We grieve over the death of those we love, yes, even the pets we have shared life with.
We are faced with a sobering truth that no man really accepts.
The truth is that our days are numbered. We all have a first day, and a last day, when we shall breathe our final breath.
As a new birth is celebrated, and we see sparkling young infants and soft skin, a first smile, or a loud cry for mother's breast, we rejoice. Even so, as we see the death of a loved one, silent lips that once spoke of wisdom, spread wide with laughter, or communicated love, yes...now silenced...we grieve.
We grieve over what once was, and in this life never more shall be.
We also grieve because we are confronted with our own mortality.
Many people avoid wakes and memorials because they cannot handle the sober truth that death is real, and that we must all pass through that valley.
In the West, and much of the world, we go to great lengths, and spend thousands of dollars to make our deceased one seem as though he were still alive, and dressed in their best , resting.
Anything to relieve the truth that confronts us, namely, that mans days are numbered.
Some religions teach that we will be reincarnated, perhaps into a cow, or butterfly, or a cockroach.
Other religions teach that we will return as another person with another life.
Many believe death is the end, and then we are no more.
Jesus spoke much about death, and the Bible teaches much about death.
So, where should we seek counsel? Whom should we believe?
I will leave you with this thought, by C.S. Lewis, once an atheist, a professor at Oxford, and Cambridge...
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Oh, and by the way, JESUS HAS RISEN FROM THE DEAD! Listen to Him. He alone is the One that we can listen to and trust!
For Jesus alone returned from the grave and met with those he knew, and more than five hundred others saw the resurrected Savior.
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