Paging Phinehas Eleazar

Paul told the Corinthians that the things that happened to the Israelites were intended by God to be lessons for us. The incidents Paul refers to took place during the desert wanderings Israel endured on account of their disbelief. At the end of their 40-year desert penance, the disbelieving generation’s children poised to enter the promised land would have been 40- to 60-years-old. These men in their prime, having witnessed all the miraculous things God did to get them to where they were then fell prey to the seduction of the Moabites and their sensuous worship of Baal which involved ritual prostitution.

It's no surprise that the enemy would use sex to entice God’s children, first because it is one of the strongest human drives. Second, if God’s people can be drawn into illegitimate sexual relationships, a major purpose of God in creation can be perverted. God created male and female so that they could participate in His plan to fill the earth with His image-bearers. God created the first two; then they were supposed to continue the process by procreation. God’s chosen people were forbidden to marry people from other nations because God wanted His people pure. This sounds like racial prejudice to our modern sensibilities, but the separateness of Israel was intended to be a picture of God’s holiness carried on through flesh and blood.

Israel’s dalliance with Baal also occasioned the use of a frequent metaphor. God often referred to Israel as His wife, so idolatrous worship was a type of adultery. This figure is most poignantly displayed with the prophet Hosea whom God commanded to marry a woman who would be repeatedly unfaithful. Because the marital relationship is the most intimate humans can experience, using it to show how idolatry affects God and our relationship with Him is especially meaningful. The imagery does not end with the Old Testament, as Christ is pictured taking the church as His bride in the heavenly wedding ceremony at the close of this age.

Now I am back to the lesson Paul would like us to learn from the incident in Numbers when the Israelites succumbed to the temptations of Baal. I don’t suppose there are many golden calves representing the god of the Moabites sitting reverently in our modern homes. However, I am quite certain that for many, the homes themselves are pretty close to the center of the proud owner’s heart. For others, like me for instance, it is hard not to think of the beautiful machine in the driveway as the fulfillment of our fantasy and lust. American popular society has made sex the center of everything. Or maybe it’s the career or the family or some hobby or pastime that creates the gravity of a black hole sucking all our wealth and affection into its orbit.

None of those things are bad in themselves as long as they do not take the place of God at the center of our being. But the man who spends every spare moment primping his lawn and shrubbery or dolling up his patio, measuring his worth by his address has fallen prey to idolatry every bit as much as the dallying Israelites. I am going to offend now, but I believe that churches who spend the lion’s share of their budget on glamorous buildings and facilities are likely building idol temples.

When the Israelites went after Baal, God was so incensed that He struck them with a deadly plague and tens of thousands died. Moses and a faithful few went to the tabernacle and began weeping for the wayward people. The priest Eleazar’s son, Phinehas, watched as an arrogant backslider pranced through the camp with his foreign mistress. Overcome with righteous zeal, the young man picked up a spear, followed them to their tent and impaled them both. Phinehas’ actions convinced God to stop the plague, “because he was zealous among them with my zeal.” The righteous indignation of one man brought a halt to the destruction of an entire nation.

And what are we to learn from Phinehas? First, we see that God is pleased with righteous behavior. We might also conclude that being angry with others is not necessarily wrong; Phinehas’ motivation was in line with God’s will. We also know from the laws God gave in Exodus that foreign wives were not acceptable, so the young man was operating on an established principle, even if his unilateral act was outside of standard protocols. This too may offend our delicate, modern sensibilities, but God did sanction what we would call murder on several occasions.

I am not suggesting that we take up Phinehas’ spear against idolatry in the church. However, I do think there is a place for a more aggressive church discipline than we are accustomed to. We have biblical precedent for this in the New Testament. On one occasion, Paul recommended tossing a wayward member out of the church so that the sinner might be driven back to faith by the expulsion. Paul also told Titus that a divisive person should be excommunicated. He likewise told the Romans to avoid such people. The goal of this kind of church discipline is always toward reconciliation, as Paul stressed to the Galatians.

