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 Dr.
Kubler-Ross is quoted in the Aug. ‘76 Reader’s Digest as
saying, “We can not live fully until we have faced our
finiteness and inevitable death.” She reached her conclusion
by observation and experience; but we can know this by faith.
Jesus taught that man was a “fool” who refuses to reckon
with death (Lu. 12:16-21). And fools are plentiful. I heard
recently of a man who has become obsessed with his desire to
remain young. He is breaking up his home in his effort to prove
his virility. But years and natural waning can not be denied. He
is going to age, and die! His unwillingness to accept the
inevitable is robbing him of a graceful and satisfying senior
period, and worse, of hope for heaven in the eternal after-life.
Christ
used a simple illustration to show that there is profit in the
right kind of death. “Except a grain of wheat fall into the
earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it
beareth much fruit” (Jn. 12:24 f.). Christ died to conquer,
and this involved “separation” in more ways than physical.
He gave up heaven and his former life (Phil. 2:4-12) in order to
serve the Father, and save us.
Most
of us recognize baptism as a “burial” of the “old man —
hence the importance of “dying” to our former life. But this
dying must continue — it is not a “once for all” dying. We
must continue to “reckon
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yourselves dead unto sin” (Rom. 6:11-13),
so that we “let not sin reign” “neither yield members as
instruments of unrighteousness.” “Mortify” your members
(Col. 3:5-f), means keep on putting to death our fleshly
appetites.
And
the meaning goes still deeper. If we have died, and are “risen
with Christ” we live above this life and its demands. We are
not “out of this world” yet we are not “OF” the world (1
Cor. 5:9-11). Food, raiment, and lodging are temporal
necessities, but we will not allow them to dominate or possess
us (Matt. 6:24-34). Baptism is an empty form if we have not
truly died to material desires and anxiety.
We
are not advocating an ascetic life. Dwelling in a cave doesn’t
separate us from the world in the Christian sense; it only
isolates the leaven that is supposed to influence the world. We
are “dead” when our “life is hid with Christ in God”
(Col. 3:3); when we are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth”
(Heb. 11:13); when we desire and live for a “better country,
that is a heavenly” (v.16).
For
such an one “death is swallowed up in victory.” Old age is
no blind alley, it is a vestibule. Each day is a golden coin, to
be spent.
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