Why must we die?

The Bible states that 'it is appointed unto men once to die'. This most obvious of facts is among the most distressing things that we human beings face. I have a friend who committed suicide just before Christmas about eleven years ago. Why - I can speculate but I do not really know. One my friends in Liverpool then found that her partner's nephew has been found dead in his flat. Death comes to us all but why?

The January Blues!

I read the following comment in the ‘The Guardian’ newspaper quite a while ago - ‘The  dilemma, I’m 22 years old and going into my fourth year in medical school. I have been using study to escape loneliness, insecurity and anxiety that arose from the stress of the course and my failure to establish friends’.

Another person wrote in The Telegraph “‘Life looks good on the surface - so why are we all so lonely?  ‘But you can’t be lonely,’ a friend tells me crossly. ‘You’re out  every night.’ The backhanded compliment makes me laugh. But it also makes me sad. On paper my life sounds glamorous. Denying  you  feel  lonely  makes no  more  sense  than  denying you  feel  hunger’” These are the comments of a high profile journalist who looks as if she is living the high life but most certainly doesn’t feel as if she is.

A new  national  commission  investigating loneliness  in  the  UK,  launched  in  January 2020, shows  that  a  fifth  of  the  population privately  admits  they  are  ‘always  or  often lonely’.  But  two-thirds  of  those people would never  confess  to  having  a  problem  in public. Here is the problem - loneliness is the devastating unseen result of the pressures and emptiness of modern life when people live devoid of real purpose and meaning.

Running away from God

Photo courtesy of Unsplash - Nicolas Picard

Photo courtesy of Unsplash - Simone Nespolo

Photo courtesy of Unsplash - Richard Loader

Have you ever felt that somehow God is speaking to you?

Maybe you have look around at the at the wonder of His creation. Maybe you were looking out over a panoramic view over mountains and lakes, saw the way a spider spins its web, a caterpillar moves or even the intricate insides of a delicate flower. Different things impress different people. For David the psalmist it was the magnificence of looking up into the heavens and gazing at the stars, it caused him to declare in Psalm 19, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God!’

God’s creation tells us of His very existence, God shouts out to us through His ‘handiwork’. In fact, Romans chapter one tells us that we can’t just remain undecided as to whether there is a God. We lie to ourselves if we say there is no God and God Himself says that this would be foolish.  It states that, ‘since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.’ So, God speaks to us through what He has made, He tells us that He is there. He speaks to us in different ways too. The Bible is often called God’s word. It is the very words of God, His messages, His instructions for us. Stop and think for a minute, if the Bible is what it says it is, God speaks to us every time we read the Bible.

Helping someone when they get down

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

How do you help someone when everything gets on top of them, and they feel that it is not worth living?

I am interested to see how Bible characters handled these episodes in their lives. It is easy to dismiss them and say that they didn’t experience pressure like we do, but I think some of them had a really tough time.

Take, for example, Elijah. He was a real character. I think most of us would have thought he was quite a resilient and strong person. That in itself is a warning.

Elijah was a spokesman for God. These men were commonly known as Prophets. God communicated with them, and they were expected to pass on His message ‘word for word’. No changes or adjustments, their terms of engagement were - just tell them what I told you - ‘thus says the LORD’. As a result of this, Elijah had met Kings, military leaders and other influential people. All in all, he was an impressive man. You couldn’t imagine him being brow beaten by anyone or getting depressed by his circumstances - but he did.

We discover this in 1 Kings chapter 19. If you are interested, read 1 Kings chapter 18 (it’s a captivating read) to get the background. Elijah has just been involved in a major event where God used Him to prove that He (God) is a living and powerful God and that the so-called God, called Baal, was nothing but a sham, a figment of the imagination and powerless. After this, Elijah should have been ‘on a high,’ but he wasn’t.