Our present-day Phinehas needs to be armed not with a spear but with the sword of the Spirit. As we encounter the wave of persecution that our pagan society is forcing on us, we have greater need than ever to be pure in our faith. God’s righteousness is vindicated by discipline which also bears righteous fruit according to the author of Hebrews. Recent failures by well-known evangelical figures have shown what damage can be done by one man’s dalliance. The pagans rightly charge that we are no better than anyone else. We truly are not. We know that. But we must be better at disciplining those who stray so that we may show what it means to be faulty but forgiven. Given the price He paid for her, Jesus deserves a bride, “not having a spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she may be holy and blameless.” Phinehas, where are you?

Related posts: Bringing the Kingdom; The Winnowing Fork of God; Defending Resurrection Faith; I Don’t Believe in God; Not Our Father’s God; Do We Really Need God

Content in Whatever State I Am

The young nation of Israel certainly wasn’t content after God miraculously rescued them from Egypt. Everybody knows about the forty years of desert wandering God gave Israel as penance for unbelief. They had over two years of preparation – law giving and tabernacle building – and miraculous provision before they started toward the promised land. And still, they were complaining almost all the time. They couldn’t wait to get to the promised land. The record of the Israelites checking out Canaan and refusing to believe God would give it to them is a classic tale of failure to believe. I wonder if ten out of twelve being doubters is a normal ratio. I hate to say it, but I doubt many of my Christian friends would be with Joshua and Caleb; I’m not sure if I would be most days.

The Bible has plenty of other stories of people who had to wait for God. Job went through a lengthy trial before God restored his health and wealth. Abraham waited twenty-five years for Isaac. He never saw a permanent home in the land God promised him. Joseph was in Egypt for ten years or more before he was reunited with his family. Moses spent forty years as an Egyptian prince; forty years as desert shepherd; and finally, forty years as Israel’s leader. Then, like Abraham, he wasn’t permitted to enter the promised land. Joshua had to wait forty-seven years after spying Canaan to see the promised land conquered. The Jews taken captive to Babylon had to wait seventy years to go back home. Mary and Joseph had to wait thirty years and nine months to see the Messiah revealed

The passage of time is a strange thing. It has been five months since we moved to Arizona. (Pun alert: I am content in the state I am in.) Some days I feel like we have been here forever; then it seems like we just got here yesterday. It’s the same with the rest of my life: I have no sense of being seventy years old, yet all the things I have been through seem to fill several lifetimes. It strikes me that God uses our time for His purpose; that must be why the phrase “wait upon the Lord” is so common in Scripture. The problem most of us suffer with is being content to wait.

I don’t think it is always clear why God puts us in a waiting pattern. Looking at the list of Bible characters who had to wait for God, it is clear that not all waiting was due to failure to take God at His word, though some definitely was. Sometimes we can look back and see a reason. It is obvious how Joseph’s ten-year preparation set him up to save his family. Moses’ forty-year shepherd experience in the backside of the desert of Midian clearly prepared him for taking Israel through that same desert years later. The Babylonian captivity was a God-given sentence for Israel’s unbelief. Perhaps one day hindsight will give a clue to why we experience periods of waiting. Perhaps not.

The key to why we wait may be found in something Paul told the Philippians: “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.” He learned something. Paul mentioned on occasion that he was waiting to visit one church or another; he had to be content to wait until God provided a way there. The context of Paul’s recommendation to the Philippians was related to his personal circumstances which at times must have been difficult to wait through. The list of exciting adventures in the second letter to the Corinthians contains some things anyone would want over quickly: “in afflictions, in distresses, in difficulties, in beatings, in prisons, in disturbances, in troubles, in sleepless nights, in going hungry.” Paul must have wondered how long he would have to put up with situations like those.

I wonder how Paul could claim he was content in all that. I would certainly be looking for a quick and easy way out if those were my circumstances. Or if I was Job or Moses or Joseph. Apparently, faith has a time stamp on it. Paul believed he was doing exactly what God wanted him doing, so he was content, “whatever the circumstances.” That is something I need to keep working on.

