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Study of Manual for Teachers 6-8-12

6-8-12
3 Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds it from awareness like a shield held up to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot coexist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is “laid to rest” in devastation’s arms, where worms wait to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature’s “law of life.” God is insane, and fear alone is real.

If I believe in death I am never going to be free of fear. Even if I were afraid of nothing else, if I had no fear of financial ruin or loss of relationships, if I no longer had a fear of heights, or sickness, or failure of any kind, if I still fear death, then fear will still be in my mind. If fear is in my mind I don’t know who I am. I don’t know God. I have only an awful distorted idea of a cruel and merciless Creator to call Father.

If fear is still in my mind I am separated from all things in the world, and all things are my enemy because they bring with them the threat of death. That person might kill me, on purpose or by accident. She might give me a sickness that lays me low. He might run me over with his car or careen into mine and kill me. That tree might fall on me in a storm, that lightning might strike me.

The spider might bite me or the mosquito might give me West Nile disease. The doctor might misdiagnose me or make a wrong cut in surgery. The world teems with unseen dangers, bacteria and viruses that threaten me everyday and how do I defend against all of them when I cannot even see them? If nothing else kills me, my body will, in the end betray me, and will die anyway.

All of life (as we experience life) is about death. For me to live I must eat and so something must die. No matter how lightly I walk on the planet, my very existence damages or destroys something. Death makes all things an enemy, and me enemy to all things. It fills all circumstances with an underlying sense of dread. Death mocks the love I have for my Father for where there is fear there cannot be love. And who could truly love a God Who wants your life in payment for His love.

As I study this section I am beginning to understand something. It is not fear of death that I must lay aside, it is the belief in death that must be undone if I am to know God.

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