanitized dying and death and put it in a world hopefully far, far away. Sadness, if prolonged or of a disturbing depth, is to be diagnosed and medicated. Even sadness that might, God forbid, lead to repentance.

And entertainment is the mother's milk from which today's evangelical celebrations gladly feed. We want our funerals to mirror our church services and our church services to mirror our virtual lives--fun, interesting, enlightening, moving, and upbeat. Whether it is faithful to Christ and his Word is, well, nice if you can actually pull that off and stay cool, but it is not obligatory. If your religious life is fun, interesting, enlightening, moving, and upbeat, then it is clearly faithful to Christ and his Word.

The church used to pay less heed to the impacts of secular culture on its people--in fact, the church was culture. The church's fights were more with the sinful flesh and with the devil. The world, or culture, and Christianity were nearly synonymous, and in many ways secular Greek culture provided support and a springboard for the advancement of Christian intellectual and artistic life. The church also had good reason for absolute confidence in its liturgical forms grounded in the highly regulated Old Testament worship centering in the Temple. The church had particular confidence in the forms that surrounded the death of the Christian. The church knew what dying sinners must hear from her, and one was on the cusp of entering the Church Triumphant. The dying sinner needed to confess his sins and hear the words of absolution spoken by the called minister of Word and Sacrament, and the dying needed to receive the body and blood of Jesus unto the forgiveness of sins from that called servant. This was serious business not given over to talk-show hosts who might well deliver themselves rather than Jesus and him crucified to those in the throes of death.

The church also recognized the important humanity connected to the grieving and sadness that surrounds dying and death. The Scriptures are replete with examples of courageous men weeping over death (the grief of Job over his personal Armageddon, the grief of David over the death of his child, the grief of Jesus over Lazarus). Indeed, Psalm 6 tells us David wept all night over his sins. This affirmation of the masculinity of grieving and the proper place for sadness (both in the death of a loved one or in repentant sorrow for sin) has now been replaced by the "celebration of life" that eliminates the dead body, the casket, the burial, and the sadness and grieving that once accompanied death. The church's romanticizing of death is a consequence of its substitution of the Man of Sorrows with a Teenager of Fun. This is another reason why men don't waste their time coming to our churches. When you sentimentalize death and make it "fun," skeptics will find something else to do on Sunday. If this Jesus can't deliver at death's portal, he surely is not worth consulting on the issues of this life. '

Read the entire article HERE.

Carl Trueman on Death and Meaning

Carl Trueman's latest at Ref21 is, once again, worth reading.

To celebrate life at a funeral or memorial service is a nonsense. It is an insult to the bereaved relatives who, at best, are surely only kidding themselves that the death is made somehow easier by the fact the life was worth living in the first place. Surely that makes the death even less of a context for celebration. It is also a ridiculous contradiction in terms: if life has meaning, then death is an outrage; if death is not an outrage, then life has no meaning. In either case, what is there to celebrate? And those of us who believe that life has a meaning have even less cause to celebrate than those who are `narrating themselves into their own storylines.' Let's keep funerals for grieving and lamentation at the outrage that sin has perpetrated on the world. Keep the happy endings for Disney's sugar-coated castration of classic fiction.

Read the entire article HERE.

Prepared for Death

“We are not really prepared for life until we are prepared for death. In California, at least, people are not really allowed to die. They just ‘pass away.’ Unlike the crosses in the churchyard that were once visible through the glass windows as people heard God’s Word and invoked His name for rescue, the sentimental and anonymous cemetaries (with euphemistic names like Forest Lawn) hide death from view. We do not like to talk about it and we are uncomfortable hanging out with relatives and friends on their deathbed. Focusing on ameliorating temporal stress, insecurity, problems in marriages and families, and general ‘well-being,’ the church often misses the opportunity to raise people’s eyes to heaven, where earthly things fall into their proper perspective."

- Michael Horton from The Gospel-Driven Life

God's sovereign goodness in the death of His beloved

Please take time to read this post from Tim Challies. It is a letter written by Dennis Rainey concerning the death of his baby granddaughter. It is a model of the mysterious wedding of grief mixed with joy which is only possible in Christ. It is a moving meditation on the sovereign goodness of God even in the midst of our deepest losses.