Editor’s note: We have big questions in this life… about God, who we are, what our purpose is, the problem of pain, questions about death, and so much more. In his new book, The Problem of Life, Mark Clark invites us to look for our joy, contentment, satisfaction, and answers in the God who loves us and wants us to flourish. Enjoy this excerpt.
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That wonderful, perfect place of pure love and delight in God is what we were made for. It is the home we have been searching for all our lives. In every moment of pleasure and delight, our souls catch a taste of Heaven. It is like an imprint on our memory, or as C. S. Lewis said, “I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death... I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.”1
This perspective helped him when his world came crashing down and he lost his only true love, his wife, Joy. Lewis heard someone say, “She’s in God’s hand now,” and suddenly had a picture: “‘She’s in God’s hand.’ That gains a new energy when I think of her as a sword. Perhaps the earthly life I shared with her was only part of the tempering. Now perhaps He grasps the hilt; weighs the new weapon; makes lightnings with it in the air. ‘A right Jerusalem blade.’... How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back.”2
The life of those dead in Christ is still far better than ours alive in this world.
David Watson, a leader in the charismatic movement, received a terminal diagnosis and thought he would be healed, so he began writing a book to document his experience, claiming throughout the book how he trusted God was going to heal him, yet he died. J. I. Packer wrote the foreword for the book that was eventually published, and he said something we all need to hear. Packer urged us not to focus on the fact that David thought he would be healed while he was writing the book. That’s not what matters, Packer said.
In the providence of God, who does not always show His servants the true point of the books He stirs them to write, the theme of [this book] is the conquest of death, not by looking away from it, nor by being shielded from it, but by facing it and going down into it. David’s theology led him to believe that God wanted to heal him. Mine leads me rather to say that God wanted David Home, and healed his whole person... Health and life, I would say, in the full and final sense of those words, are not what we die out of, but what we die into.3
What a beautiful and subversive perspective, knowing that in God’s hands even our death is a victory, an upgrade over our present condition.
God is claiming His victory: “This vale of tears is but the pathway to the better country: this world of woe is but the stepping-stone to a world of bliss.”4 All of which leads the apostle Paul to taunt death as he considers the wonder of the resurrection:
Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? — 1 Corinthians 15:55
The hope of the resurrection relativizes our fear of death, which works backward into our lives in a million different ways. In his book Future Grace, John Piper draws on the work of psychologist Ernest Becker and the denial of death in our modern culture. “Have you ever asked yourself,” Piper says, “how much addiction and personality dysfunction and disordered lifestyles may originate in the repressed fear of death?”5 His point is not that people are enslaved to a constant, conscious fear of dying but that we are enslaved in a thousand ways by trying to avoid this fear itself. Instead of facing it as an unchangeable reality, we avoid it in every way possible and are enslaved in our avoidance.
The writer of Hebrews says it this way:
[Christ] too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might break the power of him who holds the power of death... and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. — Hebrews 2:14–15, emphasis added
Death looms for each of us — that much is certain — and we become its slaves in many ways. When we deny the reality of death, we are enslaved to an illusion. When we succumb to fear, we are enslaved to terror. Our only hope is to reject these options for the assurance of being rescued by a Savior, and so these options impact all of us as we journey through this world. God desires that our ultimate safety and security, our final hope, be in Him. And He wants that to have an immediate effect on our lives.6
Even if you are a skeptic and approach life as if there is no God and all this religious talk is nonsense, I hope you’ll admit this hits a nerve. Because even if we don’t think any of this is true, we still want it to be. We all want there to be a way in which the sadness and injustice and pain the world has experienced will somehow be rewound or renewed or restored. It sounds too good to be true, and yet that is the story we are invited into. As the Bible says, “Plan your life, budgeting for seventy years (Psalm 90:10), and understand that if your time proves shorter that will not be unfair deprivation but rapid promotion.”7 In the end we want to declare along with the apostle Paul — as many have engraved on their tombstones — that
the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. — 2 Timothy 4:6–7
That is the way.
