Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Books

On Death….

by Jimmy Hopper

The Riverwood Book Group has been reading (and discussing) John Milton’s fabulous Paradise Lost for the past few weeks. We have found much to agree (and disagree) with in Milton’s telling of the fall of Satan, of Creaion, of original sin, and of expulsion from paradise, but we all agree that Milton’s epic is incredibly powerful. On this dreary, rainy afternoon, I was reading Book XI and I came to another stunning passage.

The archangel, Michael, has come to Eden after the Fall to tell Adam and Eve that they are to be expelled from Eden because of their sin. Adam is taken to a high mountain, (Milton describes it as the one upon which Jesus will be tempted,) and he is shown the future, the results of sin. He sees murder and war, and then he sees the myriad of diseases and ailments from which man will die and the horror that accompanies that death. The conclusion of the section is as follows:

  Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; Despair
  Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch;
  And over them triumphant death, his dart
  Shook, but delay'd to strike, though oft invok'd
  With vows, as their chief good, and final hope
  Sight so deform, what heart of rock could long 
  Dry-eyed behold? Adam could not, but wept....

We, as Christians, are always aware of the Lord bearing in His body the punishment for our sins, but we seldom think of the stupendous cost of sin on all of humanity, including ourselves. Riverwood has dealt with death through much of this year, and as we dealt with it, we came to see at first hand the pain, the horror, the savagery, the very stink of it in our nostrils.What a cost sin, the curse we carry, extracts. What a wonder it will be when we reach the day where there is not only any death, but there is no sin, the father of death.