My life story is filled with waiting periods. At eight years old, I discovered cars. I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license, but I had eight years to wait – a literal lifetime. My high school sweetheart and I couldn’t wait to get married, so we rushed through our four-year degrees in three years. We wanted children, but there was a miscarriage and four years of waiting before our first. Another miscarriage and four additional years passed before our second came along. Almost four years later we were “surprised” by our third child.

My career has had numerous fits and starts. I decided to become a teacher, but when I graduated, there were hundreds of applications for every opening, so I had to wait a few years doing other things before I landed my first teaching job. I decided I wanted to become an administrator, so I waited through a couple years of graduate school only to discover that the stresses of private school administration were not to my liking. I changed course and began looking for a post-graduate program that would earn me a doctoral degree so I could teach in a teacher college. That wait lasted about ten years.

After burning out in classroom teaching, I took what was to be a two-year sabbatical to finish a novel I had been writing for several years. I remained away from teaching (driving a truck) for twelve years. The novel did finally get published, but I am still waiting to move from the bottom of the Amazon book list. When the 2008 recession forced my small trucking company into bankruptcy, I returned to teaching at a college where after twenty years of waiting, I finally realized my dream of teaching teachers. I had periods of peace of mind throughout my career, but I never reached the Pauline standard of contentment in “whatever.”

All of this says nothing of the fact that I have wanted to customize every car I ever owned (over 250 and counting); I wanted to remodel every house we ever owned (6 – 7 if you count my current stationary RV); I constantly tinker with projects large and small with an eye toward improving function or efficiency. Doubtless the most damaging aspect of my discontent is how it affects people around me. My wife long ago quit telling me to stop trying to “fix” her when all I wanted was to help her in some way. My children will testify that I was impossible to please. Even my sincere compliments usually went something like, “That was really great, but….” It seems I was never content.

There is one aspect of my discontent that I am happy with – sort of a contented discontent. (I know that’s an oxymoron.) I am not content with my conformation to the image of Christ. I am not content with my knowledge of God. I am not content with my understanding of the Bible. If I understand the message the Bible teaches about life hereafter, I won’t ever be content with the praise I can offer God. These are all good things.

If you are content with the Bible sitting on your coffee table, I recommend you pick it up and read it every day until you find my level of discontent. If you think you know God perfectly well, I recommend you reexamine your idea of who God is. If you are content with your progress toward the likeness of Christ in all your life and behavior, I recommend you stop right now and confess your failure and pray for discontent. I am learning, as Paul suggested, to be content in whatever my earthly circumstances may be, but my spiritual contentment is yet in the future. I might wish a little contented discontent for you as well.

Related posts: Through the Bible in Seven Minutes; The Knowledge of Good and Evil; Why Heaven Matters

Take the Bible Literally?

My childhood home was overseen by a mother who was born in England and grew up in Canada with parents who never completely abandoned their British heritage. Because of this lineage, my mother was careful to impress the use of proper grammar and pronunciation on my sisters and me. Perhaps this explains why I did well in elementary and secondary school English and literature classes. It may also explain why I eventually chose English as my major (and initially, French as a minor) in my secondary education curriculum in college. More to the point, my concentration was grammar and linguistics. Over the years, I have been referred to as a “grammar Nazi” by my students and a few friends who chafed under my constant correction.

When I entered Bible college in my early twenties, I was thrilled to study koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. Having inherited my mother’s love of precise language, I was keen to know exactly what the Bible writers had said. As a witness to my enthusiasm, near the end of the first term, my first-year Greek professor told me not to bother with a second year because my capabilities were already beyond most of his second-year students. Had circumstances not intervened, I would have gone straight into the study of Hebrew so that I could apply the same diligence to Old Testament study, but it was not to be. I have done some self-study, but I must rely on commentaries to fully understand ancient Hebrew.

I lay all of this background so that my penchant for interpreting the Scripture in the most diligent fashion might be understandable. As I wrote recently in “Where’s My Cloud,” knowing who God is must be the primary goal of any sincere Christian. Following closely behind this is knowing what God expects of His people. To learn these things from texts that are thousands of years old, one must take care to interpret them in the context in which they were written. The Bible says plainly that God does not change, but languages and cultures do. The most reliable interpretation of Scripture is one that first attempts to understand the original intent and meaning of the ancient author.

