Cancer Blog #25
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #25
February 15, 2022
“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4)
“6 Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord 7 for we walk by faith, not by sight 8 we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 5:6-8)
Surely one of the most underrated virtues of our time is courage. We see cowardice in its most popular form in the cancel culture and in the craven responses of businesses, schools, government, and celebrities, and also in the surprising demand for “crying rooms” and the refusal to hear disagreeing opinions on university campuses, not only at the undergraduate level, but most recently, embarrassingly, in a law school (George Mason) when law students(!) wanted to not only to cancel and fire a new professor , but also requested a crying room, as if they were not only victims, but also toddlers. Strange times we live in, with people openly asking for sympathy because they are cowards, which they openly demonstrate (people in past generations would have been embarrassed and ashamed to have been seen behaving in such a childish way).
And yet, we see in the passages above the antidote to this problem. In the Joshua passage we see one of many exhortations to Joshua from Moses and from God to have courage. For though God had promised Israel the land of Canaan, the people were still very afraid of the inhabitants. So it is with us in our fear of death. As we see in the saying of David in Psalm 23 and of Paul in 2 Corinthians 5, the key to conquering the fear of death is to have confidence that God is always with us. If we believe that, then even when walking in the valley of the shadow of death, we will have courage. If we have confidence that the Lord Jesus is with us, then we can say with Paul that we will be of good courage and prefer death to being here because we will be with the Lord in a fuller way.
The presence of the Lord in our lives is our confidence that He is indeed Emanuel, is the way we conquer our fear of death. Whether living or dying, when we believe that He is with us, then we will gain courage, and we will no longer be afraid. When Jesus approached His hour of death, He knew His disciples would desert Him because of fear:
“Behold, an hour is coming, and has already come, for you to be scattered, each to his own home, and to leave Me alone…”
But, note His next words:
“and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” (John 16:32)
Years ago several other guys and I went to visit a mutual friend who was dying in the hospital, and we lamented that could not stay with him till his point of death. He did indeed die a short time later, not long after we had left, much to our sorrow. But, I never forgot the passage he read to us from John 16 and I realized that Jesus (and our friend) was encouraging us to remember that even if we are humanly alone, we are never truly or completely alone, for though we face death and might be humanly alone, we can have courage, for we know that the Lord will always and everywhere be with us. Therefore, we can be of good courage as Paul says; death cannot make us afraid, for the one who conquered death is at our side.
Next: Death and the Discipline of God