Death is Unnatural

"What?" you say. "Death is part of the circle of life. You know, being born and living and dying; it's all normal and natural." Yes, it is normal, and the percentage of your fatality is 100% (unless of course you are lucky and are raptured before your body dies). But I would like to argue that death is unnatural.

Haven't you ever been around a little child, confused over death? Children, still not entirely tainted by the world, still hold onto a since of innocence, and death seems to confound them. Why did the plant die? Why is the goldfish dead? What does it mean that so-and-so passed away? I think children are right in their feelings; death is just wrong. Something has been perverted.

And you, doesn't death bother you? I never cease to be sad when a pet passes away, I learn of someone's passing, or on a less serious note, when I hit a squirrel. It always makes my soul twinge. (This is why I can never hunt, unless I was starving. Not because I'm against the idea of hunting, but because I couldn't kill an animal because I enjoy watching it and things being full of life.)

Friends, death was not natural. It was not the way of things. God created a perfect earth with no death and no pain. Full of life and love and peace and purity. And it was very good. But pride led to destruction, and life gave way to death. The beautiful dance of God and his creation, between Him and man and the beasts and the earth, ruptured violently. Man wasn't the only one to suffer:

"19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that[h] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." (Romans 8)

Death, though, is not the ultimate end, for death was mastered by another One long ago on Calvary:

"54 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.”[h]

55 “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”[i]

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Cor. 15)

If Jesus is your life and to serve Him is your goal, then death is only temporary. We look to a time of restoration, when unnatural death is swallowed up by extraordinary life!

Living in victory,
Jane