HOME / PROCLAMATION! MAGAZINE / 2008 / JULY/AUGUST / EDITOR'S COMMENTS

JULY / AUGUST 2008
VOLUME 9, ISSUE 4

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D E P A R T M E N T S

Editor's COMMENTS

On the death of my dad
Colleen Tinker

On Monday morning, October 15, 2001, the phone rang. Exhausted from days of anxiety and sadness and nights of staying late at the hospital, I answered and heard the words with a numbing finality: my father had died just minutes before.

Richard and I met my mother at his room, and we sat mostly in silence while we waited for the undertaker to arrive. This was the first death we had personally experienced since leaving Adventism about three years before.

"I know he's with the Lord," my mother finally spoke, "but it's hard actually to believe it."

"I know," I answered. "It's amazing how a lifetime of being programmed to believe 'soul sleep' was truth makes me question what I know the Bible really says."

I sat with my internal struggle, seeing the wasted frame that clearly no longer housed my father, praying that God would ground me in truth and reality at that moment.

During the preceding years, God had opened my heart and mind to the Scriptures that taught to be absent from the body was to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:6; Philippians 1:22-23). These texts had filled me with amazement and surprising joy.

As an Adventist I had repeatedly heard that believing in soul sleep was a great comfort; we were protected from believing in spiritualism because we knew the dead were dead, and we knew we weren't making them sad with our continuing sinning and heartaches because nothing of them remained except in the memory of God from whence He would bring them back into existence at the resurrection.

Even so I had never fully reconciled myself to the claim that soul sleep was a comfort; sometimes I even had vagrant thoughts about wishing it could be true that the dead were with Jesus instead of being nowhere while their bodies turned to dust. I would quickly discipline such thoughts, not wanting to entertain Satan's great deception in my mind.

And now I sat in the presence of my father's lifeless body. I knew he was not there. I knew also that he had trusted Jesus; he had embraced the gospel and followed Him out of over 70 years of loyal habit and tradition, leaving Adventism and claiming his new identity as a "regular" Christian just a few years before.

Quite unexpectedly I found myself in an internal crisis. At the moment of my first close encounter with the death of a loved one, my mind raised all my old indoctrination from its not-too-dusty archive. I had no proof that my father's essence was consciously with the Lord. What sort of self-protecting delusion was I pursuing, attempting to believe some sort of life continued after the last breath?

As I prayed silently and faced the unfamiliar void of my dad's departure, I realized no proof would be given to me except the proof of God's own word. Either I would fall back into the familiar, rational view that death was the end of life, that humans, like animals, turned to dust when the breath left their bodies, or I would by faith accept the plain words of Scripture and believe that Jesus broke the power of death and gave my father eternal life (John 5:24), and that now my dad was absent from his body and present with the Lord.

I had no physical proof for either belief. I either had to accept by faith the teaching of the Adventist church and its prophetess, Ellen White, or I had to accept by faith the clear teaching of God's own word. I chose to believe God.

In this issue Chris Lee presents a Bible study on the state of the dead. Dale Ratzlaff shares an exegesis of 2 Corinthians 5:1-9, and Chris Badenhorst lets us read a letter he wrote to a friend explaining how the new birth is impossible unless we have spirits that are not mere breath. I discuss why understanding that "spirit" is not breath is essential for knowing who Jesus is and what it means to be in His image. Phil Harris shares his faith story, and Michael Hicks tells of his unconditional surrender.

Since my father's death God has continued to reveal to me the truth that nothing, "neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future…will be able to separate [me] from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39). We pray you, too, will come to know this reality. †

 

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