3 August – Ben Cornell, Hope Church

There are two worlds

There are two worlds. A world of life and a world of death. We live in the world of death, with the knowledge that death is heading towards us, and that along the way we are subject to death insofar as our physical, mental, spiritual health are eroded and wounded. The world of life reaches out to us, seeks to restore us, to pull us out of the river of fire down which we are carried. If we take hold of that hand, we have hope that we are connected to the world of life. But we must keep holding on and never let go. That hand will never let go of us!

All the world and everything in it is dying – because it has no true life of its own. It must continuously take in life to be sustained (food, water, oxygen), a process, like treading water in an ocean, that is ultimately futile. We will be exhausted and we will drown. This is the fate of everything in the world of death. Everything. Even the sun will one day be exhausted.

But when we die, we do not pass from life to death, but rather, from death to life. We are, here and now, in death, in the realm of death, the sphere of death’s influence and inescapably under a sentence of death. But then, we shall be in life. We go to the world of life, if we have held onto that hand. We go to a world where true life is self-sustaining and is never wounded or eroded. This is God’s life in us. His hand reaches out to us in mercy, in rescue, in love, because he would not leave us in death but desires to pull us out into life.