Our coming death makes life both more serious and less serious.
We must take life more seriously because this life we have now is to be measured and weighed. It has real consequences, and the Bible tells us it has eternal consequences. Will we or will we not trust in the Lord Jesus with this life that we have been given? That is a serious question, and that question makes life a serious matter because this life will come to an end. It is because of death that this life is given such great seriousness.
To be sure, life was serious before death. In those moments when Adam and Eve lived with God before their fall, their life is valuable and weighty because they are made in the image of God. However, life after the introduction of death has now had something else introduced to it. Even as something is taken away from it. A certain kind of seriousness is added in the presence of death which tempers life’s joys. Death reorganises the priorities of life.
It is tempting to live for the here and now like our life depended on every fleeting moment. Every moment must be productive. Every moment must be squeezed of life to extract the essential nutrients for temporary sustenance. When this temporary moment is overvalued, or taken too seriously, something has become amiss. Ill-defined priorities climb to the top of our existential to-do list and find a misplaced home.
We might say that death is the anecdote to that. You can’t take your toys to heaven, or hell for that matter. Sometimes it feels like all the things we have to do, play with, work for, work with and work to achieve, et cetera et cetera, sometimes they feel like toys. Then it becomes rather silly when we treat those toys like they mean the world to us.
Death touches everything a bit differently. Overall it makes our life decisions vastly more important, especially the one decision to follow or reject the Lord Jesus.
But then to other decisions, life becomes less serious. Our pursuits in light of eternity don’t matter as much as we think they might. What really has weight is how we carry ourselves through life; our character, and our motivations. These things are not necessarily seen by others, but the Lord sees them – the eternal Lord sees them.
So what brings about these random thoughts? Well I’m writing this in my little study. There’s not a lot of stuff in my study, it’s almost like a storage space. But some of the things that I’ve stored in here are hanging up; my bachelor of nursing certificate and my bachelor of Divinity certificate. They each represent four years of my life. These hang up on one side causing me to think about them and what they represent. But then, in front of me hangs a painting. Just a small A4 painting. It’s a little representative picture. There is King Jesus, me and my wife, and our child Ellie who died.
The death of a child is a sobering experience. It gave me a certain perspective on life. It has become both more and less serious. I treated things that don’t matter much like they really matter, and I treated things that really matter like they are optional. But death helps me think a little straighter. As painful as it is, I do appreciate the reminders of death around our house, some pictures here or there, her urn of ashes and clothes hanging up. I don’t visit them all that often, and sometimes they affect me more than other times. But it is helpful.
I’m reminded as I look back over my last couple of months that I tend to get caught up on trivial things. I tend to think more of myself than I need to. I tend to overweigh decisions. I tend to trivialise important things. But experiencing death so closely has helped me. It cuts through the fat and grease of life and helps me get to the meat and the substance.
But like a greasy meal, I get left out in the cold of the world and the fat gets thick again and I fall into poor priorities and motivations and desires. Our lives are like that, they tend to get cluttered with the unimportant in important places and our hearts tend to attach to the world.
I hope you don’t face the kind of suffering I faced. But I do hope you face some suffering if it helps you to see just a bit more clearly. You will be thankful for it. And I hope that reading this will help you see just a little bit more clearly – hopefully without going through the rough waves yourself.
But when you do go through those rough waves, a blessing that can come is that they shake us and wake us from our stupor, our infatuation with the trivial little toys of this world.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 