God In Our Death and In Our Dying
God chose to die so that even the terrifying, unknown spaces between worlds would be filled with God’s love, and we’d never be alone, not for a moment, not for an instance.
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39)
The central message of the Christian faith is revealed in the resurrection— that Christ raised from the dead has abolished death, that humans need no longer fear death, that death is no longer an inevitability, that death has no power, that death cannot separate us from God or even from one another— that even though we die, in Christ we live. We live. Somehow we live.
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