Life to Dead Things

Life to dead things.

That’s the Hope.

These past few weeks, it’s been the only thing getting me through.

In rare moments of sanity, God pulls back the scales of naïveté from our eyes and allows us to feel the weight of Darkness that is ever so present in our world.

It’s in these moments where we can’t hide from the realities of Depression, Cancer, Car-Accidents, Oppressive Governments, Suicide, Injustice, and other horrible things that inhabit our world along with us.

No matter how hard we try to ignore these realities, they are still realities. Even if we avoid all of these in our lifetime, the end for all of us is Death, the ultimate un-doing of all we know and love.

We can close our eyes to the Darkness, but that doesn’t make it go away. It just makes us blind.

So what do we do?

We have two options, really.

We can accept the Darkness as the ultimate end to all reality, an Inescapable Tyrant who will, in the end, be “all in all.”

Nietzsche tried this and was driven to insanity. The Darkness and Fatalism he embraced didn’t just define his worldview——it consumed him and, in the end, became him.

But there’s another option.

We can Hope.

Hope is holding onto a belief in a better future.

For Christians, this hope is life from the dead. In the words of Paul, “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).

Jesus Christ did not close His eyes to Darkness. He saw our state and He moved towards us. He took the Darkness on Himself, extinguishing it with His great love as He suffered the consequences of Sin and Evil in His own body.

He died and rose from the dead.

In Keller’s words, Christ entered into death and “blew a hole out the back.”

So now our Hope is that, in Christ, Death has been defeated, and one day will be swallowed up forever, overcome by Life itself.

If not, the Death really does get the last laugh.

Mental Illness wins the match.

Suicide is never defeated.

Injustice is never accounted for.

Death ends as the Victor.

That’s a grim reality. And if you live only by what you see, that’s the reality you get.

But there is Hope.

Resurrection.

Life to dead things.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”