Seeking original meaning also entails knowing the genre in which the original was composed. As I wrote in “Understanding the Bible as Literature,” “The Old Testament, particularly the wisdom literature and the prophets, is full of metaphor, imagery and symbolism. The original readers were accustomed to literature that was not meant literally.” Not literal does not mean not true. Nor does it mean not inspired. It certainly does not mean that we can ignore the lesson it teaches. It simply means that modern readers must get into the heads of the original authors and audience to grasp the significance of what was written.

Now I come to the point which inspired me to write about this subject again. My through-the-Bible reading schedule has me in Numbers these days. As its name suggests, Numbers is a record of counting things. God ordered Moses to count the people by tribes and clans. The total was a surprising 603,550 males over the age of 20. This would mean that there were between 2-3 million people when women and children were added. That number of people, if it is literal, is going to present problems.

The actual numbering is problematic for those who want the Bible to be literal in every word. Ancient language scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser, says that several factors mitigate against the Numbers count being a numerical value. The amount of food needed for the 45 days after leaving Egypt before manna arrived would have been unmanageable; millions of animals and thousands of pounds of grain would have been necessary. Also, the time for a phalanx of that magnitude to cross the Red Sea would have been a week or more not one night as Scripture records.

Additionally, according to Heiser, the area outlined as their camp on the Jordan before crossing into Canaan could not be realistic. He says, “At 2 million, the population density would be over 40,000 people per square mile—13,000 people per square mile greater than the city of New York in 2010.” Remember, there were no high-rise tents in ancient Israel making that density beyond unlikely. Then too, the Israelites were said to be the smallest ethnic group of all those in Canaan, yet there is no archeological evidence that there were any cities large enough to make that true. I suspect one could also rebut this claim with the counts of enemy dead during the conquest of Canaan even if we believe those numbers were numerically accurate.

Something inside me struggles with this information. I want to believe the historicity of all the Bible, but as Heiser points out, the ancient Mideastern literary practices were not the same as ours. As Westerners (Greeks) we think only of numbers having numerical value. The ancients considered them to have metaphoric value perhaps more important than their actual value. Example: God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Since no one thinks there were exactly 1,000 hills where cattle existed when that was penned, neither does one assume that there were other cattle on other hills that God did not own.

I would easily buy the idea that numbers were taken metaphorically until I come to a spot where God was numerically specific. When counting heads of Israel to balance numbers of Levites for redemption of the first born, God uses the exact number to be redeemed, 22,273. Since there were only 22,000 Levites, the Israelites had to add 273 animal redemptions to make up the difference in the actual numbers. (Num. 3:39-48) I feel like I am way out on a limb to say that the number is a metaphor, but the concept of one-for-one redemption is accurate. It works, and it maintains the truth of Scripture without being literal. Nonetheless, it makes me quiver slightly, metaphorically speaking.

To quote myself again, “A slavish, literal interpretation of all Scripture leads to gross misinterpretation. At one point in church history, people were put to death because they suggested the earth revolved around the sun. The church leaders thought this contradicted the clear teaching of the Bible that the sun rose and set (revolved) around the earth. Again, the Bible frequently uses the idea of the earth having ‘foundations’ because the cosmology of the day pictured the earth as a table with legs or foundations.” I would add that people who are expecting the heavenly Jerusalem to be a 1,500 cubic mile floating city with transparent gold streets and gates made of giant pearls may also have been influenced by misinterpretation of figurative language.

I will attempt an analogy from secular culture. Many children in our culture believe that a mythical character named Santa Claus delivers presents in a magical sleigh on Christmas Eve. As I have written elsewhere, the legend upon which Santa is built is not indisputable. It remains, however, a good reason to be charitable at Christmas time, so there is no reason to scrap the practice just because we outgrow our belief in the myth. Since the Bible is so much more believable than myths due to its authenticated historicity, borrowing principles from metaphors, images and symbols found in Scripture is a sound practice.

