There is something awfully final about death.  After the miracle of birth, death seems a bit of an anticlimax.   There is no fanfare, just the slow turning off of the switch for many of us.   It’s hardly the curtain call sought by most actors who “strut and fret their hour upon the stage.”

Any spiritual claim concerning humanity needs to make sense of both our beginning (why we exist) and our ending (why death exists).   These two events peg out the limit of our existence and remind us that life is linear—it has a beginning and an end that is defined by time.

Death is certainly a mystery that has baffled humanity throughout history.   Some of us dread it, a few of us welcome it… and all of us have to face it.

But we don’t like it very much.   Many people, such as the poet, William Cary, have a fear of it.   When he saw a canary singing happily in a cage, he thought gloomily that it could only do so because it didn’t know it was going to die.

Biologically, death is a handy thing.   It allows the evolutionary process to happen. Death clears the stage of old organisms and makes space for new organisms to develop.  The death of species less suited to an ecological niche allows better-adapted species to thrive.   This process of selection drives the engine of biological adaptation and diversity.   It has resulted in you.   And it has given you an innate instinct to survive for as long as possible.

Interestingly enough, this instinct, does not switch off once we have done our biological duty and our children have become adults.  We do not then meekly surrender to death, calm in the knowledge that we have done our job.   Instead, we become social burdens.   In our aged state, we use up resources, clog up supermarket queues, and require more than our fair share of medical resources.   Surely evolution should have taught us to get out of the way with the minimum of fuss as soon as our biological job was done!  But it hasn’t.   We hang on to life as tenaciously as possible.   We hate death because of its uncertainty and because it ruptures the bonds of love we have formed.

The big question is: Have we invented God simply to give us the illusion that there is meaning and hope after death—making the prospect of death more palatable?

All this was a mystery until one man, Jesus Christ, defeated death and was resurrected.   This did not happen in myth: it happened in history.   It did not happen in fiction: the resurrection accounts of Jesus stand up to forensic investigation.

So, what will you do with Jesus?   Will you ignore him and the way to eternal life he offers?   Or will you join him in his resurrection and defeat of death?

Death… it makes you think, doesn’t it?

It’s odd seeing a dead body. I’ve seen a few as I’ve watched the strange phenomenon called “life” trickle away… turning a friend into a corpse. The really weird thing is that the body, at the point of death, contains all the elements necessary for life to exist—and yet there is only death.

So, what is the mysterious life force that breathes fire into the unlikely pile of atoms that make up your body? And, more intriguingly, why does this life force exist? These musings bring to mind a comment by St Augustine:

And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.

When pondering the possibility of God, it is important to study nature. If God exists, then the canvas upon which he painted his purposes was biology. The objects that God chooses to create and love are cast in the form of living, biological machines. As such, it is reasonable to expect that God might have left some clues to his own existence, character and purposes in nature.

If the biblical witness to God is true, we would expect these clues to be subtle so that they don’t compel faith in God, but invite it. The question, is, “Have you seen God in the order and beauty of nature?” If not, I invite you to do so.