In the last sixteen months, four members of my family died (a stepfather, two brothers, and an uncle). All of them were critical influences in my life, and each of their deaths was a blow that left me reeling. Death is daunting, especially when it comes rudely knocking on my household's door.While it may be stating the obvious, death is certain for everyone, a fact easily acknowledged but hard to face squarely. Moreover, none of us knows whether we have one day left in this life or many. So, like everyone else, I don't like the thought of facing the certainty of my death, nor facing the certain death of anyone I love. Nonetheless, a death-date awaits every single one of us, and how we live our lives between now and then matters. Every nanosecond matters. After all, everyone wants to live well, and everyone wants to die well too.
Death and dying and God all give rise to a lot of opinions, religious and otherwise. And, many people in our relativistic culture believe God is whatever they imagine Him to be (or not to be), and what happens amid death and dying is considered the same, involving whatever chemistry of imagined "realities" a person conjures up.
However, this is both illogical and irrational; all such "truths" simply can't all be true. Think about it. Does God just magically become what each individual person imagines? No. Do death and dying just magically transform into each individual's imagined perception of what they involve? No. Thus, such relativistic "truth" isn't really very comforting at all; its merely a coping mechanism that sadly reflects our depth of denial and distance from God. Upfront, relativism sounds good in theory, as a basis of civility and tolerance, but, in reality, it lacks serious answers to many of life's most pressing problems (e.g. death, dying, God, meaning, evil, and pain).
Hence, truth about death and dying and God must be pursued outside ourselves, and only the Scriptures can adequately inform us in these matters. Don't drink the relativistic Kool-Aid, even if its vogue among the intelligentsia of our day. Such "experts" (religious or otherwise) will offer you no real answers to death and dying and God. Bottom line, you can't learn to live or die well from these sorry sources. True faith isn't a blind, relativistic leap in the dark, it's an informed, absolute leap in the light, the light of God's revealed will in the reliable Scriptures.
"Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades" (Rev 1:17-18).
