Nena Arias | September 3, 2018
Science tells us that every living thing is made up of cells, which is a very small protein-based particle. It has a wall that separates it from its surroundings creating order. It regulates itself and maintains a constant state; it eats nutrients to stay alive, it grows and reacts to the environment and the laws that govern it. It also replicates itself. Every second in a single cell several million chemical reactions take place, which start other reactions forming a complex mechanism. A true marvel. But eventually, every living thing will die. So, what is life? Is it just things, processes, DNA and information? Is life and death an irrelevant question? In reality, don’t look to science to answer these basic questions, they don’t have the answers. Only God tells us about the origin of life, its proper development and purpose on earth and illuminates us on the afterlife and what we can expect when we leave this earth.
The proper and accurate information we need to know about life is that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Reading the account of Creation in the book of Genesis is fascinating and answers all the questions about where everything came from, what is its purpose and how it reproduces to replenish and fill the earth after its own kind.
God also instructs us about the origin of humans. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (Genesis 1:26-28). “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). To this day, when a person stops breathing, they are gone from this earth.
This is God’s uncomplicated explanation for all of Creation.
People who rebel against the God of the Bible have chosen to invent their own “explanation” of how everything came to be. The top theory, as things stand right now, is the theory of evolution, which believes all this came from nothing. With all the missing links and unanswered questions evolution has no explanation at all. You need much more faith to believe in the nothingness of evolution than to take God at his word backed up by all the evidence in all of Creation of his undeniable great wisdom and intelligence. All of Creation is a marvel which can only be explained by the intelligence of a Superior Being above and beyond of what humans could ever produce. We know this Supreme Being as God.
The truth of the matter is that, we are given one life to live and then we graduate into the afterlife. “…it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,” (Hebrews 9:27). “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil“ (2 Corinthians 5:10). This is the cycle of life here on earth and the assured existence of an afterlife.
These days we have been reminded of the lives of two well-known individuals that died, as we all must do at some point. Their lives were passed before our eyes through the media. They were John McCain and Aretha Franklin. Most of us only had knowledge of their public persona, while some knew them in private. We can only evaluate the life of a person by the life they lived and what is documented. Have you noticed how often people become much better at their funerals than how you remember them? I did not know the John McCain and Aretha Franklin that people described in their eulogies. But this made me think, there is only one eulogy that counts and that is God’s evaluation of our life when we go before him. He sees all of our deeds we do in private and public and what motivated us to do them. He will have to give us our due according to what we did while we were in our earthly body, whether good or evil. Nothing escapes his knowledge and he is recording everything to make right judgment of you and me.
I make it a point to prepare every day according to God’s Word for my parting date because all who are alive will someday have to depart from earth. We live planning for the long-range life but live as if it were our last day because we never know when our appointed date will come.
“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”
Psalms 116:15
