Why Are We So Afraid to Die? by Rev. Benjamin Glaser

Of the many things which separate us from the animals the one that causes us the most anguish is the lingering knowledge that all of this will end some day. You will cease to breathe. There will be a funeral service and you will take up residence in a graveyard somewhere. There is no escaping it. No matter how hard you try, and no matter how much science attempts to find a solution, it will all fail. The only way any of us will not experience death is if the return of the Lord Jesus Christ is what comes next.

So why do we spend so much time and energy either acting like it won’t happen to us, or living in such fear of death that we can hardly do anything else? Well, in this short essay for 1782 we are going to explore that a little bit. At the outset it is important to lay out this point. Christians must set an example for the world to see that the faith which we confess is more than just a blind hope in a get-out-of-hell-free card. For all men and women struggle with the fear of death, and the Believer alone has a solution outside himself that no work of man could ever equal. God has blessedly in His grace gives us a witness to what comes next.

In a well-known, and well-worn, story about the Puritan William Perkins he was serving as a chaplain in the prison near Cambridge. The tale goes that as he was at the gallows one day that he noticed the man headed to the rope was shivering. Perkins yells up at him and asks if he is afraid to die, the gentleman retorted, that no it was not death he feared, but what comes next. As the story progresses Perkins takes this man and gives him Christ, first in the law to convict, and then in grace to grant relief. The man in tears throughout changes the tenor of his weeping, from sadness to joy. He then goes and gives himself over to the executioner that he may soon join his savior. Now, this may seem morose, but it is the heart of why we fear. Because we do not have true assurance about what comes next.

Our desire as a culture to remove all sense of danger or vulnerability arises from the sense that what we experience now is all we get, so we ought to make sure there is no degree of risk in what we do. There is a popular meme which floats around every now and then on the Facebook which shows a kid with tube socks and a big wheel floating above kids in a re-enactment of an Evil Knievel jump. The tagline is usually some variant of “It’s a miracle we survived the 1970’s.” The idea behind this is that kids today are soft, or do not get to have fun like we did back in the day. Now, there are reasons for why people think we lived differently back then. Some of it is just anachronistic nostalgia that is common with “kids these days” type of thinking, which is true of every generation. I’ve even seen people who graduated high school in the 2000’s talking about life before smart phones. Nostalgia often has a tug of fear tied into it. The world we knew no longer exists so we decide to try and re-experience it and re-create it. I’m one to talk on this point since I’m going to see Dead and Company on Monday, but you see this in the somewhat lame continuation of 70’s rock bands with the drummer and maybe a bassist left from the classic lineup. Everyone pretending it is just as awesome as it was back when they blew the roof off the Palladium in London. Though as everyone tries to lift it up there is that sense that it’s all just pretend. All of this is tied into the big picture problem of pretending as if life never ends. If we can just keep trotting an 80 year-old Mick Jagger out on the stage than I’m still sixteen in the bedroom I grew up in transgressively listening to Their Satanic Majesties Request. No need to deal with reality. No need to grow up and take seriously the demands of what comes next.

So what does come next?

In American Folk Religion there is an idea that the future after death is just an amped up version of what we are doing now. If you like to fish, you’ll catch 100lb bass in the eternal Lake Hartwell in the sky. Like to golf? Well, it’s Augusta every day. Though when you attend funerals where this faith is preached the way you get to watch Dale race again is either by being a good bloke or just having had the blessing of lived in the first place. Even if there is a random word about God it’s usually in the same vein as how we talk about Grandpa and his Werther’s Original. Or maybe I should use the word vain? Either way for a Southern culture which proudly displays its love for Jesus on Insta or Snapchat there seems to be little care for what He actually has to say on the subject, which is why again the focus is on the flesh, rather than the Almighty. For we don’t actually want to experience God in the eternal, but ourselves in what comes next.

Which turns us back to the whole question about why we fear death.

Our safety-conscious world knows, as the Bible declares it, that as long as we can pretend like death isn’t going to happen to us then we have no need to consider the weight that is on our shoulders. Why worry about that when we can indulge ourselves today? For if we can put off judgment another day, as Felix before Paul, then we can pretend as if the consequences of life will never need to be paid. We don’t actually have to deal with our sin, the way we are living in sin, and the pang of conscience which eats at us like the worms which took down Herod.

But the piper is piping and He is nearing the door.

So continue America, Clover, South Carolina, Bethany Community, wherever you might be. Keep on keeping on as if death is for someone else, that if you can inoculate yourself against the still small voice which haunts your soul then you won’t have to deal with it…and you will find that when the time of death comes it will be not the Lake of Pike to which you will swim. Put on a brave face, tell people you love Jesus, but at the end of time it will be a Matthew 7:21-23 life for you. Is this really the way you want to live? At the end of the day is the devotion to self really meeting the struggle you have with the fear of death? Well, we all know it doesn’t. The difference between those who know the peace of Christ and those who deny it to themselves for the pleasures of sin is that at death we know that true life begins. So how can you turn away from this present evil desire to not deal with truth? Go back a little bit in Matthew 7 for the answer:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

Are you ready today to meet Christ? If you die today what Jesus will you see? The one who casts you away into outer darkness because you desired to live today? Or the one to whom the Scripture says:

 Therefore, brethren, we are debtors—not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.