Death is an enemy. In the Christian worldview, it’s called “the last enemy.” Paul wrote, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:26).

This piece has two points: 1) Death is inevitable and 2) For all who are in Christ, death ushers Christians into the very presence of God. Death is, therefore, to be understood as a transition into God’s presence. Why? Because of the person and work of Christ.

This past week, I ‘lost’ a friend, Mr. David, to death. Leukemia ravaged his body. Physically, his white blood cells were eating the healthy blood cells. He had to have injections of platelets–again and again. But eventually, even that was insufficient.

First, like you, I feel the deep pain of loss. But I do not grieve as those without hope. God is bigger than death. Through Christ, God has conquered death for his people. And God is omnipresent; he is as near you as the person to your left and right. Near to us in our time of sorrow. Know that in your bones. God is near. 

     Let us acknowledge the sorrow of this time. We know that God understands sorrow. Jesus wept at the loss of a friend. In John 11, the apostle John records that when Jesus lost his friend Lazarus, Jesus “was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (Jn 11:33) and in verse 35, the apostle John records that Jesus wept. 

     Mr. David worked in the IT field for much of his career, then Disney in his later years, and was a “fixer” of almost anything. Prior to his civilian career, he was a U.S. Marine, and worked on helicopters. I knew him after he’d retired. He was a faithful churchman, businessman, and an avid traveler. He and his wife and their friends traveled across the country many times and have set foot in all 50 states. And their stories of RVing with friends made for many sweet conversations I had with them both. 

     When I was Mr. David’s Sunday school teacher and pastor, he was undergoing medical treatments, I’d always go to him and ask how his week was. He’d never complain. He’d answer my question but always end with, “I’m blessed. I’ve had  a good life.” I could tell he was in pain, but true to his nature, he didn’t complain. He eschewed the temptation lesser men might’ve had to feel sorry for themselves. And he’d invariably encourage me by saying kind words about my teaching and ministry, and we’d laugh and embrace. He was an encourager. 

     When I reflect on Mr. David’s legacy, I always remember him telling me of his peace. His supernatural peace. He did not fear death. Because he knew he’d open his eyes not in judgment but in benediction in God’s presence. Let me say this lovingly: Mr. David died well. Like Job, he knew that his redeemer lives, and he (Mr. David) also lives, because Jesus had prepared a place for him. So, yes, we grieve, but not as those outside of the gospel. 

     For all who are in Christ, death is not the end, life is. It’s a transition into the presence of God. Jesus, who cannot lie, promised resurrection and heaven to his people. 2 Cor 5:8 says that the believer, when away from the body, is at home with the Lord. 

     In his last letter he penned, the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 4, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Tim 4:7-8). 

     So, to the extended family, friends, and all who loved him, we love you and we loved Mr. David. We acknowledge our sorrow, but we also have the ultimate victory through Christ the Lord. 

     Let me leave you with this: If you are in Christ, dear ones, you will see Mr. David again. All will have been made well. But there’s one condition: be in Christ. Be in Christ and be made whole, be made well. I will see you again, dear brother. Well done. See you soon. 

Text: “The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and whoever captures souls is wise” (Pr 11:30).

Question: Who would not want to be such a person?

Reflections: The idea here is one of blessing other people by being a blessing, to speak the words of life to another soul, to point others to fruitfulness and bounty rather than tearing others down and leaving them devoid of rescue and the hope of redemption.

A similar thought occurs in Daniel 12:3: “And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”

In the picture above, the tree is in bloom. It shouts life. It shouts health. It trumpets beauty and vitality. Who would not want to be a vessel of such a message? That is, who would not long to be part of God’s plan to rescue and restore people to spiritual health? Those who hate God and hate redemption. Those who are anti-life.

This is why the Christian is outward-focused. He has tasted the water of life; therefore, he longs to pay that forward. As the old cliche goes, it’s one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. The bread of life (Jesus) has come down as the manna from heaven to feed the hungry souls of men.

We are wise when we do this, when we are diligent to sow the seeds of the gospel. Pray that God tills the soil of the heart. May we long to see trees of life because of the great work of the triune God. The author of life died upon a tree in Jerusalem and was raised imperishable and undefiled three days later to show us that death for the believer is to meet God face to face and not be condemned. May we speak the words of life to all and pray for God to grant eyes and ears to see that eternal life awaits.

Recently I completed another reading of the 150 psalms in Scripture. Psalms come in myriad genres. Below are some of those types:

• Prophetic
• Royal
• Messianic
• Celebration
• Lament
• Wisdom
• Worship

There are other types, too, but those are some of the most common.

