Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 February 1916 — INTO ETERNAL LIFE [ARTICLE]

INTO ETERNAL LIFE

Soul Moves Place When the Spirit Leaves the Mortal Body. St Paul said: “I die daily." It could not have meant that the spirit left the body every day, yet he said: “I die every day.” The importance of this question to you and to me is to get some idea, if we can, as to what death is. It is not a gloomy thought; it is not a sad one; it is a great philosophical question that becomes exceedingly interesting to anyone who gets into the inner part of its consideration. He meant that we all die daily; not that it was peculiar to him, but that it was a general, universal truth. What is death? It is a change. The Bible defines it very frequently as a change. “We shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the 'last trump, for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised.” We shall all be changed, so that the word “death.’’ whether in the original language or the English, means a change. You do not lose anything unless you become dead to it. Every little loss is a little death. The Bible, then, presents death as being a present loss; something gone today which we-value and desire to retain. It is also defined as a transition. If we go from one room to the other, we die to the first room, and it is a resurrection and a new life in the other room. It is a transition, and when the apostle Paul uses the word “death" he means all these things. Death also means change of form, but never change of essence. The Bible never teaches that death is annihilation. Simply New Form of Life. Death, then, in a scriptural sense is a very philosophical question. For instance, if you had a large amount of gold hidden in your cellar, and bonds and stocks in your safe, and you live with them In miserly joy and satisfaction, you count your gold over every night, and you bury it again beneath the soil, and the next night you live with it again, or you go to the safe and open it and take out the stocks and bonds and count them over, and you live with them. Then the time comes when you conclude you will die to those things, that you will give them up, that you will take your gold from the cellar, that you will invest it in a hospital oFsomeFschobl or church, or some institutlon for the good of humanity, then you die to the gold in your cellar, and you live to the new form in which that gold appears. You take those stocks and bonds and you invest them in a home, and you furnish it with the luxuries of life, you live in it with your family, and you surround it with all the joys of domestic comfort, and you die to the bonds; let them all go; you have lost them, you are dead to them, but you are alive to the new home and all the blessings that come with it. Vou simply die to one form and rise again in another. That is the Bible teaching as to what death means. Did it ever occur to you that Christ died twice? Not only once did he die for us, in the form that we read about when he died and went home to heaven. But he left those fields of glory, left his association with the angels and gave up his home in heaven, he died to heaven when he ?came down to live as a man upon this ' earth. The greatest trial of his existence must have been there, Error to Dread Death. Christ died twice. All sacrifice is death, and what is going on every day in the natural world, as we meet it everywhere, is but analogous to what takes place in the spiritual world, all dying, and any person who makes a sacrifice today for the betterment oLthe future is dying today that he may live doubly tomorrow. I must point the Gospel moral which it teaches us, and that is that you need never dread death. There is nothing to dread, unless your sins are heavy on your heart, or unless you have failed to do what you could do, and that is, put your trust In Christ. If you have faith in Christ you should have learned by now not to have any fear of death, and if you have, resolve now that you will not have any fear of death, that it is but the natural * thing anyhow. You are dying all the time. Your body has died many times. This entire body goes through a change in less than eight years, so that there is not one particle of the body left that was there eight years before. All is dead, gone! It has disappeared, as the whole body ultimately will; and when death comes to you, remember that nature, instinct, and everything teach that death is but transition; that it is not annihilation, but the natural going from one natural state to another natural state; tint you live in this body while in tins world, and it Is your natural condition to remain in this body so long as it is of any use to you, but when you go out of this body, you do not die—you are the same person living with identically the same character, the same thoughts, and wishes, and de-; sires In the country of changed com ditlons, so I say, don’t fear the mo"meat at deatlrr •~Don‘t fear that transit tion. - . ' But what I want to urge upon yon Christian people is that you look, the world in the face and tell the people that you are not afraid to die.— Exchange.