Living until the morning

Number your days

If death is sleep and the morning is certain, how should a person live now? Moses, who saw a whole generation die in the wilderness, prayed:

So teach us to number our days, That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

A person who refuses to think about death does not become more alive; they become less wise. Solomon said that it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, “for that is the end of all men; And the living will take it to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). The Bible’s teaching about death is not morbid. It is a summons to live each day as the gift it is, in the light of the day that is coming.

Have the Son

Because immortality is a gift, the question that matters is whether you have received it. John puts it with beautiful simplicity:

And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

Eternal life is “in His Son”. It is not in you by nature. It is not in a creed or a church membership. It is in Christ, and whoever has Christ has it, now, as a present possession held in trust by God, to be fully received when He comes. Jesus said:

My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.

The believer who dies does not fall out of His hand. “Your life is hidden with Christ in God,” Paul says, and then gives the timetable one more time: “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Colossians 3:3-4). Hidden now; revealed then. Safe throughout.

Grieve, but with hope

Christians are not told not to grieve. Jesus wept at the tomb of a friend He was about to raise. What Paul says is that we do not grieve “as others who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). That makes a practical difference at a graveside. We do not need to pretend that the person is in the room, watching. We do not need to speak to them as if they could hear. We do not need to worry about where they are or what they are feeling. We can say the truest and kindest things: that they are at rest; that their works follow them; that their life is hidden with Christ in God; and that the next thing they will know is His voice.

And we can comfort one another, as Paul instructs, “with these words”: the Lord Himself will descend, the dead in Christ will rise, and so we shall always be with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18). The comfort of the Bible is not that we never say goodbye. It is that goodbye is not the last word.

Facing your own death

For the believer, death remains an enemy, but it is a defeated one. You may face it with the confidence of Paul, who did not know whether he would live or die but knew that either way, Christ would be magnified (Philippians 1:20). You may face it with the confidence of Job, who expected to decay and yet to see God in his flesh. You may face it with the words of Stephen, committing your breath into the hands of Jesus and falling asleep. And you may face it knowing that “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). God does not finish His work in you at your death. He finishes it on that day. Your death is a pause in the work, not the end of it.

The morning

Let me end where the book began, at a graveside. The words that are usually said there are not wrong, only incomplete. Absent from the body, present with the Lord is true, and it is true in the way Paul meant it: this believer has closed their eyes in a mortal body and will open them to see the face of Christ, clothed in immortality. Between those two moments there is, for them, no time at all. For us there is waiting, and work, and tears, and the house of mourning where the living take it to heart. But there is also a trumpet that has not yet sounded, and a voice that every grave will hear, and a morning.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

That is the question He asked Martha outside her brother’s tomb, and it is the question this book has been asking you. Though he may die, he shall live. Do you believe this?