It may be my mother’s voice echoing in my head that says numerals must be numbers. I can fully relate to people who insist that creation took exactly six twenty-four-hour days, and the Messianic reign will last 1,000 years of 365 ¼ days each. What I cannot do is join the doubters who will reject the entire Bible because the numbers don’t work. I will try to get comfortable with the numbers being metaphors alongside all the other beautiful imagery of Scripture. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of literal death, I will fear no evil because I know God loves a good metaphor.

 

Related posts: Understanding the Bible as Literature; Rain on the Parade; Not Our Fathers' God

Where’s My Cloud?

The Israelites had the cloud by day and fire by night to assure them that Yahweh was with them. They stayed when the cloud stayed and moved when the cloud moved. That probably doesn’t seem relevant to a Christian today, but there may be a reason to look for “clouds.” I think Jesus could “see” the cloud when He was on earth. He said He only did what He saw His Father doing. When the Father moved, Jesus moved. Paul says each believer is a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we should be conscious of a cloud-presence around us. If we are sensitive to the moving of the Spirit, we will move the tabernacle when the Spirit moves.

If we are going see what our Father is doing, we have to know Him. Jesus said true life (zoe) is found in knowing God and Jesus. (Jn. 17:3) Paul said everything else is rubbish compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord. (Phil. 3:8) Proverbs says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Prov. 9:10) David told Solomon, “If you seek Him, He will let you find Him; but if you forsake Him, He will reject you forever” (1 Chron. 28:9). Similarly, God told Jeremiah, ““You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13).

In The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer, one of my favorite 20^th century authors said, “The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason, the gravest question before the church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.”

There can be no argument that the Bible recommends getting knowledge about God. Nor can there be any doubt where to find that knowledge. Sadly, not many people are making the effort these days. George Barna, the Christian pollster, reports that only one in six adults in the United States reads the Bible  at least once each week. LifeWay Research finds that although Americans express admiration for the Bible, more than half of them have read little or none of the Scripture. Lifeway also reported that, “Less than a quarter of those who have ever read a Bible have a systematic plan for reading the Christian scriptures each day. And a third of Americans never pick it up on their own”. 

Another LifeWay study found that the level of Bible reading among people who attend Protestant churches regularly is not encouraging. While three in ten people surveyed say they read the Bible every day, a disappointing four in ten read it only once a week or less. Even more discouraging is the rising number of people, even among believers who don’t consider the Bible to be the literal Word of God. According to a Gallup poll in 2017, only 35% of Protestant Christians believe the Bible is to be taken literally. Another 51% say it is, “the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally.”

I doubt that the Gallup poll required a careful definition of the word “literal.” In my experience, I have found that people who speak of taking the Bible literally usually mean that we should believe it and do what it says. Those who question the literal nature of the Scripture are often looking for a way to dodge the more uncomfortable passages regarding certain pet behaviors (aka sins). Mature students of the Bible know that it contains more than one genre of literature; as such, some things are not meant to be taken literally. This does not give license to downplay the lessons those passages teach or to ignore them completely. It certainly does not lessen the conviction that the Bible is meant to be a guidebook for knowing God and discovering His intentions for us.

Commenting on the results of a survey done several years ago, George Barna said, “Many Christians are hard-pressed to convert their beliefs into action. The ultimate aim of belief in Jesus is not simply to possess divergent theological ideas but to become a transformed person. These statistics highlight the fact that millions of people who rely on Jesus Christ for their eternal destiny have problems translating their religious beliefs into action beyond Sunday mornings.”

While I agree with Tozer that our conception of what God is like is more important than our behavior, our behavior must be instructed by our conception of God. If a believer is not regularly in God’s Word endeavoring to know God personally, one must question the authenticity of that person’s faith. John MacArthur said, “Spiritual growth progresses from knowing you are a Christian to knowing the Word of God to knowing God Himself.” Because our chief end in life is to glorify God, it is essential that we know who God is so that our behavior will bring glory to Him. I cannot expect the cloud of God’s presence to inhabit the tabernacle of my life if I don’t know the God I am inviting in. With that in mind, I am praying for more cloudy days in my life.

