The Wilderness and Other Trying Times

"But God was with him and
rescued him from all his troubles."
—Acts 7:10

Now Job starts meditating on the frailty of human life, and the words he uses make it appear that he didn't yet have clear assurance of the life to come. To him, the "land of the shadow of death" is apparently a "land of thick darkness, as darkness itself . . . anyone that goes down to the grave will never come up again."

All of his life Job has walked with God and known His blessings but now, through his affliction, he will learn what he never was able to learn in his prosperity.

Ecclesiastes 7:3 says, "sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better and gains gladness," that "sadness has a refining influence on us" (Living Bible). "For God sometimes uses sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek eternal life. We should never regret His sending it" (II Cor. 7:10).

It is unfortunate that this "refining influence" cannot be found in our times of peace and prosperity. However, the realities of God's Kingdom will only be unveiled to us when the love of everything this world has to offer has been stripped from our grasp.

Purifying fire and times of crisis will cause us to get things out of our lives that we didn't even realize were in there.

Let me illustrate this if I can: Let's pretend you just created a vase out of clay, then placed it into a kiln to harden. The extreme pressure caused by the heat hardens and purifies the clay. Any foreign substances in the clay, like a piece of straw or dirt, would cause the clay to expand and to explode, marring the vase. So it is our lives.

If there are any impurities in our lives, the stress of adversity will force them
to the surface and if not dealt with then, would, I believe, destroy us or at least our testimony.

Sorrow will teach us lessons that laughter never could. It has been said that there can be no Pentecost without first experiencing a Calvary. There can be no Canaan without first going through the Wilderness.

I have heard it argued the wilderness experience of the Israelites was not at all necessary. The argument says that the reason the people of God had to spend that time wandering around in the desert was because of their own sin, that it wasn't God's desire or plan.

This is true, although, the scripture also says, "when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine Country, although that was shorter. For God said, 'if they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.' So God led the people around by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea" (Exodus 13: 17-18).

Even before the people of Israel sinned and had to wander for 40 years in the wilderness, God already knew something about them. He knew that they were not ready to go right into the Promised Land.

It has been said that it took one day for God to take Israel out of Egypt, but it took 40 years to take Egypt out of Israel.

Moses told them to remember how the Lord led them in the desert for 40 years, "to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble you and test you, to do you good in the end" (Deut. 8:2-5, 16).

Clearly, God's purpose for the wilderness journey was for training, for discipline, for instruction. God was acting as a father to provide for His people. Part of His provision was to bring His children through the wilderness.

God does indeed have a purpose and He is bringing us into the land of promise. However, when we get there, we have to be mature enough to accept the responsibilities and privileges of that inheritance. He has to lead us through a process of growth, of training, of instruction, so that we will not only be brought out of Egypt, but that Egypt would be brought out of us.

Granted, the actual number of years wandering around was indeed punishment for sin. The Israelites could have gone into the Promised Land much sooner if they had only submitted to His training. But there was still something in the plan of God that involved a journey in going through the wilderness.

One way or another we all have to go through a wilderness of our own and the length of time that it takes will vary depending on our response to His leading and instruction. The most important thing to remember is that His purpose is to do us good in the end.

So often what we may desire is not what the Lord wants to give us, not because He's a mean stepfather who wants to take away all the dreams and desires of his children. No, He actually has something that is better for us. Yet, we cannot see that any more than a screaming child who has been denied something he desires, can see the long-term benefits of the present denial.

This exhortation by Moses was motivated by the fact that the people of God were missing the food they had back in Egypt. There were actually a lot of things that they didn't miss, but what they could remember were the fresh, crisp vegetables, the juicy watermelons, tart onions, fish and Domino's Pizza. Now here they were, out in this wasted wilderness, supposedly on their way to some "Promised Land" which didn't seem to be anywhere nearby, and all they had to eat was something called manna.

Now that word, manna, does not mean bread. It simply means "whatcha-ma-call-it." In other words, they looked at that stuff and said, "what in the world is this?" Now can you imagine eating the same thing every meal, day after day, and not even knowing what it is? I mean I often eat the same thing for breakfast several days in a row, but the same thing for every meal? Every day? Moses was saying that they had to remember the road on which the Lord had led them. Then explains why: "To humble you, to test you, and to discover whether or not it was in your heart to keep his commandments."

