The Resurrection Of The Dead

Twenty-fifth in a series
1 Corinthians 15:12-58

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being. (1 Cor. 15:17-21)

I live quite close to people who are very aware of their mortality.

I have several friends with cancer. The word cancer immediately evokes the word death. We don't always talk about it bluntly in polite society. However, in moments of candor, those friends of mine who are undergoing treatments for cancer share honestly their own inner thoughts about life and death.

One real fact of life is death!

Psychiatrists tell us that a mature person is one who has confronted the eventual reality of his own death. You and I are terminally ill. At this very moment, you are in the process of dying. It's just a matter of time, unless perhaps Jesus Christ returns before that moment.

We run through life so fast trying to avoid thoughts of death. Death hits. You lose a loved one. You have a brief service in his/her memory. Then you move on, inoculating yourself into a personal invulnerability. We know we'll die. We just don't want to think about it. We call those thoughts morbid, gloomy, dismal. Yet each of us must face the reality of our own inevitable death.

Billy Graham once said that the last generation didn't talk about sex. Ours does. In fact, sex is the major topic of our day. What our generation doesn't talk about is death. Elisabeth Kübler Ross, in her studies of our culture, notes that many of us live denying the fact of death.

Some people have trouble confronting this reality. Occasionally a teenager fantasizes about death as a possible alternative to facing the explosive difficulties of adolescence. That's why we're seeing such an increase in suicide among young people. However, there is a big difference between a whimsical death wish, contemplated in the privacy of one's own thoughts, or the speculative musings about death philosophized in the classroom, from the direct encounter with the real loss of a parent or a close friend.

Early in my ministry I discovered how shocked we are when a young person dies. I was pastoring in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Never have I observed greater public anguish than at the funeral of 14-year-old Bobby. His motorcycle smashed into the tail end of a truck. He was thrown to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, pavement, his skull split wide open. Rushed to the hospital, he went through hours of brain surgery. Finally, he died.