The fifth message of the common wonderful: It is true that you are going to die, and it is also true that “Neither death nor life, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, not any height nor depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God”(Romans 8:38-39).
It seems that we are born with a longing, desire, and deep hope that this thing called life could somehow last forever. It is a premonition from Something Eternal that is already within us. Some would call it the soul. Believers would call it the indwelling presence of God. It is God in us that makes us desire God. It is an eternal life already within us that makes us imagine eternal life. It is the Spirit of God that allows us to seriously hope for what we first only intuit. Thus Paul loves to variously call the Spirit “the first fruits, “the promise,” “the pledge,” “the guarantee,” or, as it were, the first installment of what is, in fact, the full and final situation. All spiritual cognition is actually recognition: The Spirit within you knows the truth, you slowly intuit the truth, and faith allows you to finally and fully grasp this truth—which cannot be proven but only experienced.
God, by every religion’s best definition, is love (1 John 4:16). What follows, of course, is that if we are God’s creatures, then love is what we are too, at our deepest core and final identity. When we live consciously within this love, we will not be afraid to die, because love is eternal, and that core self is indestructible. “Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:8). You already know that intuitively
Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
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