If that hasn't ever happened to you, that's great! However, I suggest you set in place a series of measures to make sure it doesn't happen in the future! We all seem to have the capacity to forget, from time to time, what we are supposed to be doing. We have become absorbed in something else!
At the deepest possible level, we can become so absorbed in all the "something elses", that we become side-tracked from the real meaning and purpose of life itself.
The Scriptures present the clear picture that we as human beings are designed to know God. The opening chapters of the Bible show God walking and talking with the man and the woman in the cool of the evening. This knowledge, love and fellowship are essential to what we were always meant to be.
That plan was broken by the human quest for autonomy, by that rebellion against God that we call "sin".
The happy life of the garden was destroyed. The loving fellowship was destroyed. The partnership in supervising and managing the creation was destroyed. There could be no Garden of Eden. The stresses of autonomy would be evident in human relationships as well.
The Lord had said, "… you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die" (Gen. 2.17). They weren't zapped in that instant - in fact the record gives Adam a total of 930 years (5.4)! Yet death became a painful foreboding and a grim reality. The time of reckoning would come.
The painful passing from this life to the life to come was not the Creator's original purpose. This life, of course, was never meant to be all that there is. The world would have become a much more congested place than it is now! Because death is our experience, it's difficult for us to imagine how it could be otherwise. The Scriptures don't give us an answer, though they do give us some clues.
We read that "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away" (Gen. 5.24). Elijah went up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2.11). Jesus - after his death and resurrection - was taken up into heaven in a cloud (Acts 1.9). Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, says that, when the Lord returns, "the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thess. 4.16b,17a).
Until the Lord returns, we will all face the prospect and reality of death. With a good diet, a healthy lifestyle, care on the roads and the help of the medical world, we will put that day off as long as possible. Yet we all face the fact that this physical life we now live is terminal. Unless the Lord returns first, it will come to an end in death. And if we are alive when he returns, it will be changed into a body designed for eternity - without the limitations and failing functions to which this body is subject.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15.51-57, "Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?' The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
God designed us to know his love and to live in fellowship with him. He has reached out to us in redemption. Throughout human history he was doing it. Then at the right time he sent his own Son. And his own Son has died the death of separation and punishment for our sins. In him we are forgiven, set free! We still face physical death, but it has no power to hurt us. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
Jesus came to restore us into the love and fellowship of the Father. As we put our trust in him, we begin to experience that now and will know it in eternity.
The disciples of Jesus were worried and upset. They could see the darkening clouds gathering. Opposition could overwhelm their Teacher and Lord. At first they hadn't understood or believed him when he had spoken of his coming death. The time had come when it seemed a much more real possibility.
But now Jesus is saying, "In my Father's house are many rooms… I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am" (Jn 14.2-3).
So the death of Jesus would be make a room for you and me in that heavenly home for ever. And when we die, Jesus will come and receive us into that place of light and love.
When my mother was in the Royal Brisbane Hospital after a stroke twelve years ago, she didn't know who we were, but we heard her singing. Her ability to sing in tune had gone and at first we couldn't place the snatches of words we could hear -"What a wonderful Saviour is Jesus, my Jesus! What a wonderful Saviour is Jesus, My Lord!" We traced it down to the old Sankey's hymn book. The words were written by E.A. Hoffmann. The tune of the chorus you will recognise as "Thailand" - set to D.T. Niles' hymn "The great love of God" in the Australian Hymn Book (105) and attributed there to Charoan Vijara in 1960.
Here are more of the words:
He cleanses me from all my sin:
What a wonderful Saviour!
And now he reigns and rules within:
What a wonderful Saviour!
He walks beside me in the way:
What a wonderful Saviour!
And keeps the faithful day by day:
What a wonderful Saviour!
As a family we felt grief at her passing in September 1992. Yet we knew that her wonderful Saviour had gathered her to himself.
Jesus said that there is room for you. He lived and died to make room for you. The most important choice of our life is to trust him as our Saviour and acknowledge him as our Lord. That's for here and now - as well as for hereafter.
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