daily java

Daily Java:

When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. (Romans 5:12)

There is a reason we die, but it is not the reason we think.

Someone the other day said that there was a reason for a person’s death. And he was right, but not in the way he thought.

Contrary to what we think, the Bible never says that God takes us when he is ready.

For instance, it was Acts 12 and the church was growing and needed its leaders, yet the apostle James, one of Jesus’ inner circle of three, was killed. What’s more, God stops them from killing the apostle Peter. Why did James die and not Peter? Was it James’ time? What about the fact that the church needed James as much as they needed Peter?

In 1979, the entire faculty of my seminary was killed in a plane crash. For what reason? What could God have in mind for taking four of the most godly men I knew? Was there a reason? What could it possibly be that would leave an institution that taught his word without valuable teachers and four families – two of them young families – without their husbands and fathers?

In 2010, I drove through a blizzard to get to Lincoln to preach. That same weekend, that same blizzard, the pastor of a good church in Lincoln flipped his car driving to Omaha and was killed. His wife lived. So a church that turned out to be a bad move for me was blessed and a church that had been there for several years lost it relatively young senior and founding pastor.

What was the reason? There was none. There is not a reason for everything that happens. The reason we die is because Adam and Eve brought sin into the world and humanity was cut off from the Tree of Life. God kept us from living forever in our sin. And so we die.

As Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 says:

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest.
Sometimes things just happens. My mother-in-law lived for ten years with no mind in her Alzheimer’s and another young man, powerful in the kingdom died early. Some idiot lives into his hundreds and John the Baptizer, one which Jesus called the greatest man who ever lived died at age thirty. A really stupid person lives a life of health and prosperity and a baby born to godly parents dies early with a painful disease. What’s the point?

The apostle Paul said in Romans 8:28: And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. What this means is that God takes the bad that happens – the death, the pain, the suffering, the disease, the poverty – and, if you love him and are called, uses it to his glory.

Small comfort sometimes, especially when it your loved one who is gone or suffering.

It is not the will of God that you suffer or die. There is not a time that God has in mind for each of us to die. That is fatalism or determinism. God does not have our lives controlled down to the time of our deaths. That is not to say he couldn’t know them if he wanted, but he does not take us or punish us with suffering. Job found that out in the book of Job. His suffering was not only without any good reason, he didn’t even understand why and God didn’t tell him why.

All we can do is serve him and allow him to work in our lives, turning those times of suffering and deaths of loved ones to his glory, remaining faithful to him always. He is Lord.