Mind of a Christian

Death

For all the robust, gung-ho attitude I had towards life as an atheist, death always scared me. I didn't want my consciousness to end. As an atheist, I saw life on Earth as my only shot of living and thinking and experiencing. In that sense, I valued life. In another sense, I was terrified of death.

I never had the courage that Mark Twain had when he said, 

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

But why worry? someone might ask. You don't have to worry about it since you'll be dead and you won't be thinking about anything at all. You see, this is going along how Mark Twain felt. In an atheist's perspective, this can make sense. I don't have to worry about being dead, since there won't be a living me to begin with.

I envied the comfort that Christians had about death. For them, existence does not end during death, since they get an opportunity to have eternity with God in heaven.

Personally, however, I did not become a Christian because of my fear of death. Sure, I was scared of death as an atheist, but I saw it as a hard fact of life. I couldn't avoid death, and I accepted that death was the ultimate end of oneself.

Today, as a Christian, I am not afraid of death. I'm rather more afraid of the process of dying, since those could be pretty terrifying. As a college commuter, I pass through the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey to New York, and again to New Jersey. Because the tunnel goes underneath a river, I was always paranoid of the tunnel collapsing and me drowning. The tunnel's pretty long, so there would be no chance of escape, and I'm absolutely terrified of drowning.

So yeah, death? I'm fine. Dying? That's still spooky.

Now let's talk about sacrificing your life, let's say, for a fellow person to live. Kinda like taking a bullet meant for someone else.

As an atheist, I saw this as quite the ultimate sacrifice, because you don't exist after death. Giving up your life for someone would be giving up everything you had and could have had in the future, and I saw that as something noble.

As a Christian, however, I didn't think of sacrificing your life as any less meaningful.

Let's say you and someone called Alma were both stuck in a pit that's about to close up on you, and you had the option to let Alma escape but at the expense of you staying behind to die. It's either you or Alma who gets to live. The Bible doesn't require you to risk your life to save someone like Alma when both of you are in danger of dying, but that's what makes sacrificing yourself even more meaningful. You didn't have to save her, but you did, and that's doing something way beyond of what you're required to do.

God blesses those who go above and beyond what's expected of them.

And we can't talk about sacrifices without mentioning the Messiah.

Now, in a naturalistic, atheistic sense, His death was nothing more than an unfortunate legal sentencing - a good person who was framed to die.

But spiritually, the Messiah died so that we and the whole world may be forgiven of our sins to save us from damnation. Think back to the Alma analogy. Imagine that we are Alma and Jesus allowed us to escape the pit while He stayed back to die. The outcome of that story is that we escape the pit, but now scale this to the larger, eternal picture. Jesus died so that we are saved from eternal death and can have eternal life.

Caring for us to that magnitude, and investing in our spiritual and eternal fate makes the Messiah's sacrifice the most meaningful sacrifice.