We have had a wave of funerals at our church lately…two this week.  I’m always struck by our desire to prolong life – to live forever if we could.  It is amazing what people will go through to live a few months or a year longer.  Their loved ones sometimes encourage them to go through excruciating treatments just to have a little more time with them as well. When we die, even at an advanced age, it seems wrong – as if the universe has betrayed us.  I believe there is a part of every one of us that does want to live forever.  We want that because it was God’s original intent.  When Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden, they were given free access to the Tree of Life.  As long as they ate from the tree, they would live forever.  That was God’s original for his entire creation.  Sin, of course, inserted a great parenthesis in that intent.

Solomon declared, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men” (Ecc.3:11).  Every culture looks beyond this world for some form of eternal life, whether they look for it in reincarnation, some version of paradise or becoming one with the world soul.  Something tells each of us that physical death should not be the final chapter.

We are entering the Easter season.  It comes early this year but always brings a sense of hope.  It comes as Spring approaches and everything that appears dead begins to show life again. Our rose bushes are blanketed with fresh green leaves.  Fruit trees in West Texas, barren just a week ago, are covered with white blossoms.  Life is emerging again. It is a metaphor for eternal life in Christ.  When we thought all had ended, God had more.  An empty tomb is the promise of eternal life.  Physical death does not have the last word. Jesus has the last word.

His word is, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this” (Jn. 11:25-26)?  Through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, God has restored his original intent.
Jesus is the Tree of Life.  As long as we partake of him, we live.  Our eternal physical life will not be apparent on earth until the Lord returns with his saints and restores the earth to its pre-curse glory. In the meantime, we are with Christ in Paradise.  Ultimately, Satan will not beat the Lord out of anything.  The earth he set in motion with a pristine environment that partnered with man rather than opposing him, will spin through space once again.  God will live with his people and death will not be found in the dictionary.  

I have come to believe that our desire to hold on to life in this world is not so much a lack of faith about God’s goodness and a home in heaven, but is proof that we were never meant to die in the first place.  Death always seems wrong.  So, we comfort one another at each funeral with the hope that God has placed inside of us. We do so because we can, in fact, live forever with those we have loved and thought we lost. As Easter approaches, remember that physical death is not the end even as winter only hides life that emerges each year by God’s grace. Physical death for those in Christ is only the prelude to the eternity God has placed in our hearts.