Tag Archive: Death

My Response to “The Rose”

So dare I hope so late as now
Toward the end of my life
That, beneath all of the ice and snow
Atop my frozen grave
When the sun’s love clears the cold stone
There will yet lie the seed
That in the spring becomes the rose?.

Why have I always resisted the idea that departed believers are really still here “with” Jesus?

For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.  For most certainly in this we groan, longing to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven,  if indeed being clothed, we will not be found naked.  For indeed we who are in…
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Going to Be With the Lord

No faith is needed where the thing hoped for can be seen. And the difference between not yet seeing and fully seeing Is the whole difference between being in the body and being out of it and “with” the Lord.

“I Want to Be Forgotten!”

A rebellion against the power of death, written as a tribute to two important people in my life who have left this existence in recent Decembers.

“Unless You Repent, You Will All Perish,” the Parable of the Spared Fig Tree, and the problem of evil in Luke 13:1-9

In Luke 13:1-9, Jesus answers the “problem of evil” by pointing at his questioners’–and everyone’s–sin, pointing out that death and suffering come as a result of sin, not of being a greater or lesser sinner, and calling for repentance.

A Poem and a Hymn About Futility, Death and Hope

I am posting a new poem I recently wrote, the most complete text I am able to find of an old Isaac Watts hymn, and some related scriptures, all on the subjects of death and the futility of “success” in this life. God is our only hope.

About Jesus in the Earliest Christianity

This post is a detailed index of what the earliest Christian churches appear to have understood, this time about the Person of Jesus. Most of these ideas were later distorted, leading to divisions in the Church and historical consequences in the world. Further links to this outline will be added as new articles are written.

Memorial Day: The Case for Mourning

There are those who say that a good Christian should always rejoice because of anything that happens, and must never grieve. These people are wrong. Our instructions are to grieve physical death, and to grieve the sinful condition of our world that leads to it, as God himself does, but to do so in a way that expresses our hope in the resurrection. Do not deny grief, but show hope in grief. Groaning is not a sin.

An old dream about dirges, Sunday school classes, and the expectation to hide problems

How a dream about the word “dirge” led me to recognize two of the major problems of modern Western churches: our insistence on hiding problems to preserve our “witness” rather than dealing with them in the Spirit (hypocrisy) and our one-way, “fact”-intensive teaching style.