Here they are out in the desert, for forty years, looking for the land that flowed with milk and honey and all they could see were the sand-which-is here. (Say it fast and you will catch the pun . . . get it? –you may groan now.)

The time of training is exactly what the Lord is up to in our wilderness. Maybe it is a wilderness of loneliness, or singleness. Possibly, a wilderness of working in a job you do not like or a wilderness of missionary work that is just plain hard work instead of the glamour you expected. Whatever it is, is it for nothing? NO! It's to humble you, to test you, and to discover whether your heart is set on obedience and if you will be able to find contentment even in turmoil.

Job's Question
Job's sorrow makes him ask, "who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?" Obviously, Job realizes that man, as he is himself, is unclean. Certainly, a corrupt tree cannot produce good fruit. "That which is flesh is flesh" and there is no hope for man except to die and start all over again, and that demands a new birth from above.

Job understands that there is hope for a tree if it is cut down; new life springs again. But what about a man when he dies? "Where is he? If a man dies, will he live again?" If he could just know for sure, that one thought alone would give him hope and he would wait patiently all the way through this conflict until he would hear the voice of God call him to another life. When that happened, he would know that the Lord actually did have a plan and purpose after all. However, right now, it seems like God is counting his steps, and watching minutely for sin, so that He can bundle them all together as evidence against him.

Running water will wear away even stone, and Job is feeling very worn out with his afflictions. This prolonged trial is destroying every bit of hope. Anyone in this depth of distress becomes oblivious to anything else going on around him. All he feels is his own pain and mourns over himself. In Charles Swindoll's book, For Those Who Hurt, his number one recommendation for overcoming pain is to quit looking at yourself and start reaching out to comfort others.

It is so easy to become engrossed in our own pain and ourselves. We try to analyze, understand and discuss our problems away. Elisabeth Elliot tells an interesting tale of her journey to Ecuador:

"We were two women and one man—he in shorts and rubber knee boots, we in standard jungle garb of blouses, skirts, and tennis shoes. As we plowed through the mud, some spiritual parallels came to mind.

"Every step of faith is a step of 'faith.' In some places, the logs were submerged in mud. Finding one to put your foot on did not make it easier to find the next one.

"Each step was a 'decision,' but to make it a 'problem' would have halted progress altogether. Sometimes the choice was to balance on a 3-inch-diameter log laid parallel to the path and take a chance of slipping off sideways and falling into the mud, or to step deliberately into mud (which was like peanut butter) up to one's knees, or to try to beat one's way through the tangle of the side at the trail (and of course that tangle could always hold snakes). You had to keep moving. Decisions, therefore, had to be snap decisions.

"If we had let each step be a problem, to be paused and pondered over, we'd still be there. If a decision turned out to be the wrong one, which it often seemed to be, you simply pulled yourself out and kept on . . .

"The trail—always leading us to our goal—took on various aspects. We were not always in mud up to our knees or trying to find footing on logs that were in some places submerged. For short spaces, the trail was gravel. Sometimes there were hills to climb and rivers to wade where we got the chance to rinse off a few pounds of jungle soil. At times we were in sunshine where the forest had been cut back to make pasture, at other times in deep shade.

"There was a tiny footprint in front of me. You learn when you travel jungle trails to recognize the differences in footprints. A party of Indians had evidently preceded us not long before. One of them was a child no more than three. As we came to what seemed to me impassable sections, I found myself spurred on by the knowledge that where the trail was firmer I would find the little footprint. Sure enough. That little person had made it through what was for him hip-high mud, across precarious logs, into the streams, up the hills and down the slick ravines. There is something amazingly heartening in the knowledge that somebody else has been over the course before—especially if it's somebody who has had manifestly greater difficulties than ours to overcome. Most of the time there was no evidence at all of his going and I could lose heart. But here and there again the evidence lay, clear and unmistakable. If he had made it, so could I."

I have had people say to me, "That's great, Nickolas, but you don't know what I've been through." It really doesn't matter, my friend. In I Cor. 12.9, the Lord says, "My grace is sufficient for you." It is sufficient against any danger or pain, or memory or illness, or weakness, or bad habit . . . "to enable you to bear the trouble manfully because my strength and power (which is his grace) are made perfect and shown most effective in your weakness" (paraphrase of the Amplified Version). What you are saying, in effect, is that your problem is bigger than His grace. If that is what you believe, you are going to have some real hard theological questions to answer.

