Death Hurts

The pain of death

Death hurts.

Many years ago, at a friend’s invitation, I went to a Good Friday service at a liberal church. Throughout the evening, the entire mood was one of pain and grief. At the end, we were told not to smile cheerfully at each other as we went our separate ways, but to maintain a solemn silence. When we returned to gather on Easter morning, then we could greet each other with joy as we proclaimed, “He is risen!” We were encouraged to keep the sadness of Good Friday in our thoughts until Sunday.

In contrast, most of the evangelical Good Friday services that I attend close with the uplifting hope of Easter. They downplay the very real pain of Jesus’ death and quickly move along to the joy of His resurrection, rather than remaining in the between-time of intense grief that the earliest Christians suffered through.

But death hurts.

My neighbor, Matthew, and I were more like acquaintances than friends. We’d exchange greetings when we saw each other out front. Once in a while we’d extend that to a brief conversation, with comments on the weather or the latest sports scores.

Our encounters were short and shallow, not enough for me to form an accurate view of his character. But over time I grew to respect him because of what I saw in him outside of our conversations and what I heard about him from others.

He was kind and gracious to everyone, with a ready smile and laugh. He was a hard and steady worker who, at about 40 years old, was struggling financially through no fault of his own, but who never expressed any bitterness or resentment about it. Matthew was a good guy.

And then, one day recently, he was suddenly gone. A heart attack took his life.

I didn’t shed many tears, because I’d never been very close to him. But it hurt more than I would’ve expected.

I thought I was hurting for his grieving parents, although I’d never met them. I’m sure that was a big part of it, but it went beyond that.

I thought I was hurting because he was no longer there to say hello when I expected him to be. I did miss him a bit, but it went beyond that.

There’s something about death itself that just plain hurts. For most people, the death of a loved one will trigger emotional pain beyond any other suffering that they ever go through.

Death hurts.

I was a teenager when President Nixon resigned. I remember the anger and hatred people felt toward him for his devious character and illegal actions. But I also remember the change when, not too many months later, he experienced a potentially life-threatening medical crisis. Hard hearts were suddenly softened. Voices that had been raised in anger were hushed. The possibility of death was looming in front of us, and we felt the hurt. Even for this man who had caused so much pain.

Death hurts.

Even if we didn’t know the person very well.

Even if we didn’t like him.

The pain of Good Friday

We need to allow ourselves to feel that hurt. Even on Good Friday. Maybe especially on Good Friday.

All of Jesus’ followers were deeply hurt by His death. Shouldn't we be, too?

It’s easy to assume that the only reason for their pain was their lack of faith. Jesus had told them many times that He would die and rise again (e.g. Mark 8:31), but those foolish, blind followers of His refused to believe Him.

Some Christians seem to think that if the disciples had accepted the truth He’d graciously revealed to them in advance, they wouldn’t have felt any pain or grief at all at the cross. Maybe they would have rejoiced that God’s will was being done, and eagerly looked forward to His resurrection on the third day.

But would they?

Or would their hearts have broken anyway? In sympathy for His physical and spiritual suffering. In grief for their loss of His bodily presence. In anger at the injustice. Or just because death hurts.

Jesus cried at the death of Lazarus—even though He knew that He would soon bring him back to life and that God would be glorified as a result (John 11:4). Jesus wept at something that He knew would bring glory to both Father and Son.

Death hurts.

The joy of Easter

And that makes the wonder and joy of Easter so much greater. Death itself has been defeated. That most painful suffering that many of us experience was conquered by God through Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The contrast between the terrible pain of the crucifixion and the great joy of the resurrection is similar to Paul’s comparison in 2 Corinthians 4:16-17: Through the disciples’ light and momentary troubles on Good Friday (as real and deep and intense as those troubles were), God achieved an eternal weight of glory on Easter Sunday that far outweighed them all. It was far more real and deep and intense.

Easter doesn’t mean that we’ll never hurt. It means that even the most serious pain we’ll ever know can be healed through the crucifixion and resurrection. (This isn’t usually instantaneous. It often takes a while. Maybe that’s one reason God allowed some time to pass between the two events—so we won’t expect instant relief.)

And we won’t just be healed, leaving us pretty much the same but with a few fresh scars. We’ll be redeemed, transformed, made new, brought into a kind of life that includes pain but that far outweighs any and all suffering that the evil one can ever inflict on us.

