No Dead End!

We have a fear of "dead ends"...of being trapped, of having to turn around, of losing time! It is like trying to stick a chicken in a gunny sack. It almost just won't go in! Or it is like trying to drive pigs into a gate, or a small pen. They always turn the other way. But give them an opening at the far end, and it is a different matter.

And so, death, for many people is like that. We get panicky. We have the feeling of being boxed in, of being trapped. It is the closed gunny sack concept. But let a person catch a glimpse of an opening on the other end...and then it is not a "dead end", but rather a passage‑way through!

The death of Jesus Christ upon a cross was so final, so agonizingly real! And death is real. It is real today. It stalks us all along the journey of life. And so if you were to seek that event of earth‑shaking significance, spin the wheel of everything that has happened and where do you finally stop?...on the invention of the wheel?...on the discovery that the earth is round?...on the theory of evolution, or relativity? Perhaps some would pick one of these.

But if you want to be truly perceptive, you would have to pick out the resurrection as that one bright light upon the horizon. For if gravity gave the scientists a basis for knowledge...and if atomic power gave a certain potential for driving motors and industry...and if the computer promised a certain refinement to the whole process of automation, then though they each promise some bright ray of hope, none of them speak to the haunting fear, that universal uncertainty of mankind, so poignantly questioned by Job of the Old Testament drama, "If a man die, shall he live again?" (Job 14:14)

Give us something that speaks to man's fear of death, and you will speak to the most universal need...more important to him than money, than sex, than power.

And so today, Christians around the world stop the spinning wheel, and herald that one major event that does this. Here was the break‑through, we affirm. We know a man who conquered death...Who went into the valley of the shadow of death...that "dead‑end" of the centuries. And Jesus walked right through! "Death could not hold its prey, Jesus my Savior. He tore the bars away, Jesus my Lord."

And so, for those who have learned the higher laws of life, death is no "dead end", but only an open door into the future. Praise God!