Do Men Die?

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 29, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 47.

Change of Language Can Not Change Facts

ANYTHING to get away from the solemn, certain facts of life and the teaching of the Old Book. It’s pitiful, and one day will be found to be bitterly disappointing. This for instance from the November issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal:

“Can we not get away from the universal use of the words ‘dead’ and ‘death,’ and even the harsher sounding words ‘die,’ ‘dying,’ and ‘died’? Aside from the harshness of the words themselves, and they are harsh and cruel in their sound, the words no longer express our belief: we are all fast reaching the belief that we do not die: we are not dead. We pass from one stage to another, and so why should we not say what we believe of ourselves and of those dear to us: that we simply pass away? Any usage, any contributing element, no matter how seemingly small, that will help even in the slightest degree to remove the old-fashioned gruesomeness that has so long associated itself with the completion of our work here and the beginning of our work in another stage, is worth adoption.”

Of course “dead” and “death” and “die” and “dying” and “died” are harsh, they represent conditions that are harsh and ugly and evil. Sin is an awful, a terrible fact. The mighty, appalling, multiform curse upon the world of sickness and suffering and avarice and lust and crime and murder and death and every other devilish thing in the category of evil are each and all some form of sin and the results of sin. God would have men know it; know that “sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” James 1:15.

It is the accursed lie of the long ages that men do not die. It is the old lie of the serpent, whispered into the ear of our first parents, “Ye shall not surely die; . . . ye shall be as God.” Gen. 3:4, 5. Upon that falsehood has been built every heathen system, the theories of purgatory, of an endless hell, of saint worship, of Spiritism, of transmigration of soul, of Buddhism, Brahmanism, Mormonism, and the self-salvation ideas of New Thought, Christian Science, and numerous other cults.

If men do not die, why should Christ die to save them? What need of the resurrection or the second advent? The entire Bible stands or falls with the Bible teaching of Sin and Death, Righteousness and Life.

Standing on the old lie, there is no settled hope of life beyond the grave save that furnished by baseless human hope. Standing on the Word of God we see the awful facts of sin and death; but beyond the black record of sin, out of its miry depths, beyond the suffering, the dying, the gloom of the grave and the awful horrors of death, rises the Sun of Righteousness and Life, with healing in His beams. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Death, the fact to sinful man, is an awful and horrible thing; life forevermore, which God in Christ makes possible to every sinful soul, is a blessed and glorious thing. Change of terms will not change the horrors of death and dying. Let them be as ugly as they are. Let faith bridge their awful terrors and grasp the life beyond.