 

 

I Believe; Help my Unbelief*

Painful doubts

Is there a single Christian on this planet who doesn’t suffer from doubt at least occasionally? I doubt it.

One of the greatest sources of doubt that Western Christians face: The clash between biblical and natural explanations for everything that exists. I struggled with this issue for many years after being saved.

I became a Christian as a freshman in high school. Up to that time, I’d been steeped in the certainty of evolution and the Big Bang. During an open discussion on origins in my eighth-grade science class, a fellow student had had the audacity to suggest that God had created all that we see. My intense, automatic, internal reaction was, “You can’t say that in school!”

As a young Christian, I knew I was supposed to believe in the Genesis account of our beginnings. But evolution made so much sense. There was a convincing logic and a sort of beauty to it. The evidence appeared overwhelming.

Shortly after graduating from college, an agnostic friend asked me point blank whether I believed that God had created all that exists in six days. I had to honestly say that I believed that He could have done it, but I was still uncertain about what had actually happened.

Evidence for creation

Over the next five years or so, God kept confronting me with this question—and with evidence for biblical creation. For the first time, I heard the argument that if humans came into being through evolution, there was no explanation for the Fall. No original sin. No need for Jesus to come and save us. No basis for my faith. That was pretty scary.

Another fact that hadn’t really registered in all my years of reading the Bible: Jesus always spoke about the events in the Old Testament as if they were literally true. Always. For example, when the Pharisees questioned Him about the laws governing divorce, Jesus asked them whether they had read that “at the beginning the Creator made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Jesus clearly supported the Genesis account. Who was I to question it?

God sent a brother in Christ to provide a good role model for me. He was an engineer, a critical and logical thinker, and a firm believer in creation. He was rarely able to accept something simply because the Bible says it’s true. He had to wrestle with it, to think it through and examine the evidence. If he could trust God’s Word in this area, maybe I could too.

I attended a class at my church on the case for creation. One night, we watched a video showing fossils with dinosaur and human footprints side by side, followed by an interview with an atheistic scientist who had examined the rocks and was asked for his analysis. After admitting that no animal other than a human being could have left such distinctive footprints, his feeble explanation was that they must be a product of erosion.

Which takes more faith: To believe in the pretty much impossible possibility that wind and water carved out several obviously human footprints in a perfect human stride next to equally clear dinosaur footprints—or to accept the evidence that people and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time? This experience was my first taste of the powerful bias of a supposedly objective scientist when confronted with facts that contradicted his own set views.

The class also addressed a sticky question: Why would God create a universe where it looks like natural processes have been at work over billions of years? Isn’t that deceptive?

They called it “apparent age.” Adam didn’t start out as a single cell. Plants and animals weren’t all seeds and embryos on the first day of their creation. Many of them were fully formed, mature beings. They had apparently passed through all the previous ages and stages.

In the same way, all that exists—rocks, planets, the light coming to us from distant stars—was created instantaneously, but appearing as if it had arisen through natural processes over time. This strategy provides the continuity we need to be able to study God’s creation scientifically.

Eventually, my faith grew strong enough to trust the Bible’s explanation for my existence. And I hope I’ve learned from my own experience to exercise loving patience toward other Christians who are struggling with painful doubts.

God’s goodness

One thing still bugged me, though. Our universe is expanding. The most obvious explanation for that expansion is the Big Bang. Why would God intentionally design a universe with something as seemingly unnecessary as its expansion, something that would undermine faith by pointing to a nonexistent Big Bang? I didn’t like that.

Sometimes God asks us to trust Him. Sometimes He wants us to accept what He says even when we don’t understand it as well as we’d like to. It’s called faith. But sometimes He graciously gives us a glimpse of the answers to our questions.

I was doing research for my last post when He unexpectedly provided one of those answers. All this time, I’d imagined that a stable universe was a real option. I had no idea that God knew better. The truth is that this universe must be expanding at just the right rate or it couldn’t exist.

I could have gone through the rest of my life without learning that fact. After fifty years as a Christian, I’ve reached the point where I can say that I don’t have all the answers, but I know that God does. When something puzzles me, I might face temporary doubts. I might even remain uncomfortable with it for years. But I know deep down inside that He has a perfectly good reason for it. Yet God, in His grace and love and kindness, granted me this opportunity to delight in His design.

Satan is always sending painful questions into my life to try to shake my faith. But God frequently responds with fascinating answers to build it up even more. (For another example, see “The Crucifixion.”)

*Mark 9:24 ESV. One of my favorite verses.