Even If I Die . . .

After my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God!   Job 19:26

Job said to his friends, “If I die before the Redeemer comes, some of you might be tempted to think my faith was in vain. But even though worms destroy my body, I will see God. Death will not put me beyond the range of the Redeemer’s power.”

Right here, at least two thousand years before Christ, it is as if God gave Job a candle in a dark room. In its short flame, this man had enough light to see that God had more in store after his funeral service. God “broke the power of death and illuminated the way to life and immortality through the Good News” (2 Timothy 1:10)—Good News already recorded in what is perhaps the oldest book of the Bible. Christ came into a dark room and switched on a brilliant light.

Job’s wife had a very different philosophy: “What you don’t get now, you won’t get ever!” There are a lot of people today who would agree with her. Whatever lies on the other side of death cannot be half as attractive as life here and now!

But when Jesus Christ came into the world, he declared, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying” (John 11:25). In his resurrection, Christ became the prototype of a new humanity.

That means the day is coming when you will be done with sin forever. You will be responsive only to what is good and pure and true. You will be filled with all the fullness of God. Temptation will be gone, confusion past, and pain forgotten. The heaven God has planned will make the joys Adam and Eve knew in the Garden fade into insignificance.

The joys of body and soul in that life are so great that they’re difficult to imagine, but God says what he has prepared is beyond anything that has ever entered our minds (see 1 Corinthians 2:9). Job discovered he was not in the land of the living on his way to the land of the dying. He was in the land of the dying, yet on his way to the land of the living.

For further reading, see 1 Corinthians 2