In all of our lives, death is an unspoken assumption. Always there, we know that each of us will die, somehow and some way. But we tend to push it out of our minds, knowing that if we are young enough or healthy enough, our odds are good. But this trusting in odds is trusting in gods, and these are gods that did not deliver your fathers, or you, or your children. Everything, including the number of your days, is actually in the hand of God.
The psalmist cries out to God when the floods of death surround him, when the snares of death confront him. Those who are endangered, or sick, or aged, usually learn to confront the reality of death in a particularly vivid way. But even here it is possible to kid yourself. A man might yearn to live to be 120 because solid statistics show that nobody dies after that.
But the truth is that for each of us, the day of death is one day closer than it was this time yesterday. We cannot slow down the rate of approach. We cannot alter the day. Not one of by worrying about it can extend our lives by a single day. And death is certainly an adversary, described as such throughout the Bible, an adversary from whom we must be protected. But in order to be able to take refuge in God in the day of our death, we need to learn to take refuge in God now.
We are becoming in the present what we will be in the future, and the future is when we will die. We are preparing right this instant to be the sort of person we will be on the day that we die. If you must take refuge in Him then, the way to learn is by taking refuge in Him now. This is the most secure fortress that ever was, and consequently you should not expect to stroll right in. Learn the passwords now. And by urging you to learn the passwords now, I am not assigning you a particular work to do. The password is a humble and contrite heart. The password is to believe in the one whom God has sent. The password is faith.
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