GET READY TO DIE by G. D. Ballou

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 30, 1879

“GET READY TO DIE.”

By G. D. Ballou

One of the prominent features of our times is the great lack of practical Christianity. There is enough profession and loud boasting of the wonderful progress of the gospel; but when we look for fruit we find only here and there an olive berry on the outmost fruitful branches. Isa. 17:6. This lack of living piety is a great rock of offense over which thousands of unbelievers are stumbling to ruin. Every result has an adequate cause or causes. Probably the great cause of this lack of which we have spoken is the almost universal preaching of the sentiment which heads our article. Death is made the objective point of all religious teaching, the consummation of the Christian’s hope, the gate to endless joy. And since the devil is the one that has the power of death (Heb. 2:14), it follows that he is the gate-keeper to the abode of bliss and eternal felicity. Surely his Satanic majesty occupies a most honorable and important position in God’s gospel plan of salvation.

But the Bible nowhere gives a hint or intimation that any reward is to be given at death, or that any fondly-cherished hopes will be realized then. Not in all its pages can be found a single exhortation to make a moral preparation for death. When the Lord said to Hezekiah, “Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live,” he did not have reference to a preparation of character for death, but to the adjustment of his business affairs. God made man to live and glorify his Creator, and his constant appeal to us is to live right, act right, and do right. All his exhortations to us are in regard to how we ought to live, and none of them as to how we ought to die. This life is given us in which to make preparation for the life beyond the resurrection, and not for any condition in death. God made man to live, and not to die; and life is that for which we are to seek and make preparation. I Tim. 6:12, 19.

Why should so much be said about getting ready to die, when we are none of us fit to live? Let us learn to live first, and we need have little concern about death. Our future will not depend on how we die, but on how we have lived. We shall not be judged by our happy or gloomy feelings at death, but by the record of our works which the books shall show. Rev. 20:12. If our lives are such as God can approve, we shall need no special preparation for death, nor need we fear its trying ordeal.

The most pernicious effects are seen as the result of this popular exhortation. It blights and withers the great and noble thoughts that would lead us to a consistent, careful Christian life, by causing us to overlook practical, every-day duties and center our chief thoughts on the death-bed scene, hoping that by some means we may have a happy, triumphant departure. Happy feelings in death cannot save us. We are not to be judged by our feelings, but by our doings. It is possible for us to be deceived when we depend entirely on feeling as an evidence of our acceptance with God; and it is possible, too, that we may cherish a false hope based on false teaching, and at last go down in death self-deceived. Matt. 26:42–46.

This subordinating everything else to a preparation for death leads sinners to fatal procrastination in the work of repentance. Indeed, if this is the important thing, why may they not spend this life in carnality and sin, and then use the last few minutes in sorrow and contrition, and thus, in accordance with funereal theology, make their accounts all right with their Maker? It certainly must be a matter of no small encouragement to the sinner to take just the course here indicated, when he hears the unrepentant man preached into the courts of bliss on the strength of his having at some time in his life arisen for prayers and on his death-bed expressed the determination that if restored to health he would live a better life. Such evidences weigh light in God’s balances. There can be but little hope for that man who has deliberately spent all his life in sin, right in the face of gospel light. In cases of recovery such death-bed repentances generally prove to be anything but genuine.

The Bible nowhere enjoins such repentance, but it says, “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.” And many similar exhortations do we find. It also gives us rules by which our lives are to be regulated, but in no case does it give us a rule by which we are to die.

Life is the important thing, and our future will depend, not on a few forced, spasmodic efforts on the brink of the grave, but on our course through life. He whose life has been in accordance with God’s word does not look down into death for any consolation; his faith carries him beyond, over into that eternal life promised to the righteous. This special plea for a preparation for death is entirely too weak and unscriptural to thoroughly convert men to God. What we need is more living, practical godliness to convince men of the truth of Christianity.

G. D. BALLOU.