Related posts: Daily Bible Reading; That’s Not God

Why Jesus Wept

 Jesus wept. Famously, this statement in John’s Gospel is the shortest verse in the Bible. Much of the commentary on this brief passage asks why Jesus wept. The only possible biblical answer to that comes from the people who witnessed Jesus’ behavior at the tomb of his friend, Lazarus. When they saw him weeping, they said, “See how he loved him!” They assumed Jesus’ love for Lazarus caused Him such grief that he wept. This may well be true, since the Bible plainly says that Jesus, being fully human, bore all the emotions of any normal person. However, the larger context of the event begs for a more nuanced explanation of Jesus tears.

Reset the clock back to when Jesus first learned of Lazarus’ predicament. When He was told Lazarus was sick, He replied, “This sickness is not to death, but for the glory of God, in order that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Then, after waiting two days, Jesus announced that they would be going to Judea. This concerned some of his disciples who reminded Jesus that He had recently been under threat of stoning by the Jews there. Jesus responded with an interesting exclamation: “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going so that I can awaken him.” Two verses later, it is revealed that Jesus knew Lazarus was dead.

The use of the metaphor of sleep for death is important if we are to understand what Jesus was doing and why He wept. When Jesus approached the grave of His friend, the dead mans’ sister, Martha, came out to meet Him. She was concerned that Jesus had not come in time to heal her brother, an attitude that proves she knew Jesus had the ability to do so. Then she exhibited a greater faith when she said, “Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will grant you.” Jesus told Martha, “Your brother will rise again.” Her reply was, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” She was expressing a belief that was widely held by many Jews of her day. Jesus was about to broaden her ideas about resurrection.

When Jesus approached Lazarus’ tomb, it had been three days since he died. Even with the Jewish embalming practices, a dead body would begin to decay after this amount of time, a fact that Martha pointed out to Jesus. Even in her enlarged faith, she believed it was one thing to heal a sick person but giving life to a stinking corpse was out of the question. The language describing Jesus’ inner feelings at the tomb is unique. John says Jesus was “deeply moved in His spirit,” and he was “troubled within Himself.” I believe John is trying to tell us that something other than human grief was bothering Jesus. Saying His spirit was moved takes it to another level beyond emotion.

This reveals the deeper issue that I believe may have prompted the weeping by Jesus. There was a spiritual battle going on not just over the life of Lazarus, but for the very souls of all those who were present and those of us who read the account now. Death is a spiritual enemy that Adam’s sin introduced into human experience. When Jesus stood at Lazarus’ tomb, He knew He was striking a preliminary blow in the battle He was ultimately going to win on the Cross of Calvary. I believe one reason why Jesus wept at Lazarus’ tomb was because His friend’s death reminded Him of all the pain, misery, and death that had followed the disobedience of Adam in the Garden. He also wept because He knew there would be people who did not believe in Him; He knew people who don’t believe in the resurrected Christ face a fate far worse than physical death.

So, Jesus wept. He undoubtedly felt sad at his friend’s passing because of how it affected Lazarus’ sisters and others who loved him, but He knew it was not permanent, so I don’t think that was His main reason for His tears. Jesus knew that the incident was orchestrated to bring glory to Him and His Father. If we are true followers of Christ, being remade in His image (as commanded), we should be able to look at death the same way Jesus did. We should be weeping for a lost world that denies the Risen Savior.  Weep for a loved one’s death, yes, but not as those who have no hope.

There is another possible explanation for why Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus that I never thought of until I wrote this. Jesus could have been seeing Lazarus as a forerunner of every believer who would be buried in the waters of baptism, the likeness of Christ’s own grave, destined to be resurrected to new life when they came up out of the water. I weep every time I witness a baptism. Don’t you? Maybe Jesus wept tears of joy knowing that Death was soon to die. Maybe Jesus was seeing death the way one of my favorite English poets, John Donne, saw it in his 10^th Holy Sonnet:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

 

Here is another short poem recorded by the Apostle Paul,

“Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?

Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”

 

When we achieve that victory, we may weep for joy as well.