On Death: The Privilege of Participating in God's Pain

I have been attending a Beth Moore Bible study these past few weeks.  On one of the days she taught about Abraham’s test, when God asked Abraham to take Isaac up and offer him as a sacrifice on the altar.  Most of us who have read this story, recognize that it is the foretelling of God offering His son, Jesus, as an offering for our sins.   I had never looked at it before from the viewpoint that God was giving Abraham the opportunity (dare I say privilege?) of participating in God’s pain and loss.

My uncle, barring divine intervention, is on the brink of death as I write this.  I knew last spring, when I saw him for my birthday, I was seeing him for the last time.  I thought I had come to terms with that.  I have not.  I’m still weepingly sad. I’m still begging God to intervene and heal him completely and make his body strong and whole.  In the same way that Abraham knew that even if he sacrificed his beloved son, Isaac, the son through whom God promised Abraham’s descendants would outnumber the stars, God would STILL be able to keep his promise, I know that God is able to change what seems to rational thought inevitable. 

But that is what we do.  We fight death.  With every measure of strength we have, we fight death.  We know at our very deepest part that death is NOT part of who God made us to be.  Death is NOT RIGHT.

I remember reading Genesis 3 as a young person and thinking, “If God said if they ate from the tree he told them not to eat from they would die, then why didn’t they die when they ate from it?”  In fact, according to Genesis, Adam lived 930 years!  The first death recorded in the Bible wasn’t even Adam or Eve, but Abel, and this was before Adam was 130 years old. 

Clearly, the fruit was not poisonous, and death did not come into the world by natural law.  God chose death as the consequence of sin.  But why?  Why death?

B. D. Napier, in a little book of poems called “Come Sweet Death”, writes about the fall, “…let us be free of you—or let us die!  It is the same, you say, you stubborn God?”  and later,  “Sweet Eve, you say you thought you heard him laugh?  I heard him say, “how can I give you up? How can I hand you over?”  Then a word about another silly little tree—an antidotal tree, redemptive tree.  And then—this must be when you thought he laughed—I think I heard him sob.       I think he wept.”

Sin brought a separation between God and man.  A big separation.  A separation it would take another death to bridge.   When we feel the pain of separation that death brings us, that pain is an echo of the pain God feels at the separation sin brings between Him and each of us.  That’s why death is the fitting consequence of sin. It causes the kind of pain in man that sin causes in God.

And when I miss a loved one who has died, I will remember that it is just a ripple thousands of years past the first wave, and just an echo of the pain my own sin has caused.  And I will think about the second tree, where the death occurred that made the pain of separation a temporary thing.  

I’m still praying for your miracle, Bill, because the pain is big.  But if it doesn’t come, I’ll be looking for you at the reunion.  I love you so much.  I’m so thankful for the privilege of knowing you, for all you have done for me for half a century, for your faithfulness, for your legacy.  I will carry your smile and your laugh and your voice in my heart the rest of my life.  

With immense love and the utmost respect, dedicated to 

William Oscar Richter 

November 11, 1948 to February 25, 2013