In the Beginning God

6 On Dying

If the only way to die is not the complete cessation of the physical activity on the part of the body, then how do we die?  The only feasible way to die is to become someone else, and lose our identity to the one we have become completely absorbed by to the point we would not, or could not do, say, or think anything differently than that one. 

I once encountered a small white cat that had been accepted into a family of poodle puppies that were very small bred.  The cat which was abandoned by the side of the road was so young it accepted its role as just another puppy.  It slept with the poodles.  It ate with the poodles.  It stayed on the floor with the poodles, it even delighted in dog food and table scraps when the other cats being very finicky ate only cat food.  I thought it was a dog until when wanting to join another puppy in my lap it meowed.  I was amazed as the owner began to explain the circumstances of the strange creature.  I eventually realized that the cat was spiritually a dog, if cats have spirits and sometimes I hope they do not.  Physically it was not much different than a dog anyway, but spiritually it was a dog and had ceased to be a cat at all.  The cat it was born to be no longer existed in the mind of the cat at all.  That poor pathetic little kitty found out in the yard just feet from the road had actually died, and the dog it had become had taken its place.

To have one’s spirit broken to the point one is terminally “off” like a living corpse with nothing going on as far as its own volition is not the only way to spiritually die.  To be spiritually a human and give yourself over to sin to the point that everything you were in life was completely controlled by the spirit that is in the body, what the Bible calls the spirit of the flesh, is also to die if you never were intended to be that, but the spiritual creature God intended you to be in the first place.  In that case your spirit, the spirit that was in Adam for example, never came to be and like a flower that dies upon the branch you never bore any fruit and withered away to the nothingness the flower was actually made of.  Literally you returned to the chemicals that comprised your body when it was alive and all that you were to have been by design is as nonexistent as any animal form.  For though animals have bodies and those bodies have fleshly spirits though it is very nearly impossible to think that they could do anything spiritual, and even emotionality on the part of an animal is highly suspect, yet they must have such as that but give themselves over entirely to the spirit of their flesh, die and become the materials that their makeup was destined to be.  As the Bible says, “… for dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,” when speaking to the spiritually dead, those completely taken over by the flesh.

A blonde bombshell was highly prized in the society I lived with.  But when she became a slut, and the sex partner of anyone she could, which was almost everyone at first she was so highly prized; but when she was used up and completed her corruption nobody wanted her body any longer but her.  When she died there was no one there as she was buried.  Just the grave diggers and the funeral director and even I who once knew her, not sexually, merely watched as I mowed the graves from a distance.  Once a veritable treasure she died and became part of the soil never to have been anything but the beauty she had been for so short a time; her physical death incidental to her spiritual demise.

Judas Iscariot suffered a horrible death after turning the Lord into the Jewish authorities.  He had once been a promising student and doubtlessly a very fine scribe (I do not know these things but I believe it is quite probable.) yet he became a clump of bloody flesh in a potter’s field bought with the traitor’s pay he tried to give back.  Physically he was like any man.  Spiritually he was completely taken over by Satan and afterward abandoned not even worthy of being one of the Devil’s minions any longer; completely of no more value to anyone.  Many think he died because he gave himself over to Satan the night he turned the Christ in, but he was dead long before that when as the thieving holder of the money purse he was so greedy he stole all he wanted from it and still greedy went even for what little the Jewish authorities would give him besides.  Fortunately he went where he belonged and it would have been better for him had he never been born, for he suffered a fate worse than death.  How very sad to commit suicide because of one’s guilt only to find all he had done was to hang in the costume he wore to protect him from the elements and to hide his body from prying eyes.

Ironically even to be born again as it is called is to first die spiritually, and then to be made new by the Lord, a completely new creature.  Not everyone will die physically, but all of them who are born again spiritually will be taken to a life much higher than the mere life of service to an ever deteriorating body that must in all other cases eventually do its owner no good as they return to the chemicals they were when their bodies were created to house them.  It is not really a mystery.  There is nothing mystical or magical to it either.  We all know, now that we are not cavemen, that there is more to it than just being born to serve a physical body the sum total of the days of our existence.  Anyone who can think knows it is impossible to think of one as the mere chemicals that comprise their body.  But so many serve their body so as to exclude anything higher and some do it well (Dying to have sex with seven virgins for example, and just one example for there are many.).  But they wind up an embarrassment to those who thought them their brothers and sisters, and dead, just as dead as the blonde whore I mentioned before.  If it were not that God had a Son and sent him to save us from that horrific senseless and pardon my rashness, even stupid death, duped by the Destroyer there would be no hope.  Even the Weeper must weep, as the Savior did.  It is so sad I almost cannot bear it as I think about it, let alone write about it, and watch it happen over and over again. 

          God give us the words to help save even one, but hopefully many.