If you are in Christ, i.e., united to him by the Spirit through faith alone, your name is in the Lamb’s book of life and eternal fellowship shall be yours. Respect death. Mortify your sins. Grieve and mourn the loss of life but rest in the promise that the end belongs to him, who walked in the garden with our first parents, in whose image we are being re-created.

Americans born after World War II, for most of that time, have experienced prosperity and medical progress hitherto unknown in human history. We have been led to expect that, given enough resources, medical science can conquer virtually anything. In an undated story (why do publishers do that?) Becky Little highlights four diseases about which we have largely forgotten because of vaccines: Smallpox, Polio, Rabies, and the Flu. To be sure, people do still die from the flu but, until Covid-19 we have not faced anything like the Spanish Flu, which killed approximately 675,000 people in the USA and 50 million people globally.

To date the CDC reports 463, 659 deaths in the USA and 2.3 million deaths globally from Covid-19. Though the number of deaths in the USA might be beginning to approach the total number of deaths from the 1918 flu, globally the 1918 outbreak was much more deadly. Be that as it may, when we add to the effects of Covid-19 the aging of the American population, we are living through a time of great loss. Psychologically, this sense of loss is intensified by social media and changes in the way the news is reported.

We grieve these reports of death and these losses, as we should, because death is not normal.

The media generates revenue by clicks, and so they report (market would be a more accurate verb) news from outside their local area with with headlines designed to get the reader to click, if not to read. The old newsroom maxim, “if it bleeds, it leads” was never so true. The media have embraced death and destruction as part of their business model so we are bombarded with reports of deaths from our own town and from places across the globe. Then there is social media, on which friends and acquaintances seem continuously to be reporting death and loss.

We grieve these reports and these losses, as we should, because death is not normal—at least it was not supposed to be. We were not created to die. We were created for endless fellowship with God. He put us a paradise, a garden, a temple. We were created in righteousness and true holiness. We were endowed with all needed to obey and to enter into blessedness. The Lord even instituted a sacrament of life, the tree of life, and a sacrament of death, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:15–17). We were authorized to eat from the one and forbidden from the other.

Our first parents had fellowship with God even before the consummate state, which loomed before them. Their week was organized around the weekly Sabbath—remember this is before the fall and who knows how many years before the institution of the old (Mosaic) covenant (Gen. 2:2–3; Exod. 20:8). The Sabbath was a picture of future blessedness and fellowship with God and with one another (Heb. 4:9).

The marvels of modernity have given us the illusion that we can, through will and technology, conquer the consequences of sin—but it is just an illusion.

Spoiler alert: We did not obey God. At one point in our life in God’s paradise-temple we freely chose death and God kept his promise (Gen. 3:6–7). Death entered the world (Gen. 2:17; 3:19). We began to die and promised misery began to manifest itself everywhere, from food production to childbirth (e.g., Gen. 4:8). There has been man-made attempts to overcome finitude and the fall (e.g., Gen. 11:1–9), but those ended badly too. Eventually life became so horrible that the Lord, as it were, started it over. He destroyed “the world that then was” (2 Pet. 3:6).

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