As long as we are continuing on our journey, we have to simply attend to the tasks at hand and live out our lives today. Live it without contemplating what happened before, without worrying about the future and especially not regretting the way it is now. We cannot always see into heaven; we have to live on earth. Just keep moving steadily ahead, one foot in front of the other, regardless of whether it is the "log," the "rock," or the "mud" that receives it. The Bible does not speak of problems. As Corrie ten Boom says, "God has no problems, only plans." Don't think about the problems but of the purpose. Elisabeth Elliot's advice is to "encounter the obstacle, make a choice—always with the goal in mind."

She goes on:

"We are conditioned nowadays, however, to define everything as a problem . . . A group of young wives asked me to speak to them on 'The Problems of Widowhood.' I declined, explaining, in the first place, that I did not regard widowhood as a problem, and, in the second place, that if I did, I was not sure I had any warrant for unloading my own problems onto the shoulders of young women who had enough of their own, and in the third place, a widow has only one 'problem,' when it comes right down to it—she has no husband. And that's something nobody can do anything about.

"Life is full of things we can't do anything about, but which we are supposed to do something with. 'He himself endured a cross and thought nothing of its shame because of the joy that was set before Him.' A very different story from the one which would have been written if Jesus had been prompted by the spirit of our age: 'Don't just endure the cross—think about it, talk about it, share it, express your gut-level feelings, get in touch with yourself, find out who you are, define the problem, analyze it, get counseling, get the experts' opinions, discuss solutions, work through it.' Jesus endured it."

We live in an evil world. Hurt, pain, loneliness, loss, death, deterioration are a part of it. There is a bumper sticker that has become very popular lately which, paraphrased for decency, reads: "Stuff Happens." I don't want to sound like a defeatist, but rather a realist. My question to you is how are you going to respond to the 'natural course' of this world? Are you going to rise above it? Don't become defeated, realize that we are in a war zone and in this war, there are victors and there are casualties. There are no non-combatants. There are no innocent bystanders. We are to stand strong in the power of his might.

The Place of the Dead
In the next few sections we are going to wrestle with Job's attitude (and that of the Old Testament in general) regarding death and the afterlife. We need to understand the concept of death the ancients held, then we will see how a brighter revelation came with the resurrection of Jesus. You see, if we were to convert Job's ideas of death into modern thinking, he would be saying, "When you're dead, you're dead." Whoa, is this the position of great faith?

Job uses the image of a tree to represent the possibility of new life. Even if you cut down a tree and destroy it, he says, "at the scent of water" it is capable of budding again. In the mind of a Christian, this imagery is great! But not so for Job. He knew nothing of the "shoot" that would arise from the "stump of Jesse" (Isa. 11:1). He also knew nothing of the dead tree on Calvary that would spring up to eternal life.

Job's statement that the dead "will not awake" is softened slightly by the qualifying phrase, "till the heavens are no more." Again, to a Christian mindset, this is good preaching! It should immediately bring up that awesome occasion when "the heavens will disappear with a roar" and the Lord will usher in "a new heaven and a new earth" (II Peter 3:10-13). However, Job had no knowledge of Christian theology. He was actually describing something that in his mind was impossible, unthinkable. He meant that it was as unlikely that human beings would ever rise from the dead as that the stars would fall out of the sky.

This view was the standard teaching of his time regarding the afterlife. The Old Testament folks had no concept of "Heaven." Heaven was the place where God lived, but there was never any suggestion that the faithful would go there when they died. In fact, the Hebrew world for the place of the dead was "Sheol," and Sheol was a murky limbo of a place, cold and forbidding. As David described it in Psalm 88:10-12, it was a region of "darkness" and "oblivion." "Do you show your wonders to the dead? . . . Is your love declared in Sheol? . . . Are your wonders known in the place of darkness, or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?" I am not positive, but this may be the thinking behind the erroneous doctrine of Purgatory. No doubt, it was far better to be alive on earth than to be in Sheol!

