Cancer Blog #32
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #32 – Death and the Trajectory
April 6, 2022
[Gen 3:17-19 NASB95] 17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. 18 “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”
[2Ti 4:6-8 NASB95] 6 For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. 7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; 8 in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.
There is a trajectory to our lives that unbelievers seem to ignore or at least pretend to do so. When our parents, Adam and Eve, disobeyed, their sin launched us like a shell that follows a trajectory as surely as a shell follows once shot from a cannon. It can end only in the death of our world, our race, our own person. The central problem for us, and has been since the fall, is death. As God reminds us in Genesis 3, we are only dust, and will return to the ground; as He said to our parents: “to dust you shall return.” This curse is a fulfillment of the warning He gave our parents at their creation: “[Gen 2:16-17 NASB95] 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” Satan, of course, disputed that disobedience to God would result in death: “You surely will not die!” Believing that lie, Eve, then Adam, disobeyed, following Satan’s assessment rather than God’s warning. But when that disobedience occurred, God pronounced the sentence of death that He had warned them of.
So, now our lives, our whole world, lies under the curse of death, and we as well as all other creatures will, sooner or later, return to dust. And, most of our race seek means to obviate it, and yet there is no way to do so. We will all die. “No one gets out of here alive,” as I have reported that a friend of mine has said. We can rage against it, protest it, mourn it, deny it, or claim its unfairness, but we will face its end to our life, nonetheless. The frequently pronounced unfairness claim reminds me of the old joke about the man hauled before a judge having been caught killing his parents. He pleaded for mercy. “On what grounds,” ask the astonished judge. “I’m an orphan,” pled the murderer. Our parents disobeyed and we follow in their footsteps daily, increasing their disobedience with the whole of our lives. We are no different, no better than they, yet, we expect mercy where they had none. We claim no fault, but in our hearts, we know better. We claim unfairness when our disobedience is no less than theirs, wanting to be our own god as they did.
Yet, as Paul points out, our death need not end in despair; we can find another trajectory. There is hope yet, even from the God who acted as judge in pronouncing the sentence He had warned our parents of. He has offered a different trajectory. If we will return to Him, submit to His rule, receive His mercy in Christ, then we can receive life once again, as was promised by the presence of the tree of life in the garden, and we will be blessed beyond our understanding. God Himself became human to take that curse of death upon Himself, and will give us again a life full of joy and reward. But, to do so, we must fight the good fight, we must finish the course, we must keep the faith. There is no other way. Life in this age is only temporary, a life that will inevitably lead to death forever, unless we seek that other trajectory.
Next: Death as their Shepherd