If you thought until today that death is the end of life, you were wrong ! To prove this fact, Christ, our Lord, resurrected from the dead the son of the widow from Nain like from a sleep: `Young man, I say to you, get up!` (Luke 7, 14);
Another time coming at the head of the daughter of Iair, He said risking ridicule : ` She is not dead but asleep.` (Luke 8, 52);
Regarding Lazarus, who had been dead for four days, He said : ` Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.` (John 11, 11). That is why we say about the dead that they reposed!
In what regards His own Person, Christ simply was resurrected `coming out like a bridegroom from the chamber…and leaving His burial things in the tomb, according to the Canon of Resurrection.
So do you think that death is for God what those `who had no hope` think about it?
(1 Tes. 4, 13): meaning definitive disappearance, nothingness, or the end of the end? What was death for the son of the widow from Nain, or for the daughter of Iair? What meant death for righteous Lazarus? But what about Christ, Who ` is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life!
My dears,
If you thought until now that Go dis stronger than the Lord of Life, you were wrong ! Christ the Lord proved Himself master of death as well, bestowing life to other dead and resurrecting Himself, defeating death and becoming in this way the surety of immortality and of our eternal happiness! Thus, death is not the end of life, but life is the end of death – life in Christ and with Christ!
Didn`t He say : ` I amthewayand the truthand the life.` (John 14, 6).
Then why did God allow death ?
The Book of Genesis answers us at this question, in chapter 3 : `Because of the sin of our forefathers !
So if they had not sinned we would have been all immortal in flesh today ?
Yes, because we had no interdiction to eat from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, only from the Tree of knowledge of the good and evil. Only after the fall, God seeing the man`s attraction for sin to the detriment of the communion with Him, forbid the man`s access to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3, 21-24).
He did this so that he would not stay eternally in this sinful state on earth. We all see how much evil there is in the world in the conditions when our life is relatively short. So you imagine what proportions would have reached evil if we had remained immortal? What a jungle the world would have become in the perspective of a sinful eternity here on earth?
This is how the Christians understood the reason of death and in this way they accepted it, regarding it :
- Not as the supreme evil, but at an end to evil
- Not as the greatest catastrophe, but as an accident on the course of the way, because of the ancient sin
- Not as a non existence, but as a passing to another life, to the eternal life
- Not as the end of life, but as the end of death (meaning of sin – with the sense of spiritual death – trampling down death by death) and as a resurrection in the heavenly state, from where the man fell when he could still remain immortal
S: It is known about great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that in his faithlessness he proclaimed `the death of God. This is how he became the author of the famous theory `God is dead` embraced with so much enthusiasm by the philosophers from the Age of Enlightenment
They say that at his burial God appeared to his friends and supporters saying to them with a deep meaning: `Nietzsche told you about Me that I died…But I am telling you that he didn`t die!
† SEBASTIAN
Bishop of Slatina and Romanați
Source: http://www.episcopiaslatinei.ro/
