If ever we needed an example of the fact that death is the great social leveller, we have had it in the past week.
A few years ago one of my brothers was asked to visit a poor old lady in a Fifeshire mining village who was dying. As he approached her bedside the old lady said, “son, I’m feard to dee”. In her West Fife dialect she was expressing exactly the same sentiment as Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela. According to newspaper reports this week his final words were, “I don’t want to die, please don’t let me die”.
Death is the final great taboo in western society, we don’t talk about it until it is upon us or those we love. Despite the assurances of high profile atheists that death is the end, we fear the unknown beyond and perhaps the thought of leaving a meaningless life – even the hedonistic Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. All of us at some level want real significance in life and sense a deeper reality to our being that suggests that death does not end existence.
For Christians, and by that term I mean those who have a living faith in Christ, not those who merely tick that box on the hospital form, for such Christians there is a confidence that we know what lies beyond death and we need not fear that – even if the process of getting there is just as unpleasant for the believer as the unbeliever.
One of the great doctrines of Christianity is that by dying Christ defeated death. His resurrection was a powerful demonstration that death had no hold over Him. The Christian can put his hand in that of his Lord and know the reality of His promise, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish”, John 10.27,28.