The Fear of Death and Why You Should Stop Saying Stay Safe.

Fourteen years ago today, I was much younger and much more naive about life and God’s ways. I thought if I did the right thing, good things would happen every time. That if I said the right things, people would feel comfort and joy every time. I found out that God doesn’t work the way I think he should work. God is not tame, but he is good. I found out that the God we serve is not safe. All my life to that point, I thought he was safe, and the day I realized he was not safe was also the day I began to question if he was even good. 

How I have come to know God over the past decade and a half has changed the way I see him, the way I trust Him, and the way I see everything because of him. It is not an overstatement to say I was blind, but now I see. That day fourteen years ago, led to a chain of events that made me question the goodness of God; it led me to struggle with anxiety as a result of an overwhelming fear of dying. 

It was nearly two years of working through the implications of me thinking that if I pray enough, give enough and serve enough, good things will come from that as my payment from God because of my goodness. I had grown up in church my whole life, and I thought the gospel was for sinners, not for me. I thought God was in my debt because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was angry fourteen years ago because I didn’t think God heard the prayers of a sweet family suffering far more than I ever had. I was angry because I prayed for a boy filled with more faith than I had ever had. He didn’t rise. I was angry with God because he owed me and wasn’t coming through when I was calling in my favors, eared through years and years of good behavior. 

I was a Pharisee. People look at Pharisees in the Bible and say they are religious zealots who don’t love God they love themselves. That isn’t so. They were some of the most outwardly perfect people you could ever imagine. A pattern of good behavior marked their understanding of life. They encountered Jesus, and he was not the Messiah they imagined. They killed Jesus because he was not and could not have been the God they had long-awaited. I was one of those. I had an idea of God that he always answered my prayers in the way I prayed them, He always did what I thought was right, that he is more pleased with me because of my goodness. I knew God but not his ways. 

It changed one day reading The Jesus Storybook Bible to one of my babies. I read how a woman who was a sinner came to Jesus and took the most important and expensive thing; she had a jar of perfume she broke it, and poured it on the feet of Jesus. The religious people thought this was a waste. It smelled like the lilies in the summer field. It wasn’t a waste. They were mad at God’s kindness to this sinner. They thought Jesus should not be kind to her. “That woman is a sinner!” they grumbled. “We’re the good ones,” God spoke to me as I was reading that to my child and said, that’s you. I knew God but not the ways of God. 

I realized I was a Pharisee, an older brother who had always been in the house of God but didn’t understand the love, forgiveness, and severe mercies of God. Through that season and the season of my wife being sick with cancer, I have come to know God and understand his ways. I am not perfect in my love for Him, but I now know he is perfect in his love for me and that everything he does is good. 

What changed in me over the past decade is I have come to see my need for Jesus. He isn’t lucky to have me. I am utterly without hope if not for Him. All my best, everything I could hope to point to is nothing compared to knowing Christ. What resulted from that was a transformation in the anxiety that the fear of death brought me. In Matt McCullough’s excellent book Remember Death, he says this.

“In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a crucial insight into the root of our anxiety: “Worry is always directed toward tomorrow.” When we’re anxious about something, we bring the future and its uncertainties into our experience of the present. “It is our securing things for tomorrow which makes us so insecure today.” 

My fear of death was because I couldn’t control the future. I came to learn that facing death can lead to true hope. Today we are facing a pandemic that doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon. I see so many that are afraid of death. Americans spend Billions a year to look younger, feel younger, and cheat death. We are now spending trillions to cheat death by trying to find a cure. I pray we do. I don’t, however, fear if we don’t. I hear so many people say, “stay safe” I myself have said this. I no longer say this. I beg each of you to stop saying this. In its place, let’s encourage each other to be brave and have courage. 

Aristotle is famous for his law of the golden mean. He believed that virtue is found in the middle of two vices. Courage, for example, is found between cowardice and recklessness. Too much courage and you are reckless too little, and you are a coward. Our world is filled with the disdain of virtue by cowards and reckless men and women. The challenge for us in a time like we are in is how do I know what courage is. Some say it’s staying home. Others say it’s not wearing a mask. Look to Jesus. Aristotle and his followers didn’t see or understand that the golden mean isn’t our idea of courage, but rather, it is the reality found in the person and work of Christ. We need to know Christ and understand his ways. 

How this looks practically, I think, is best explained by Martin Luther, who faced a pandemic of his own. 

“You ought to think this way: “Very well, by God’s decree, the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me, and I have done what he has expected of me, and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.

I love this because it tells us to think of our neighbor. Wear a mask and wash your hands. But it also says if your neighbor needs help even if they are sick, you don’t stay away. The law of love is more compelling than self-preservation. Love sometimes looks like wearing a mask, and at other times it looks like walking into a house where everyone has COVID to bring a meal or medicine. “If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me.” Our confidence as Christians should make us loving and not brash. We should be filled with common sense (grace) and ruled by love. Our courage is found in Christ, the golden mean. We can be brave and have courage only because he conquered death for us. My favorite poet says it this way Death used to be my executioner but has now become my Gardner because the only thing death can do is plant me into everlasting life. 

So go out into the world today unafraid of death because our hope is not in our own goodness but in the life-altering power of Christ who conquered sin and death. Until He is done with us, nothing can take us, and when He calls us home, nothing can keep us. 

Have courage and be brave today. 

Love you all 

Sam