Strange as it may seem, it appears that when Old Testament believers died they did not go to Heaven but to someplace rather nearer to (though not the same as) the Christian concept of Hell. Instead of going to be "with the Lord," they were merely "gathered to their people" (see Gen. 25:8, etc.). Granted, when Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration it was in a glorified state, for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob "is not the God of the dead but of the living" (Matt. 22:32). On the other hand, what are we to make of the great prophet Samuel who, when he was called up from the grave, appeared back on earth not as a radiant and glorified being but as a perturbed spirit, a ghostly old man who was at the mercy of a pagan spiritualist. (see I Sam. 28)? As Jesus taught, "No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven" (John 3:13). Again, when Jesus told His disciples that He was going to His "Father's house" in order "to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2), the clear implication was that before this no such place had been prepared. Even in the case of King David, Peter thought it important to declare in his Pentecost sermon, "Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day," and he "did not ascend into heaven" (Acts 2:29, 34). In the words of Thomas å Kempis, "Under the Old Law the gates of Heaven were shut and the way to Heaven dark."

This might seem like a bleak and muddled conclusion. What else was there to say about death before Jesus Christ came to break the bonds of the grave and to "set all its captives free?"

Death without Frills
Job finds himself in an impossible situation. The proverbial Catch 22. His suffering is so great that one of the few thoughts that bring him any comfort is the thought of death. Yet, even death does not hold any comfort since he knows that it will only leave him worse off than before. Think about it. On the one hand, there are times when he passionately longs for the grave, extolling it as a realm of "peace" where "the weary are at rest." (Job 3:13) But on the other hand, he knows in his heart of hearts the grave is the one thing to be feared more than anything else, for it is the "place of no return . . . of deep shadow and disorder" (Job 10:21-22).

What a grim realist Job is! He knows there must be some way out of this impasse, and yet he also knows that whatever the answer is, it is something dark and obscure. As we have seen, even in conventional Israelite theology there was no reason to look forward to anything good after death. For everyone who died, there was one common destiny. As David lamented to the Lord in Psalm 6:5, "No one remembers you when he is dead. Who praises you from the grave?" As the author of Ecclesiastes observed, "All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward?" (Ecc. 3:20-21).

For those of us who live in the age of grace, it is very difficult to understand how Old Testament believers could ever have sustained their faith in God. Remember that after Jesus died the "veil separating the Holiest place in the Temple was split from top to bottom." It says, "The earth shook, rocks split and graves where opened. It then goes on to say, "Tombs were opened. (A number of bodies of holy men who were asleep in death rose again. They left their graves after Jesus' resurrection and entered the holy city and appeared to many people)." The rending of the curtain meant several things. For one thing, it meant that full atonement had been made and that Christ had gone through the veil into the presence of the Father. It meant that the high priestly ministry of Jesus made a human priesthood unnecessary between man and God and that all Christians have immediate access to God the Father, without any intermediaries except Christ himself. On top of all that, it meant that those who had died were ushered into the presence of God! (Rom. 5:2; Eph. 2:18; 3:12; Heb. 7:23-28; 9:12, 24; 10:19, 20). Sheol was no more, and Heaven became our destiny!

This was not the case for Job and the believers of old. If you think of it, what possible hope was there for the dying? We can sidestep this question by dismissing pre-Christian views of the afterlife as simply being vague and indistinct. If anything, the Old Testament writers saw very clearly into this matter. What they saw was totally different from what any of the other cultures all around them saw. They saw in death the great, gaping, terrifying opposite of everything that was good in this present life. For the most part, they didn't talk about the "hereafter" much. What was there to say? Unlike the Egyptians, for example, pious Jews had no interest in spiritualism or the occult or in any esoteric knowledge of Heaven or the underworld. They also did not have anything to do with elaborate funeral rituals designed to expedite the soul on its "final journey." Actually, their death was a death without frills. It is one of the great distinguishing marks of the Hebrew Bible that it refuses either to idealize or to mythologize death. It shows absolute scorn for any attempt to fill in the intolerable blank of the grave with man-made fantasies.

Soon we will see the Lord admonish Job in His great speech out of the whirlwind, "Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of deep shadows?" (Job 38:17). If the Old Testament prophets had little to say on this issue, simply because little had been revealed to them by God. They said what they had been authorized to say, and no more. Like Job himself, they saw death for exactly what it was—a "land of gloom and deep shadow" where "the dead are in deep anguish."

