Nobody likes burials. I guess that even the men, who dispatch people early to their graves, feel bad during their victim’s interment. King Solomon, on the contrary, said: ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting…that the living may lay it to his heart’ –Ecc. 7:2. There are lessons to learn during funerals but in most cases, we learn nothing except on the expenditure side. If a family killed five cows, we then plan to kill ten when our dad will die. That was not the sort of lesson he wanted posterity to note. It is on things with eternal perspective.
King Solomon, in his life, was well-exposed to many things, including evil ones, but after wandering in futility, he learnt his bitter lesson. To his chagrin, all the pleasures he had sought, were nothing but vanity. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ he confessed. I have seen people seeking joy from the wrong source and did not get it. In a meeting one day, joy, the one the Lord Jesus bestows, was radiating all over me. One of our leaders noticed it. He then brought out a packet of cigarettes and started smoking profusely. It did not give him what he was looking for. He dropped the cigarettes and lit his pipe but still, it could not give him any satisfaction. I knew what he was looking for and I suspected that he also knew that I knew it – to be like me! That was free and very simple – just to be born-again like me!
Solomon’s advice to youths and also to all of us is: ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth’. If we heed his counsel, it will be easy for us to understand his ‘conclusion of the matter’, the matter about this life we live. It is, ‘Fear God and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man’ – Ecc. 12:1, 13. It is not every father that tells his family the awful truth about the mistakes he made in life. Solomon did, so that the living may take it to his heart.
Realizing that one day, irrespective of our station in life, ‘the dust shall return to the earth and the spirit will return to God’, and that death is not the end of man, King Solomon would not like us to follow his former–sin-soaked life. It is important therefore that we should be giving priority to spiritual things more than we do to the physical. Our bodies, which we care very much, sometimes at the expense of the spirit, will perish in the grave, while the spirit lives to be answerable to God. That is why the ethos of the Scripture Union, Nigeria, is: ‘No Bible, no breakfast’. This great ministry wants us to be meeting the need of our spirit before that of our body. Someone, who lived before King Solomon, knew also that death is not the end, and that accountability will be demanded from us at the end of life. We forget this most of the time. ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his,’ said Balaam, an unbeliever, to Balak, who had hired him for a bad job – Num. 23: 10.
It is amazing how Balaam knew that there were people living righteously, while other people were living in sin. What he might not have known was that it was not their personal effort that made them righteous. Righteousness is a gift of God, which He imputes on believers. For sure, Uncle Balaam must have witnessed many deaths and might have even caused the deaths of many people, hence he was hired by Balak to curse God’s people. Doing any harmful thing to God’s children is to declare war against God. It is better to fight a live wire than to fight the Almighty God. One truth he could not hide was his admiration of the way the children of God live and die. He did not only admire it, he also desired it. His confession and refusal to do the bad job would have made him forfeit the money Balak would have paid for the evil contract. It did not bother him. It might have also attracted the wrath of his satanic group, but he did not care.
The truth must be told and Balaam chose to do so. He was not a child of God but he knew that the difference between the end of God’s children differs from that of the unbelievers. He then made his choice, an open choice, to die in the way God’s children do: dying peacefully because their lives had been surrendered to God, and their death also ushers them to God’s presence. ‘Yes,’ Balaam seemed to be saying, ‘I want to die like these people you have contracted me to curse. They may be tall or short, rich or poor, educated or illiterates, and even if I cursed them and they die, which I doubt, I want to live and die like them’. It would have meant little had he made the confession before God’s children. In that case, it would have been misunderstood as flattery, but it was to his kith and kin. This is nothing but evangelism at its best!
One peculiarity about God’s children, which Uncle John, the beloved Apostle, noted in Rev. 14:13, is that after death, ‘…their works follow them’. You may rubbish them as much as you can or even murder them, but it will not affect their work – good work – because it follows after them. That could explain why Balaam wanted to identify with them. ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’ – Prov. 18:21. The level a man attains in life depends on his confession. Uncle had confessed that he would die like believers and so, it must be with him, no matter how deep he had wandered in evil.
Bible historians tell us that the Roman centurion, who watched the death of the Lord Jesus, confessed, ‘Truly, this was the Son of God’ – Matt. 27:54. Truth is sacrosanct, yet, only few people tell it, especially, if it will be at the expense of their job. Uncle Centurion did not bother. Praise God that he became a Christian later and rose to be a Bishop. That was a great advantage of attending a funeral over a birthday bash, where he learnt that the One hanging on the cross was the Son of God. Politics, military indoctrination, or whatever, could not deny that truth he discovered. In his military career, he might have been involved in killing people and seeing them die, but what he saw that day was different. Never had he seen a dying man, agonizing in excruciating pains, praying for his murderers as Jesus did. What was common to him was the dying people cursing their murderers in scathing terms.
He could not believe his ears, when, irrespective of unbearable pains, the Lord Jesus could still settle Mary, His mum and John, His youngest disciple. ‘Mother behold thy son, son, behold thy mother,’ said Jesus, pointing to John and Mary. ‘Let me die the death of the righteous and let my last days be like his,’ this Uncle Balaam’s declaration still stands the test of time. God’s children live and die in righteousness. They die to rise again in glory. What about you?
For further comment, Please contact: Osondu Anyalechi: 0802 3002-471;[email protected]