verse4today: "I am sending an angel before you to protect you on your journey and lead you safely to the place I have prepared for you" (Exodus 23:20).
Posted on 2012-02-10 via Twitter
I came across The Marks of God's Children by a sixteen-century Dutch Calvinist pastor named Jean Taffin, who wrote during a season of persecution upon Protestant Christians in that part of the world now known as the Netherlands. This book, which reads like a pastor's manual, offers encouragement to believers wrestling with the tough questions of the faith: Why suffering? Where is God in all this? Why hasn't God answered my prayers? How can I be assured that I am a child of God? And more. In one chapter, entitled "Perseverance in Persecution," Taffin offers this moving description of death, one that surely encouraged many a believer to hold fast the faith, that comforted many others mourning the loss of loved ones who chose death with Christ over life without him, and affirms for all that there is hope for what matters in life:
If we are summoned to die for the name of the Lord Jesus, what is death except the victory after a lengthy warfare? This death is the birth of a blessed soul after hard labor pains. It is the longed-for heaven after fearsome thunderstorms. It is the end of a dangerous and painful journey. It is the healing of every wound and disease. It is the deliverance from all fear and terror. It is the perfecting of our sanctification. It is the gateway into paradise. It is the taking posession of the Father's inheritance. It is the day of our wedding feast with the Lamb and the fulfillment of all our desires.
Who of us will not exclaim with Paul when we feel the bondage of sin, "What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death" (Romans 7:24)? And who will not, when taking hold of the gift that death brings, also say with the apostle, "I desire to depart and be with Christ" (Philippians 1:23)?
The death with which God threatened man in paradise is to experience God's wrath in body and soul because of sin. That is why death and life are twins. What we ordinarily call death is nothing more than the last blow that death can give us. Life here is a continual dying, and to call that the true life is a serious mistake. Death is the end of a thousand deaths and the beginning of true life.