p. 407 | What Is Death? by Ellet Joseph Waggoner

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 8, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 26.

What Is Death?

By Ellet Joseph Waggoner

SOME time ago the following question appeared in the Christian Union, and the appended answer is by that paper:—

"Can you tell me how it is that learned Christian ministers call death the coming of the Lord? Can it be that the terrible 'enemy,' the dreaded foe to all our earthly hopes and loves, is the same as the 'bright appearing' of the 'great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ,' the 'blessed hope' everywhere spoken of in the Scriptures as the event of joy, which we are to 'look for and hasten unto'? Who can say from the heart, 'O death, come quickly?'"

"The coming of death cannot be said in any sense to fulfill that coming of the Lord which is in the New Testament so much the hope and expectation of God's children; but to those who believe that death brings them at once into the immediate presence of their Lord, that to depart is to be with Christ, which is far better, death is no longer the dreaded foe he once was, and in a true sense dying is going to the Lord."

What a mixture is here! "The coming of death cannot in any sense fulfill that coming of the Lord which is the hope of the Christian; but, "in a true sense dying is going to the Lord." Now if dying is not in any sense the coming of the Lord, but is, on the contrary, a going to the Lord, then how can there ever be any such thing as "that coming of the Lord which is in the New Testament so much the hope and expectation of God's children"? For if dying is going to the Lord, then as a matter of hope the coming of the Lord is literally destroyed. But all such stuff as that "dying is going to the Lord" is worse than nonsense,—it is a positive perversion of the plain word of the Lord Jesus. He said: "Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me; and as I said unto the Jews, whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you." John 13:33. What he had said to the Jews was this: "Ye shall seek me, and ye shall die in your sins; whither I go, ye cannot come." John 8:21. As he said to those Jews, "Whither I go, ye cannot come," so now he said to his disciples, "Whither I go, ye cannot come." Therefore, if there is any one thing that is made positive by the Lord Jesus, it is that no one can go to him by dying. Yet in spite of this, here is an eminent Christian (?) publication which flatly says, "In a true sense dying is going to the Lord." But "to the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

Again, the Union says: "To those who believe that death brings them at once into the immediate presence of the Lord . . . death is no longer the dreaded foe he once was." Now the Scripture is the word of God, and that word declares death to be an "enemy," pictures him armed with a dreadful "sting," and calls him "the king of terrors." He was one of the most eminent Christians who ever lived, who declared death to be an "enemy" (1 Cor. 15:26); and it was in portraying the victory of the triumphant Christian that he pictured this enemy as having the fatal "sting" (1 Cor. 15:55-57). He was a perfect and upright man, "one that feared God, and eschewed evil;" one who, out of the fullness of a sublime faith, could exclaim, "I know that my Redeemer liveth;" he it was who described death as "the king of terrors" (Job 18:12-14). And however much authoritative leaders of theological thought may draw upon pagan mythology and heathen superstition for material with which to dress it up in the beautiful flowing robes of a royal friend; yet as the word of God is true, it has been, and is, and ever will be, the truth, that death is an "enemy" and "the king of terrors." We repeat, "To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." Isa. 8:20. "Lo they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them"? Jer. 8:9. E. J. W.