The consequences of death

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"Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment." Hebrews 9:27

Gloom must dwell in "the valley of the shadow of death." When we consider what death really is—not merely as putting a final close, and that, perhaps, with a pang of mortal agony, to all that nature loves, but an opening gate into endless woe—our wonder is rather that men meet it with such stoical insensibility, instead of being more alarmed and terrified at its approach.

But what is death? Is it merely what we see with our bodily eyes when we view the corpse stretched upon the bed—or as we represent it to our imagination when we follow the coffin to the cemetery? Does death merely mean that pale corpse, that funeral hearse, those weeping mourners, those gasping sobs of wife or husband, with all the sights and sounds of woe as the heavy clods, amid the still silence, fall on the coffin? To most this is all they see or know of death. But death, in a scriptural sense, has a far wider and more extensive meaning than these mere outward trappings of sorrow.

It is not then so much death as the consequences of death, that makes it—to be so truly dreadful—to be the king of terrors—and invests it with that terrible visage which strikes gloom—to be cast into the lake of fire—to be forever under the dreadful wrath of God—to be eternally wallowing in the billows of sulphurous flame—to be shut up in that dreadful pit into which hope never penetrates.

Why should death be an object of fear? Because after death comes the judgment! And why should judgment be an object of terror? Because judgment implies condemnation, and condemnation implies an eternity of woe!