On Thursday, 17th March 2022, I went to an evening memorial service in honor of a Missionary, a sister to my pastor and General Overseer of the Association of Churches Ministers and Ministries Bishop Titus Sithole. The memorial was in remembrance of Pastor Robina Mowale. At the service, Bishop Dununu Msibi was presiding over the service. He reflected on various scriptures and spoke to death in the context of the memorial service. The relevance of his preaching to the situation at hand blessed many who were in the service. In fact, I made the point of thanking him for the appropriateness of his sermon and how it has comforted us as a family around the GO and his immediate family and friends.
What I want to reflect upon is the concept of death that his preaching became a revelation to me. As Bishop Dununu was preaching, there was a duality of understanding occupying my attention to the message God has put in him for us, and more particularly myself, on Thursday.
I had a number of questions about death as he spoke to it. What is death beyond the departure of the human spirit from the body? What is death in a human being when the human spirit is still with the body? Can death co-exist with life? If we are alive, should that life be manifested through our earthly living, or should our vision of heaven be the life that is not death, or should the death of ourselves as we are born again be the life we live as we prepare for the eternal one we are all working towards as believers in the resurrection of Christ?
It should by now be clear that as I was being comforted like all that were with me, I was being rattled by aspects of the message I also had to pay attention to. It could not be because of my developed faculties of processing complex information almost instantaneously that I could go to such depths about a message as it was being delivered, but instead, it was the work of the Holy Ghost on and about the message that convicted my analytical skills to think of death in its multidimensionality.
Death is a separation of Spirit and matter. As human beings, we occupy space and have mass to the extent that the Spirit is independent of what science sees and defines us. We are a collection of chemicals whose reactions define us as physical citizens of this world. As Spirit, we are creatures of God who is our source. Our appetite for the food of the spirit is so insatiable that in our Spiritual Obeseness we transcend to heights our physical selves cannot comprehend or deal with. The vastness of our reach as Spiritual beings is what explains why it is possible to name all animals as Adam did and why we are created in the image or likeness of God.
Whilst our physical self constitutes the bulk of our conscious selves, the self that we put in the shower or bath every morning, the self that we dress and believe reflects the us that God wants to see. In fact, as humans, the difference between us and God is that God does not see himself as God, like we see ourselves as humans above all else. It is this us in our bodies that depart when God recalls us back to him as the source. Irrespective of where we end up after we have departed, it is still God that recalls us to Him, either to account for our lives or to have a straight path to where our earthly lives have prepared us for, heaven.
Without belaboring too deep on God's expectations, let me return to my questions.
As we are born we are destined to live our lives as our various selves. We enter as infants with expectations that we will be dependent on our families as God's primary reception committee. In our infant role, we would have gone through the first physical separation with our first room of life, the womb. Whilst we are in our mother's womb we were part of a Spirit that carried us for a determined term. It was during that term when we were fearfully and wonderfully made, even in those depths our frame could not be hidden, His eyes saw our substance, and as we dropped out a form of death happened.
As we were dropped for a longer, somewhat solitary journey into the world, to God we were not a coincidence, as an existence, we have "already been named [long ago], and it is known what a frail being we all are, for we cannot dispute with Him who is mightier than us. As a mystery to the world, we remained, but as man on earth, God has already pre-ordained our paths, including when to physically depart this world. Our first death is in fact about our entry to life. Like a seed in becoming what it was wired to be, we lose our initial form, size, and structure as a form of death. Throughout our lives, we will be going through forms of death.
As we enter a new life beyond the womb we do so being conscious of the promise and/or prophecy. Because the world we entering into is vast, we are bound to have asked the question to our God as we landed "where should we go?’ and Jeremiah 15:2-3 answers us thus "those [destined] for death, to death; those for the sword, to the sword; those for famine, to famine; those for captivity, to captivity. I will appoint four kinds of destroyers over (you),” says the Lord, “the sword to slay, the dogs to tear and drag away, and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and to destroy." This answer to our question defines the entire struggle we will be facing as we get born into new situations because we would have died in some. To be an infant is being born into it, to be a child requires the infant to die, to be a teen requires the child to die, to be a young adult requires the teenager to die. This process applies to many a situation we are born into.
As we die to be born we must also know that "God causes people to die, and He causes them to live. He sends people down to the grave, and He can raise them up to live again." Because in our dearest form, His children, and are from Him, and He knows our frames, He has both the right and capacity to kill us in our careers, temptations that look like opportunities, relationships that look like He has approved, paths that look like the right direction, and in wealth that would bring our premature deaths.
Because in every death we enter a new life, we become the living that He has made alive. In that life, we live His will, we allow His will to be done on our lives as it is in heaven, and we let His glory foreground all that we are. He prepares us, for as the living, we know that we will die. However those that refuse to rise as he raises us to live again will know nothing, and they will have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.
Death, as it coexists with our living, is not necessarily a bad thing. It might in fact be what we need to go through all phases of our various lives on earth. To die because God wants us to is better than living where God does not want us to be. Because we are His and are righteous by Him, we will perish, because we are taken away to be spared from evil and suffering. To God such death might include recalling you off the high tree-like He did with Zacheus, it might mean asking you to dip yourself in a dirty pond, it might mean throwing you into the furnace, and it might mean making you face the worst of persecution so that you die for the purpose of defeating death itself.
As Bishop Msibi was concluding, he reminded us of the significance of putting our houses in order for we shall die and not recover. Yes in the will of testament terms it is important to make sure those that remain behind are adequately covered. In the death for life revelation I got, this means as you are in a particular phase of being alive, leave a legacy that will make your death in that phase to administer life to those that remain. It is you that die to rise again, those that remain must thrive for you had died for them. Your death must be an asset, a shift for growth to begin.
As Romans 5: 17 wisens, for if by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
Thank you and Amen
Comments
Post a Comment