Without an understanding of Job's view on death, we will never be able to understand the sheer boldness and originality of Job's proposed solution. Job suggests in 14:3 that he might be "hidden in the grave" until God's "anger has passed" and then, at a set time, be "remembered." Think about it, isn't this the plan of resurrection which began to be fulfilled on Easter morning?

Resurrection
Job now asks the ultimate question, "If a man dies, will he live again?" Notice he did not ask, "If a man dies, will he go to heaven?" "Will death turn out to be the doorway into something wonderful?" No, his question is a more unusual one than that, because it concerns whether or not a human being, once dead and doomed to Sheol, would live again. What is remarkable in this approach is that it neither sidesteps nor soft-pedals the reality of death. Instead, since it does not attempt to belittle death's doubted finality, Job looks it straight in the eye. He accepts this dark destiny as his necessary due and so becomes, like Jesus Himself, "obedient to death" (Phil. 2:8).

Here he looks death square in the eye, and still asks whether someday, even though long dead and in the grave, will he brought back to life. It is important to grasp that this notion of a life-after-death had no place in the orthodox theological doctrine of Job's day. Years later, Old Testament writers, from King David on, were to deliver startling prophecies of bodily resurrection (see, for example, Ps 16:10; Isa. 26:19; Dan. 12:2). However, back in Job's day, there was no such teaching. As commentator Norman Habel writes, "The resurrection terminology employed by Job's speech seems to reflect a popular tradition against which standard Israelite teaching was directed." To the ears of Job's friends, in other words, all his fine prophetic fantasies would have been heresy, and Eliphaz says as much in his rebuttal (See Job chapter 15).

There is a funny thing about heresy, however, which is that in the odd case where the heretic turns out to be right, he is no longer a heretic, but a prophet. I think immediately of all of the church reformers, the apostles, and other believers that were murdered in the name of the Catholic Church. As it turns out, Job's solution to the intolerable question mark of death just happens to be God's own solution. Look at Jesus' proclamation in John 5:25, "I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live." Try to imagine the charge Job must have gotten when he saw the enactment of this very event he predicted, "You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made" (Job 14:15). Even above that, he declares that however long it might take, "I will wait for my renewal to come" (Job 14:14). Job's attitude has to be the epitome of New Testament faith, as Christians also "wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved" (Rom. 8:23-24). Since Job posed the question, "If a man dies, will he live again?" he places so much confidence on a positive response. He as much as states with Paul, "If the dead are not raised . . . your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (I Cor. 15:16-17).

In the light of all this, Job must certainly be seen as a very early Christian prophet of the resurrection. In this chapter, his thinking on the subject is still groping and tentative. In subsequent speeches, his statements grow increasing bold, to the point where in 19:25-26 he will cry out, "I know that my Redeemer lives . . . and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God." This has to be the most essential hope and promise in the Christian life! So much so that the earthly life we now live consists simply in practicing for the moment of resurrection. "Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you" (Eph. 5:14). Other religions might be happy to let the old body rot in the ground, so long as the soul journeys onward or is reincarnated. To the Christian this is a horrifying evasion of reality. In the final analysis it is not so much the salvation of our souls that we human creatures are primarily concerned about, as the salvaging of our poor, dear, bedraggled hides. Because we do not just have bodies—we are bodies. What we long for is not to become pure disembodied spirits, but rather to have our spirits harmoniously reunited with our bodies. (As long as our bodies can work the way they are meant to, without ever wearing out). And wow! —this very dream turns out to be exactly what our Savior has for us up His amazing sleeve!

Sin and Death
It should not surprise us that in the middle of his thoughts and meditations on death, Job also brings up the issue of sin. In his mind, you cannot separate the two. They are so entwined that they are almost one and the same. The very reason human beings die is that they are sinners. "Death came to all men," Paul wrote, "because all sinned" (Rom. 5:12). Death is not only the consequence but also the evidence of sin. When the body dies, all that is left is sin; all that is left is the naked fact of total corruption, laid out for everybody to see. Hence, the old warning, "Your sin will find you out."

