Overcoming the fear of death

Bible verse for today: Isaiah 26:19"But your dead will live, Lord; their bodies will rise, let those who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy, your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead."(NIV).

There have been different stories of people who have woken up after being certified clinically dead, apart from the joy of seeing that loved one again the next thing is the question "how does it feel to die"?

The truth is the fear of dying fills every human with dread and that is because no one has given an accurate explanation on the life after death.

But the bible makes us understand that dying with Christ in us brings life after death, which makes us Christians still on earth strongly believe that Christ's death in cross was not in vain.

The Word for Today devotional by United Christian Broadcasters (UCB) says:

Aristotle called death the thing to be feared most because ‘it appears to be the end of everything.’ Jean-Paul Sartre said that death ‘removes all meaning from life.’ Robert Green Ingersoll, one of America’s most outspoken agnostics, unable to offer any words of hope at his brother’s funeral, said, ‘Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights.’ The last words of French humanist François Rabelais where: ‘I go to seek “a Great Perhaps”.’ In Hamlet, Shakespeare describes the afterlife as: ‘The dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’ Clearly, unbelief isn’t just a miserable way to live; it’s a tragic way to die. A comedian once quipped, ‘I intend to live forever…so far, so good.’

But what if death is different from how the philosophers thought of it? Not a curse, but a passageway? Instead of a crisis to be avoided, a corner to be turned? What if the cemetery isn’t the domain of the Grim Reaper, but the dominion of the Soul-Keeper who’ll someday soon announce, ‘O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy’? Paul writes: ‘If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most pitiable. But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead’ (1 Corinthians 15:19-21 NKJV). Death isn’t the ‘great perhaps’. No, your last day on earth will herald the best of all your days!