PHILIPPIANS is going to be like. The Word of God gives us a great deal of help on the subject, too. Parenthetically, it would conversely be true for un believing people who persist in their lack of desire to accept Jesus Christ, to read up on what hell will be like. It is a tragic place forever, without light and love. The Saviour, who is the Light of the world, will not be there to bring comfort and aid. Physical death is the final break down of the body which the Psalmist describes as fearfully and wonderfully made. It is the total disintegration of this marvelous structure. Only the body dies. Its elements return for a time to the state in which they existed before the Spirit of God took them into this strange partnership called life. It is the dissolving of our earthly house of this tabernacle from which we are willing to be absent in order to be present with the Lord. The Lord, by His own crucifixion and resurrection has robbed death of its sting and the grave of its victory. While death can destroy and sep arate for a little while someday we will be given our glorious, resur rected bodies, not limited by the traditional laws of time and space. Left alone, the death of the body would have been sealed in eternal tomb, but Jesus Christ came for the express purpose of destroying this last enemy. He did so by dying Himself. He therefore brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel (II Timothy 1:10). The Bible teaches us that Christ abolished death by giving us spir itual life. The word “ abolished" means to render idol, inactive, in operative, or to deprive something or someone of strength. This is why
physical death no longer is a pen alty in the life of the believer. It is really the gateway to life immortal. When the stone was rolled away from the grave, it was not to let Christ come out but to show us that He was no longer inside. This is why we can now be looking for Christ who triumphed over death (Romans 5:14-17). There is much to be learned about death from the Word of Cod. Even then, however, there is a great deal which will have to wait for full understanding until we meet our Saviour face-to-face. In the mean time, even though we may have to “ walk through the shadow of death" we know that He will be with us. Surveyed from nature's point of view, death is to be dreaded. It is man's most terrible foe. You can not take riches, honors, dignities and pleasures into death with you. Everything will have to be left be hind. What a person might have been becomes a thing of the past. Warnings which came and were not heeded will have to be faced on the day of reckoning. No one can avoid the certain summons. The second view is from the stand point of the child of God. We have a marvelous inventory of posses sions in Christ as a believer (I Cor inthians 3:22). Even death is ours! That from which we would once shrink in horror, has now been a friend through Christ's death on the cross. He has taken the sting out of our last foe, completely changing the character of death for the born-again believer. The power of death to bring fear and torment is gone. Paul was certainly looking forward to that moment when there would be a resurrection and his
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