Death as a Grace
If all of this is true, that death for the believer loses its sting and is something different than the understanding most of us have had, then we can begin to understand why the apostle Paul, in prison and facing imminent death, could write to his friends and say, “To die is gain,” and “To depart and be with Christ... is better by far” than remaining in this world (Philippians 1:21–23).
The secular take is that death is the worst thing that can happen to a person. It means you lost the game of life. But what we see in the Bible is something radically different.
As Charles Spurgeon contended about the topic, “The best moment of a Christian’s life is his last one, because it is the one that is nearest to Heaven.” As a pastor, he said, “The only people for whom I have felt any envy have been dying members of this very church.” We must realize that “he who learns to die daily while he lives will find it no difficulty to breathe out his soul for the last time.”8 For those who belong to God, death is a mild interruption in our lives, simply the next, but not final, step we must take.
I remember a few years ago hearing a story about the author and preacher Francis Chan. Chan had said that he pleads with God that he would rather the Lord take him in death than he would ever cheat on his wife. That may be jarring to hear at first, but once you have a Christian perspective on death, you can understand where he is coming from. Chan is simply reminding us that there are worse things than death. In this his intentions are like Jesus telling us that if our habitual sins are at risk of destroying us, we must destroy them first. If that sin is lust, Jesus says, it is better to enter Heaven with no eyeballs — having plucked them out — than to go to hell with two eyes (Matthew 5:29). If stealing, we should want to go to Heaven with one hand rather than hell with two. Before you hurt yourself, know that Jesus wasn’t being literal, but He was making a very real and literal point: eternity must take priority over and above this temporal life.
- Eternal life is worth whatever sacrifice we need to make in this life.
One of the most profound paragraphs I have ever read comes from C. S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters on this exact topic. A young protégé demon says he is excited at the thought of the death of the man he has been assigned to. He feels he could die any day in a bombing in London (it is set during World War II), but the older, wiser demon strongly opposes his plan. His reason is quite chilling:
If he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope... If only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or adversity are excellent campaigning weather. The routine, the gradual decay of youthful loves and hopes, the drabness which we create in their lives and the resentment with which we teach them to respond to it — all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it,” while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want...
...That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth.9
Lewis here affirms what Paul and so many other biblical writers teach: that this life feeds into the next one in such a way that our choices here have real consequences for our future. This life may end with a tumor or a car accident, without any notice or our ability to prevent it. But the decisions we make today will affect the millions of years we face in the next life.
Having this perspective also changes how we cope with the death of those we love. Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and sole survivor of his whole family through the Holocaust, tells a story to this end.
Once, an elderly man consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.10
The same is true of death itself, which is why we must decide before it ever visits us what we want it to be like, for that will then forever be its meaning for us. And God’s desire and invitation for us all is that our eternity would be with him and the sweetest of all experiences.
1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 137.
2. Quoted in Keller, On Death, 88.
3. J. I. Packer foreword to David Watson, Fear No Evil (Shaw, 1984), 7.
4. Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (London, 1870), February 7.
5. John Piper, Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God (Multnomah, 1995), 354.
6. Piper, Future Grace, 354–56. 13.
7. J. I. Packer, 18 Words: The Most Important Words You Will Ever Know (Christian Focus Publishing, 2008), 205.
8. A collection of quotes by Charles Spurgeon on death: https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/blog-entries/10-spurgeon-quotes-on-dying-well/.
9. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (HarperOne, 2022), 155.
10. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon, 2006), 91.
Excerpted with permission from The Problem of Life by Mark Clark, copyright Mark Clark.
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Your Turn
Death is inevitable. But, what if we didn’t approaching the day that it comes with fear, but with eager anticipation knowing it’s the day we will finally be embraced in the grace of Jesus to the full? How does that perspective change the way you go about your day? ~ Devotionals Daily