I was struck particularly by some verses from Psalm 145 recently:

17 The Lord is righteous in all his ways
    and kind in all his works.
¹⁸ The Lord is near to all who call on him,
    to all who call on him in truth.
¹⁹ He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
    he also hears their cry and saves them.
²⁰ The Lord preserves all who love him,
    but all the wicked he will destroy. (Ps 145:17-20)

Several thinks stood out from these lines from David’s pen:

• The righteousness of God (v. 17)
• The fellowship with God (v. 18)
• The covenant faithfulness of God (v. 19)
• The salvation of God (v. 20)

Because I’m burdened for those who remain hostile to God, because I want to reach them with the good news of the gospel, I try to always understand their worldview. I think, for example, of how a person who rejects God deals with the reality of cancer or loss or divorce. As a person who believes God and believes these biblical attributes of God described above, I am promised the righteousness of God, fellowship with God, God’s fidelity to his covenant promises, and the salvation of God.

But the unbeliever who rejects these truths, where does he find hope? In psychological pep-talks? In bubblegum bromides? In horoscopes? In sundry forms of escape and endless distraction?

God’s nature is characterized by covenant faithfulness. God cannot lie. Unlike sinners, God cannot lie. That is crucial to understand. And it is a truth that brings the believer solace of soul. In a world drowning in deceptions, the balm from Gilead is covenant faithfulness found only in God, a salve for the pilgrim’s soul.

Coherence is an important word and idea. It denotes the degree to which something holds together. Is something logical? Does it hold together? Is it internally consistent? Does it correspond to the way things actually are? For example, if I say, “It’s sunny today in Atlanta,” but then you open your door and look outside and there’s a thunderstorm, the sky is darkened by ominous clouds, and there’s nothing but rain as far as you can see, well, then my statement does not cohere. It does not accurately reflect the way things are in reality. It does not correspond to reality.

Coherence is one of the tests for the trustworthiness of Scripture. God is holy; God cannot, therefore, lie. When God speaks, his Word is true. So when God said that all men everywhere are to repent and flee to the gospel of Christ Jesus to escape holy judgment, that word from God is true: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man [Jesus] whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31). 

God’s Word coheres. It holds together. It accurately expresses the way God is, the way we creatures are, and the way the world is. God does not say one thing and do another. He is internally consistent. His nature, his Word, and his covenants are trustworthy. This is why the resurrection of Jesus from the dead welcomes investigation. No one has produced the body of Jesus, and no one will, until God’s promise is fulfilled. You can count on Christianity, dear ones, because God is coherent. And in an age that is as intellectually vapid as our day, coherence is a beautiful treasure. 

‘Twas a Sunday near my affections. We gathered at Christ Covenant Church (3cs-canton.org). We sat under an elder teach on the Doctrine of Man/biblical anthropology. We heard the Scriptures and read and discussed and taught. We heard from Scripture that man is the crown of God’s creation–either male or female–created by the spoken word of God in Genesis. So much hinges upon that. Man is not mere matter in motion–some random collocation of atoms bandied about on the winds of chance or nothingness. Nothing of the sort. He is a creature formed by God to know God and to have fellowship with him. But sin . . . Sin shattered that. The first Adam failed to obey. But God the Son, being rich in mercy, became the second and last Adam in Christ Jesus. All of grace–from beginning to end–and God says to us rebels, “Come and live.”

Then I taught on “Joy Amidst Suffering,” based upon 1 Peter 4:12-19. I don’t know that anyone benefits as much as the teacher, if he cares to do the study. We don’t know something until we can teach it well. Lord, help me to be a good student–then a good teacher–in that order.

Then we went and ate Chinese food at one of our favorite restaurants. The proprietor is so friendly. She is, as is her daughter, the girl who fetches our water and brings the wonton soup. Then we ate our sesame chicken, and Hunan chicken (spicy!), fried rice, and even cracked open the fortune cookies at the end of the meal.

Afterwards we returned home, let the dog out, checked on our son who’s down with a cold, changed into swimwear, and went to the pool for a couple of hours. The sun appeared and disappeared on and off again behind the clouds that flirted with possible thunderstorms, perhaps arriving during the night.

I read for the umpteenth time more of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and my bride reclined on a lounge chair, her brown skin absorbing the sun, as if a sponge.

We had my JBL speaker on the table, too, and streamed Spotify playlists of music from the 1970s-80s, and I watched the fellow pool patrons sing along with Hall and Oates, Kenny Loggins, and Bill Withers’ tunes. A father tossed a green and black football to his lanky, pale son in the pool. A grandmother read the first volume of the Harry Potter series near the steps of the pool. An older man in a swimshirt swam laps in the middle of the pool, his shoulders brown from sun.

I put my book down on the table, watched the people, watched the trees, and snapped a photo of one of the healthy maples around the pool.

Now I’m back home. My bride is off to some friends’ house to practice music for next week. We’re meeting at a local park as part of Memorial Day weekend. We’re playing games, eating, enjoying fellowship, and we’ll once again hear the teaching and preaching of the Scriptures.

The novel at my side calls again, and I’m near done with yet another rereading of this masterpiece. Our family dog, Ladybug, is snoring atop the pink blanket in “her chair,” and all is well during this Sunday snapshot. Lord, thank you for the simple pleasures.

