Death #5 – Death as Goal

In another sense, just as valid as death being the terminus of life, death is the goal of life, just as the death of a teenager is a goal in becoming an adult. In this second sense death is the goal of life, like the end zone is the goal of the football team. Death is the “end” of the soul, the psyche, which is seeking a goal beyond an increasingly decrepit body confined on this time-cursed earth. What person in their right mind would want to live forever physically?!

This “goal zone” life is undoubtedly what the first human couple originally possessed in God’s Garden Paradise before they rebelled and chose their own sovereignty over God’s beneficent love.  This “end zone” or “goal” of the soul is intuited by many, but undefined except as a state of rest. R.I.P. (Rest In Peace) is inscribed on many tombstones, but it falls far short of the real expectation. Death as the goal of life is explained in the Bible.  God takes no pleasure in the death (as terminus) of any person (Ezekiel 18:23-32; Ezekiel 33:11), but rather, God’s loving goal is that men repent of their sins and be born into His eternal family.   

God’s purpose through the end/goal of Jesus’ earthly life on the cross was the goal and fulfillment of God’s eternal desire to have us reign with Him in eternal Paradise (John 14:1-3, Matthew 28:20, Luke 23:43,Revelation 2:7).  And so God exhorts us to repent of sin and be resurrected to eternal life with Jesus (2 Peter 3:8-9).

As an example, I remember thinking in 1973 when my second and third children, twin girl and boy, were born.  From my outside viewpoint I could see them in my wife’s womb where they had everything they needed and experienced bodily functions and emotions.  In fact I did see them on an X-ray (Ultrasound had not yet arrived in medical practice). Despite every need being supplied, I imagined that they must have wondered about the functions of various parts of their developing bodies, which did not seem to significantly contribute to life in the womb environment, or at least were underused there. In the womb they were passive recipients of every comfort. They had everything they thought they wanted.

But when the threatening pressure and pains of imminent birth and delivery came, their peace and contentment were turned upside down. The pressure and helpless desperation of descent into the birth canal and delivery into my larger world must have created fearful desperation for them. Is it any surprise that babies are so often born screaming and crying?

My daughter was delivered first, and it was not hard to imagine my son’s fear and sense of loss as she disappeared into a dark void that was a dreadful unknown for him. She had died to him and the only world he ever knew. Well might he be afraid and resist the forces propelling him along the same path a short time later, but of course resistance was useless in this mandatory one-way journey.

Like my daughter before him, my son had to leave his familiar world behind and embrace the unknown. For a time preparatory to his own delivery he experienced feelings of loss of his sister, probably not too dissimilar from the feelings of loss we experience when death takes a significant other from our lives. But the loss is temporary, and reunion is real in the subsequent larger world.  Like it or not, death in the womb issues in life into this larger and more interesting world, though my son could not know that until after he was born.

This process of birth out of the womb is a good picture of death in our cursed world. The exit from a mother’s womb is a frightening unknown to the unborn child. From our present perspective we know that the“end” of the physical body is corruption and absorption into the dust of the earth. Like the placenta of the first gestation in our mother’s womb, the physical body of our worldly gestation is cast off and destroyed after death,like a worn out tent or garment. That tent served as a house for our spirit and soul in this physical world, but it is no longer necessary when we die to  and receive a new perfect body for the eternal spirit and soul (2 Corinthians 5:1-8). In the Corinthians passage, not expecting to be “unclothed”(without a body), Paul clearly announces the “clothing” of the soul and spirit with a heavenly body.

The whole Bible testifies to us about the frightful unknown of death and assures us of the eternal larger life of Heaven. In fact, the New Testament uses a different word for “life” (zoe) in eternity than it does for life (bios) in this time-cursed world. One type of life (bios) is metabolic and temporary, susceptible to death. The other type of life (zoe) is immune to death, permanent and everlasting. At death, for the Christian, the temporary bios is transformed (metamorphosis – think worm into butterfly) into the permanent and everlasting zoe . Jesus shows us that the frightful unknown of physical death is the fulfillment of our human goal and purpose. He came to redeem us from fear of the unknown, which derives from the knowledge that we have done wrong and deserve death. Jesus fulfilled the Creator God’s kind intention for us, for it is Jesus Who redeemed us from the curse of death into the eternal Paradise and zoe life of God (Revelation 2:7).