Procession of Death
People are continually dying here on earth. However, we fail to realize the implications of death. This is because we lack a living picture of Heaven and Hell in our minds.
A coffin is being carried aloft toward the grave. It seems like a journey, not just from one point to another, but from man’s beginning to his end.
When a man is born into this world, he immediately has recourse to a mother’s compassion and a father’s protection. Next, he grows up among friends and relatives. Then he reaches adulthood and forges ahead on his chosen path through life.
His journey continues until, finally, death comes. Those relatives who had supported him through life now carry him to his final resting place. They lay him alone under a mound of earth, where there is just him and his Lord.
Until that point, he had been confronted with humans like himself; now, he is face to face with a God infinitely greater than himself. Until then, he had been in a world where he had power; now, he is powerless. Man, the most helpless of creatures, will come before God, the All-Powerful, a meeting so extraordinary that it is almost beyond imagining.
People are continually dying here on earth. Not a day goes by without our seeing or hearing of the death of someone or the other. However, we fail to realize the implications of death. We lack a living picture of Heaven and Hell in our minds. We are preoccupied with other, totally unrelated matters. We are too busy making homes for ourselves in this world to look to our eternal home. We are too concerned with worldly profit-making to care whether we have done enough to earn everlasting life. We are too involved in improving our society’s position to consolidate our relationship with God. We think of every human being in the same worldly terms, so when a person dies, we feel only a sense of loss that one who gave so much to the world has been taken away from it. In this ephemeral world, we see a man but fail to see him in the next eternal world. How can we realize the implications of death; how can we see that, as one is led to one’s “rest,” one is being led to one’s meeting with the Lord to be judged for one’s eternal fate?
