Month: August 2025

Declining to Our Physical Departure

Aging can bring physical decline and loss, leading to a struggle with self-identity and health. Yet, faith in God provides hope. Through Jesus Christ, believers can embrace eternal life beyond death. This perspective encourages acceptance of life’s purposes, focusing on the glory promised in Heaven, making the aging process less daunting.

Nobody likes aging. It doesn’t hit you that this is your problem until usually your 30’s (a little) and with every decade that passes it gets worse. When our physical decline results in actual loss, we struggle to cope. It seems that suddenly we cannot eat like we used to without consequence. We used to be so attractive and now we are attractive “for our age”, which is often the same as not attractive. Eventually we cannot run without pain. We forget stuff. We can’t sleep or we sleep all the time. We are no longer competent to drive. We are no longer safe to live independently. It is a dark decline.

I would like to give you a little perspective that I hope helps. We are created to be eternal creatures. Our bodies age, decline and die; but that is because of “sin”. I’m not saying that we would necessarily live longer or healthier if we behaved better. I am saying that we are all genetically altered from the way God originally created human beings. The result is that our current bodies must die. This would create a hopeless situation for us if not for the fact that God wants us to have eternal life with Him, and has done something about it.

Jesus Christ is God’s Son who became human for a very specific purpose. He kept God’s Law perfectly, which is what God requires for people who would be with Him eternally. He also absorbed the worst consequence of sin on the cross. He was forsaken by His father, which would be our fate. Now we can be “connected” to Jesus through God creating faith in us and Jesus “baptizing us into His death”. That phrase means that God creates some sort of “supernatural” connection to us where Jesus’ life and Jesus’ death are ours. When we are “in Christ” the only thing left for us to do is to go through physical death. The rest of the way to a glorious, happy, eternal existence has been given as a gift from Jesus.

With that as a backdrop, declining toward death shouldn’t have to be so bad. Yes, it still hurts. Yes, you feel loss. But you are heading toward something great. This impacts certain decisions and attitudes.

First, if you are facing any challenge, especially a medical challenge, you can tell yourself that it is only temporary and if it ends in death, you will actually gain from it.

You don’t have to insist that the medical community do everything possible to keep you alive. Your goal is to naturally die. Their efforts would probably only give you an extended painful, useless, modest extension on this life. You don’t even want that.

Rather than be always looking back at the “good old days”, you can be forward thinking toward the glory of what God has prepared for you in Heaven and ultimately also a New Earth.

You can understand your purpose in life as something that is dynamic but always God-given. When you retire, you move from one purpose to another that is God-given. As you lose independence, you may lose one purpose but acquire another. Life is for accomplishing whatever God has prepared for you and then you get to experience real life.

This is hard to embrace, but when you study what God has promised us you develop a genuine excitement for it. That is what this blog is all about. My life matters, my aging and decline matters, and my passing away matters. I am heading toward an increasing glory.

16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

5 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

2 Corinthians 4:16-5:1 (ESV)

Accepting the Reality of Eternal Existence

For some there is no doubt. At least verbally. We will go on beyond our death. These people tend to error on the side of thinking everybody has something good waiting for them. For others, there is a great deal of doubt. We usually don’t get a preview. People who have a Near Death Experience are almost all in on eternal life. The rest of us just see the impact of death on our flesh, and it is sobering.

Certainty that we die and then disappear, is equally hard to maintain. Many are very bold about it until death looms near. Then they are not quite as enthusiastic about the prospect and begin to hope for more.

Certainty is not the same thing as faith. Faith is several things. It is first a Holy Spirit bypass of whatever keeps us from being receptive to God because of our sinful condition. Then it is a God-produced connection between us and Christ. Then that connection produces a growing trust in all of God’s promises, His capabilities, and His character. It also generates certainty in the reality of eternal life and what will happen to you in your eternal existence.

The power of God’s Word is a driving force in having certainty in eternal life.

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

John 14:1-2 (ESV)

Who has reliable information on this topic? Even Near Death Experiences could be an illusion of a dying brain or a delusion created by Satan. Jesus raised people from the dead, was raised from the dead himself, and demonstrated that He was God through clear and observable miracles. Furthermore, His character was on display for all around him. For us, it is the power of the Word with the in-person accounts that give us the ability to “believe” in both Father and Son in this regard.

God could have created us to live and to die and be gone. He has nothing to gain by lying to us about this fact of our nature. Jesus says in the above passage that He would have told us if eternal life in Heaven was not on the table. It is on the table. That is why Jesus became one of us in the first place.

Our certainty comes with understanding the Gospel and God developing in us a deeper faith through the Word. First, it is our nature to be eternal because we are more than a body. We are a body and soul. I think that you can experience this much. Minimizing our will, memory, all conscious thought to chemical reactions in the brain, does not make sense. If our thoughts were just the product of brain chemistry and electrical activity then we would have no will. We clearly have a will. We are not “meat robots”. That is wrong.

It does take revelation from outside of ourselves to know about things that are beyond our sensory capabilities, beyond death, and probably beyond our space-time. Does the account of Jesus and the revelation that comes with Jesus have any credibility? Seek out the arguments. They are hard to dismiss unless you have a bias and want to dismiss them. God tells us what comes next. This whole blog covers it. There is eternal life (eternal existence with God) and eternal death (not non-existence but exile from God as in Hell). Eternal life is God’s gift predicated on what Jesus has already accomplished . God has proven to be trustworthy.

The only qualification to the certainty that we can have is that people can fall away. I must respect the theoretical possibility that I will abandon God’s gift. God gives plenty resources enough to never fall away, but people still manage it. I don’t doubt because I know that God is enough. When actually facing my final hour, there is no need to look at myself and ask if I have done enough. Jesus is enough. I don’t do anything. Therefore I am certain.