Book 4 of Musings Seeking Death and Not Finding It

The Book of Revelation tells of people who will seek death and not be able to find it. This indeed will be a terrifying situation.

Ordinarily we don't think of physical death as a blessing. But it is a blessing, in fact, a great blessing. As long as we are housed in a body that is continually aging, and finally becomes too weak to function properly, physical death comes as a blessing.

Sometimes people have an incurable disease that leaves them in intense pain. In this case, death is a blessing.

There are people who lie in a coma for years. Death may come as a blessing, in this instance.

There are people, such as was true of the Apostle Paul, who was confined in a Roman prison. To die and go to be with Jesus is a blessing.

As it has been said, God does not take the old but the ripe.

Sometimes people take their own lives. This is not pleasing to God. God is the only one who lawfully can decide when an individual's course on the earth has been completed. We are on the earth, confined in an animal body, in order to accomplish certain things regarding our personality. Only God knows when it is time for us to be relieved of the pains of earthly life.

The righteous individual has nothing to fear from death. Unless the person has deliberately and knowingly refused the lordship of Jesus Christ, dying physically is one of the least significant and most wonderful events of his or her life. It is one of the least significant events because he will continue much as he was, only not hindered by the physical body. It is one of the most wonderful events because he will leave the pains and heartaches of life on earth and enter the spiritual Paradise.

When the Bible speaks of people seeking death and not being able to find it, it is telling us of an unbelievably horrible period of earth's future history.

People suffering the intense agony caused by the locusts emerging from the smoke coming from the abyss will not be able to find relief in death.

People who have been mutilated in an accident will be unable to escape their pain and disfigurement by dying.

People who have been shot or stabbed in a crime of violence will have to continue living in their misery.

People who are experiencing unbearable spiritual or emotional suffering will not be able to find release in physical death.

People will not be able to commit suicide in those days. God will compel them to remain on the earth while He pours out judgment upon them.

When the Bible says "death will elude them" it is almost as though death is a person, just as we read that death was cast into the Lake of Fire. Death evidently is a spirit. When God so commands it, death will not have access to people under any set of conditions.

Our life on earth will endure as long as God and we are profiting from being here. When our probationary period has come to an end, we will pass into the authority of the spirit of death and our body will begin to decompose. Death has that power.

But our true personality, for which our physical body served as a house, will walk into the spirit realm joyously alive and free from the weight of the physical body. What we will do then I do not know. We will be waiting for the Day of Resurrection, and perhaps serving God in some fruitful manner.

So for us to live is Christ and to die is gain. But pity the poor sinner who is exposed to the fiery locusts that come from the Abyss, stinging people repeatedly with the venom of a scorpion. He clamors for the opportunity to die, but it is denied him. He must suffer his punishment.

Before the Lord Jesus returns, God is going to reveal His displeasure with the way people are destroying the marvelous gifts He has given them in His love. We are approaching these calamities. The only way we are going to survive is by dying in the Lord Jesus and living in Him, counting ourselves crucified with Christ and living with Christ at the right hand of God.

Don't let the coming judgments catch you unprepared!

During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them. (Rev 9:6)