Text: “Whoever is greedy for unjust gain troubles his own household, but he who hates bribes will live” (Pr 15:27). Proverbs 17:23 teaches much the same thing: “The wicked accepts a bribe in secret to pervert the ways of justice.” The lesson here is to have the wisdom to say no to the bride, to be unpurchasable.

In one of my favorite songs by Roger Waters named “Too Much Rope” he has the following lyrics:

When the sleigh is heavy
And the timber wolves are getting bold
You look at your companions and test
The water of their friendship, with your toe
And they significantly edge
Closer to the gold
Each man has his price, Bob
And yours was pretty low

Bob was for sale, as it were. And it didn’t take much. Bob had his price.

It’s different strokes for different folks, as the cliche goes. For some people, it’s positional authority. They’ll compromise in order to gain it. For others, it’s money. They’ll fudge in certain areas or look the other way, if it benefits their bottom line. For others, it’s power. If they feel they can be viewed as “large and in charge,” their insecurites get validated in their spirit. Now they feel they finally have a seat at the table of importance.

This past week, someone came to me and said, “Hey, we have a soldier who needs a chaplain down at unit ______. Can you handle it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Do you have the contact info?”

I copied down the contact info, contacted the soldier, drove to meet him, spent about an hour with him, listened to him, gave him a summary of what I had understood him to mean, and offered some practical steps to help navigate the waters he was in. It was, in short, our bread and butter as chaplains–providing spiritual wisdom and religious support to soldiers. I loved it. It was “our lane” as chaplains.

Afterwards I followed up with the soldier again and then informed his chain of command that I’d gotten the soldier the help he had requested from a chaplain. Mission success.

But here’s the thing. There was nothing to be gained by me. I was just doing my job, my calling. The soldier got what he needed. The unit got their soldier back–and he was better off. There was no fanfare. The reward was simply knowing that I did my job. No money was involved. No publicity. No gamesmanship. Just doing my duty.

But what Solomon is driving at here is that some people don’t want to do the work; they want notoriety. They want the applause of men. They want to be seen as the savior-figure but they don’t want to put forth any effort. They want to be seen as caring and concerned, but they don’t actually care or demonstrate concern. They have the appearance of godliness but lack the character of such godliness. Paul says they go about “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people” (2 Tim 3:5). They dupe sheeple. They pimp the undiscerning for their own selfish gains.

A recurring theme in Christianity is wisdom–to understand the times and what God’s people are to do. Christians are commanded to seek wisdom and live wisely. A crucial part of wisdom is learning to discern the true from the false, to see through optics to the reality, to distinguish between mere appearance and the genuine. Lord, grant eyes to see, I pray, for blindness is pervasive.

This coming Sunday at Christ Covenant Church (3cs-canton.org), I am teaching the end of 1 Peter 4. This section of Peter’s first epistle is about fighting for joy amidst suffering.

Here is the last verse from chapter 4: “Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Pt 4:19).

About this theme of godly joy amidst sufering Richard Sibbes wrote the following:

It is the work of the flesh and blood to depart from God, but when a man goes to God it is a sign he has more than flesh and blood in him, for this cannot be done without a supernatural work of faith, which alone will make a sinful conscience fly to God, look to him as a father in Christ, and desire him by his almighty power, whereby he created heaven and earth, to create faith in the soul. And when you have cast your soul into the arms of the Almighty, labor to settle it there and to quiet yourself in the discharge of your duty; say thus, “Now I have done that which belongs to me; let God do that which belongs to him. I will not trouble myself about God’s work but in well-doing commit my soul to him alone with the rest.” Christians should not outrun God’s providence and say, “What shall become of me? This trouble will overwhelm me!” But serve his providence in the use of the means, and then leave all to his disposal. Especially this duty is needful in the hour of death, or when some imminent danger approaches; but then it will be a hard work, except it be practiced aforehand.

Suffering as a Christian is ordained to deepen our faith in the sufficiency of God. Pain is part of the providence of God whereby the Christian both sees his situation for what it is but simultaneously sees that it is temporal and designed to sanctify the believer, deepen his trust in the providence and sufficiency of God, refine him, purify him, shape him into a vessel fit for the potter’s hands.

Peter says we are to entrust our souls (v. 19). To whom? Does it say we’re to entrust our souls to happy-clappy psychological bromides and self-talk? No. He says we’re to entrust our souls “to a faithful Creator.” In other words, we’re to cast the nets of our trust onto the rock that is everlasting: God.

Pain and suffering as a Christian are ordained by God not that we would shake our fists at God in anger or resentment or despair, but that we would develop deeper understandings of the sufferings of Christ on our behalf, that we would grow more Christlike in faithfulness, humility, and service in the kingdom, knowing that God sees all and that the judge of all the earth does only that which is right.