Journey From Death to Life 3

Hello Everyone,

Yesterday we looked at one way that Isaac’s story is my story, and yours, too.

But there is another way that his story is true of each of us, and that is:

MY DEATH APPEARS CERTAIN (Genesis 22:9–10).

 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. ¹⁰ Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. (NIV).

Can you imagine?

Again, put yourself in Isaac’s shoes. Can you imagine his horror?

Whether he was eight years old or eighteen, this had to have been a frightful moment.

Did his father surprise him?

Did Abraham explain what had to happen?

Did Isaac resist?

We don’t know for sure.

But it seems likely that, at some point, Isaac understood what was happening.

At some point, he realized that he was going to die.

And, while the biblical account doesn’t give us much detail about how things got to this point, it supplies painful detail at this point:

Abraham raised the knife to “slay” his son!

Talk about your life flashing before your eyes!

Some of us have had such a moment.

Maybe it was a medical scare.

Maybe it was a car accident or an operation.

But Isaac’s story is your story, and mine, regardless.

The Bible says,

Sin came into the world because of what one man did, and with sin came death. This is why everyone must die—because everyone sinned (Romans 5:12, NCV).

Ever since the first human beings ate the forbidden fruit, ever since they ignored God’s warning and did things their own way, we have all gone astray.

We have all rejected God’s way and chosen our own way … repeatedly.

And the consequence of the sin that touches us all is the death that awaits us all.

There is a scene in The Bible miniseries of the Exodus, in which Moses has to explain the final plague to his people, and he tells them, “Death is coming for us all.”

It’s true.

You may not be tied hand and foot and placed on an altar.

The angel of death may not be sweeping through your house tonight.

But death is coming for us all, one way or another, sooner or later.

Depressing, right?
I bet if you knew I was going to be such a “downer” today, you would’ve stayed home and watched Teresa’s boy friend on TV, right?

But stay with me, it gets BETTER.

Before we can appreciate the good news, we need to understand the bad news.

Death is coming for us all.

Every one of us is facing physical death, just like Isaac did on the altar; it’s not a question of if death is coming, it is only a question of when.

We all know our time on this earth, in this life, is limited.

We all know that the human condition is terminal.

We know that the death rate is 100%.

We may hope it’s not today.

We may feel like we’ve got ALL THE TIME in the world.

But none of us knows.

As the Bible says,

No man knows when his hour will come (Ecclesiastes 9:12a, NIV 1984).

But, happily, that is not the end of the story. Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be.

Greater things are still to come!