This is the very essence of Job's problem. Since he finds his body "wasting away like something rotten, like a garment eaten by moths" (Job 13:28), he assumes that the Lord is refusing to forgive him, refusing to release him from his sin. As far as Job is concerned, as long as sickness and death are in the world, sin remains unconquered. His friends seem to believe that righteousness is living without any taint of moral corruption. Yet, if that was true, it should also be possible to avoid physical corruption. Then the righteous would go on living forever, while only the godless died. Clearly, this is not the case, and so for Job the physical death of the righteous was an obstacle in the way of the helplessly naïve theology of his friends. Beyond that, any religion that cannot get its followers free from the curse of death, has not done a good enough job with the problem of sin.

The biggest difference between Job and his friends is most evident in their vastly different views to the problems of sin and death. His friends, like many of us, have struck a kind of a deal with death, where we just do not think about it much. Then the Lord steps in and says, "Your covenant with death will be annulled; your agreement with the grave will not stand" (Isa 28:18). But you see, Job never made that type of agreement, that's why he is free to protest loudly to his God about the outrageous insult of death: "As torrents wash away the soil, so you destroy man's hope. You overpower him once for all, and he is gone." When it comes to the issue of sin, the friends imply that it is possible to "put away sin" and lead an impeccable life. Job, on the other hand, hopes that the time will come when his sin will no longer be "kept track of" by God, but will be "sealed in a bag." He seems to know the truth of I John 1:8, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." He freely admits he is a sinner, and yet still he clings to an obscure hope that somehow the Lord will "cover over" his sin. By this, he means that his God must save him from the curse of death. In Job's mind, liberation from death would be the only acceptable sign and proof that his sin had been forgiven. Freedom from sin would be the sole and necessary sign that death had been conquered.

Every Christian has wrestled with the text in I John 3:9: "No one who is born of God will continue to sin." What about Jesus' promise in John 8:51: "If anyone keeps my word, he will never see death?" Job understood that sin and death are two heads of the same monster. This is why the Son of God had to die in order to take away sin. It is also the reason Christ rose from the dead, in order to guarantee our righteousness, because the righteousness of Christ is true life. By drawing a direct equation between righteousness and life itself, Job was proposing a solution to the problem of sin and death. In fact, this turned out to be the solution of the gospel itself. The gospel of a divine forgiveness is so radical that it would not only cancel all sin but also, by that very act, raise the dead to eternal life.

Today in Paradise
Okay, Job "sees" the hope of a resurrection. Although, his thinking seems to go beyond a mere resurrection to something for radical: eternal life! Think about it, future resurrection is not enough for us. What we really want is life now. We do not want to be just raised from the dead but to bypass death altogether. After all, why should the righteous have to die at all? How can eternal life really be called eternal, if does not begin now, the moment we believe? How can it be eternal if there is a period of limbo? One moment you are alive, the next you are not, then you are. What good is a future resurrection of the body, if we have to face death first?

Hey, good news folks. Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die" (John 6:48-50). If we are willing to believe that, then the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant becomes the differences of night and day. According to the gospel, to believe in Christ is to have died already; it is to have "crossed over from death to life" (John 5:24). For the Christian, death is no longer an event to be feared but something already over and done with.

". . . don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead . . . we too may live a new life."

"If we have been united with him in his death, we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin."

"If we died with Christ . . . we also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him . . . In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin abut alive to God in Christ Jesus"

—Rom. 6

"We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body."

—II Cor. 4:11

". . . we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all."

—Heb. 10:10

We can look through every letter of the New Testament to show that His death, brought our life—here and now! It is not something we get in the great beyond, we do not get it after all our years of toiling and struggling. No, we have it now! "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (I John 3:2).

Yet, our carnal minds can't accept this, we hear that and our minds go "tilt!" We scratch our head and ask how can this be, when Christians appear to go on dying just as regularly as everybody else? The only answer seems to lie in the brand-new approach to righteousness. This approach states that true life is not a matter of outward appearances but of the condition of our heart. It is on this basis that Jesus promises, "If anyone keeps my word, he will never see death" (John 8:51).

We say so glibly that "Jesus died for me"—but do we really believe it? Do we understand that Jesus died in our place, so that we will not have to die at all? For the believer in Christ there will be no imprisonment in Sheol, no Purgatory, no time of being "hidden in the grave" until God's "anger has passed." For those of us that have sworn our allegiance to Christ, God's anger has already passed, and with it death. When you swore your allegiance to Him, He looked at you and said, "today you will be with me in paradise!"