Sun, 25 June, 2006: Today’s Bible readings.
1 The righteous man perishes,
and no one lays it to heart;
devout men are taken away,
while no one understands.
For the righteous man is taken away from calamity;
2 he enters into peace;
they rest in their beds
who walk in their uprightness.
We don’t get many answers about why God does what He does. He is sovereign over all things, and He has no obligation to explain them all to us. But God does sometimes condescend to tell us some things.
In our reading today, God tells Isaiah why some of the righteous people died in His day: to remove them from the chaos and violence of their day.
What do we learn from this?
Death is our great enemy. We hate to see those we love die, and we have a certain element of fear about our own death. Much of death is unknown to us, and so we naturally fear it. It usually is accompanied by pain, and so we desire to avoid it. And it is so final that it ends everything we know. What comes beyond death? We know very little about that until we face it ourselves.
But God tells Isaiah that when a righteous man dies, he leaves the calamity of this world and enters into peace.
Death, though a great tragedy, is the entrance into eternal peace for the righteous. It is something we mourn, but for the Christian, there is great hope. The death of the Christian is the end of their trials and tribulations, and the entrance into the full peace of God. We still hate it, mourn it, and try to avoid it. But we have hope in the face of it.
Where is Christ in this passage?
Death is a reminder of our sin. Every one of us have violated God’s law, and apart from Christ’s return, every one of us will die. Adam’s sin brought death into the world, and therefore we all die as a result of Adam’s action on our behalf.
But because of Jesus Christ’s action on behalf of His people, death has lost its sting. Death no longer issues us into eternal judgment for our sin, but rather, death is our entrance to God’s peace. The punishment for our sins is fully paid if we are in Jesus Christ. He has taken that guilt and has atoned for it on the cross. Therefore everyone who comes to Him in faith is fully reconciled to the Father and is accepted into His heaven at death.
