With the aid of unfathomable wealth, science, and technology, death can be defeated if you’re willing to live out your remaining days in a laboratory. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Of course, none of that is true. You, like every other human being in the history of the world, are going to get old and die…The Bible doesn’t treat death the way we do. You’ll never find a more realist perspective than what is found in the sixty-six God-inspired books of Holy Scripture.

At my point in life—I’m forty-three—Andrew Fuller, my dead theological mentor, only had eighteen years left. C. S. Lewis had about twenty-two. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been dead four years already. I’m almost the same age as my father-in-law when I married his daughter. If the average American male life span is seventy-seven, then it’s reasonable to assume that over half my life is over. I watch my children hit new life milestones and instinctively compare their progress to where I was at their age. Thankfully, they are always ahead of me.

As I age, I find myself doing these kinds of mental calculations regularly. Every time someone noteworthy dies, I enter the data into a simple formula: their age at death minus my current age. That gives me a sense of how long I might have left.

John Piper was forty when he published Desiring God. Tim Keller was fifty-eight when he published his first major book, The Reason for God. He was thirty-nine when he planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. It’s encouraging to note how fruitful these men were in their remaining years. You might even say their best years were still ahead of them when they were my age. That inspires me.

The realization that I’m getting older was forced upon me. I don’t think I’m alone in that. You spend your whole life trying to reach the next milestone, trying to grow up. Then, one day, you look up and realize you’re the old man in the room. I literally had that realization one day in the gym when I told my workout buddy—ten years my younger—that it seemed like a lot of old guys were working out that particular morning, and he gleefully responded, “Aren’t they all about your age?” I had to laugh because he was right. Like Nathan to David, my friend let me know, “You are the [old] man” (2 Sam 12:7)!

We’ve been taught not to mention these things. Getting old and dying is not something you’re supposed to talk about in polite company. Age is just a number! And, of course, in a culture that prizes technical solutions for every problem—a world, for instance, in which someone must be blamed for even uncontrollable natural disasters—we often live with the illusion that we can beat aging, too. We’ve even got rich techno-utopians devoting millions per year to proving it.

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