A Brief Meditation Upon Death

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”;

~Ecclesiastes 12:1

The health of your soul depends on your meditating upon two great realities: the death of Christ and your own death. Do not ever think it morbid to meditate upon death (especially to my younger readers), for though you may not want to think of it, death will surely come to you and overtake you. Indeed, every day that you try to suppress the thought of it, you are decaying and inevitably led by life's currents towards the edge of death's waterfall.

The day is most certainly coming, my friends, when your good looks and charm shall decay, your strength diminish as the simplest actions become painful and tedious tasks. Your sight will grow dim as the world's delights become dull and gray to you, and your memory becomes clouded as you slowly forget those around you, perhaps even the ones you love most. Your eloquence will be reduced to stammers and lisps, and your appetite will shrink as you lose a taste for food. All the pleasures of this world will lose their glitter and charm, and you will watch all that you love, whether people or things, die or decay. And as you fall like the yellow leaf on the tree, you shall soon be forgotten as the world goes on.

As our eyes close and our breath is leaving us and we prepare to enter into eternity, in that moment we shall truly know what it means that we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone by His grace alone. Because it is then we shall truly realize that none of our wit, our personality, our awards and skills, our investments and wealth shall be able to guarantee that we shall be saved from God's just wrath and punishment. The only thing that will matter is if we are in Christ or not.

Now to the one who has rejected Christ, their dying moments shall be most dreadful because whether they recognize the existence of God or have spent all their lives trying to suppress any thoughts about God, yet in that moment their conscience will torment them and their heart be frozen with horror at the judgment that awaits them. Perhaps in those moments they will smell burning flesh, hear the crackle of an undying fire, and the chilling wails and moans of the enemies of God.

But to the one who has humbled himself by acknowledging the reality of his crimes against God and truly believed that he has no forgiveness of sins and a relationship with God except through Christ's substitutionary atonement on the cross, to this person (whether male or female, great or small, poor or rich) God will make them one with Christ, and since Christ cannot die, therefore we who are one with Christ too shall not suffer eternal death but rise to everlasting life with Him.

Thus, for the Christian, as they grow old and watch all else decay, they shall still have the immutable Christ. As their senses lose their power, their vision of Christ shall yet become clearer, and as their eyes prepare to close, their hearts shall thrill with joy for they are about to cross the threshold of death only for a moment to enter into their Father's house to live truly and physically with His Son: Jesus Christ, who is "the Resurrection and the Life".

Let every Christian then, like the psalmist, learn to "number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom." Redeem the time, Christian, and do much for Him who died for you while you still have breath, on this side of eternity.

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;

earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away.

Change and decay in all around I see.

O thou who changest not, abide with me.

~Henry Francis Lyte, 1847

"Christ loved you when He died, and He shall love you when you die."

~ Charles Spurgeon