Somewhere on your calendar is an appointment you may never keep. Maybe it’s a vacation that you have been looking forward to. As humans, we tend to assum that there wil always be another weekend, another candle on the birthday cake.
Hayden Panettiere had a birthday coming this Friday and she would have turned 37.
Instead, the actress was found unresponsive Sunday, August 16, in Greenville, South Carolina. First responders tried to revive her and she died at 36. Her official cause of death has not yet been determined. Tragically, she leaves behind an 11-year-old daughter.
Maybe that is why a death like hers stops us. For a few minutes, the subject we spend most of our lives keeping at a comfortable distance walks right into the room. Death is a fact, the clock ticks as the years go by. Somewhere along the way, one ordinary day will be the last day we have on this earth.
I think people used to live closer to death. Ozark tradition was that families sometimes laid out the body themselves. In fact, the undertaker might not come for days. Then people stood around the humiliation of the grave, watched the coffin lowered into the earth and walked away. They knew death was for real. We know it too except we have simply become better at hiding it.
Think about this, medicine can tell us when the heart has stopped and science can describe what happens to flesh when life ends. But, the world cannot tell me what happens five minutes after I die.
The Bible begins answering that question by telling us what we are, “The LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living person” (Genesis 2:7, NASB).
There is more to you than the chemicals which make you up. The instant after death, nearly all the material that formed the body is still there. Yet everybody beside the bed knows the person is gone. What happened?
Death is the separation of body and spirit. As the body returns to the dust…the real you continues.
For the Christian, the next moment is almost too wonderful to take in. Jesus told the dying thief, “Today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Paul spoke of departing this life and being with Christ, which he called “very much better” (Philippians 1:23).
Immediately! The believer does not wander through some dark corridor trying to find heaven. Christ loses none of His people somewhere between the hospital room and eternity. The moment the spirit is separated from the body, the Christian is with the Lord.
Still, heaven immediately after death is only part of the Christian hope.
God has not forgotten the body. Job said, “Yet from my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). Jesus said an hour is coming when “all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come out” (John 5:28–29).
There is not a cemetery on earth Christ has forgotten. One day every grave and every body reduced to dust will answer the voice of the Son of God. Paul says the believer’s body is sown in corruption and raised in incorruption, sown in weakness and raised in power, sown in dishonor and raised in glory.
How can anybody believe something that enormous? Because one grave is already empty, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20).
The first fruits were the beginning of the harvest and the guarantee that more was coming. Jesus Christ walked out of His grave. His resurrection is God’s pledge that death will not keep those who belong to Him. Resurrection gives us hope after death. The gospel answers the question that comes before it.
How does a sinner come to belong to Christ?
Scripture says our deepest problem begins before the coffin. We are spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins. We were made for God, yet sin has separated us from Him. We have disobeyed the One who gave us life. We carry real guilt before a holy God and death is the terrible wage of that rebellion.
Then God did what we could never do for ourselves. Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, came for the guilty.
At the cross, He stood in the place of sinners and bore the judgment sin deserves. God did not pretend our rebellion was small or sweep our guilt aside. It was judged fully in Christ. The verdict that should have fallen upon us fell upon Him.
Our sin was laid upon Jesus, and He carried it completely. The righteousness we could never produce is credited to those who trust Him. Every charge against the believer has been answered. The debt is paid. A guilty sinner can now stand before a holy God forgiven, received, reconciled, and made spiritually alive because Jesus Christ has done everything necessary to bring him home.
Think of the wonder of that.
The One we sinned against came to save us.
God did not ask us to climb our way back to Him. In Christ, He came down to rescue people who could never rescue themselves. Jesus took the condemnation that belonged to us. Through faith, we receive a righteousness that belongs to Him.
We come with empty hands and Christ fills them. A Christian therefore does not arrive before Jesus hoping his good deeds outweigh his bad ones. He comes resting on the same Savior who held him while he lived. His hope of being received then rests upon exactly what it rests upon now: Christ died for him.
The Savior who is enough today will be enough in that hour.
I had heard the gospel hundreds of times. Then one day I saw, believed,and trusted. Christ became real to me and God made me spiritually alive. What He has already done for my soul, He will one day do for my body.
Perhaps you fear death. You would be a strange person if you felt nothing at all. Maybe death itself does not frighten you, though dying does. Christians still grieve and graves still hurt. An 11-year-old girl has lost her mother. Parents have lost a daughter.
The gospel never asks us to call death beautiful, it tells us death has been beaten. Paul could stare toward the grave and ask, “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).
Death does not have it all its own way. There are plans on my calendar I may never keep. The same is true for you. One day somebody else may close our calendar, cancel the appointment, return the phone call and stand beside the place where our body is laid. For those who are in Christ, that grave will only be waiting for a voice.
The sky, not the grave, is my goal.
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