Death and Being

Now it is with this intense passion for being, that the idea of death clashes. Let us search why it is we shrink from death. This reason brethren, we shall find, that it presents to us the idea of not being. Talk as we will of immortality, there is an obstinate feeling that we cannot master, that we end in death; and that may be felt together with the firmest belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our faith tells us one thing, and our sensations tell us another. When we die, we are surrendering in truth all that with which we have associated existence. All that we know of life is connected with a shape, a form, a body of materialism; and now that that is palpably melting away into nothingness, the boldest heart may be excused a shudder, when there is forced upon it, in spite of itself, the idea of ceasing forever.

Frederick W Robertson in his sermon on Victory over Death, in Sermons Preached at Brighton, Third Series. 

Man is not God's chief end

The problems of the private life are often so intractable because they are not conceived in any but private relations; which is to judge the house from a sample brick. The manna so hoarded goes wrong. The soul’s lot lies in the eternal and universal counsel of God. And the first question still is man’s chief end, and the collective destiny of every soul there. The eternal does not begin on the other side of time; rather all time and space is the content of eternity. Faith is really faith in that eternal destiny as present, and then in our part and place therein by God’s grace. Immortality means living on in Eternity; it is Eternity living on in us. It is God thinking Himself, living Himself in us. But we are apt to treat God as if He were only a patron saint magnified, whom we expect to attend to our affairs if He is to retain our custom and receive our worship.

There is even what we might call a racial egoism, a self-engrossment of mankind with itself, a naive and tacit assumption that God were no God if He cared for anything more than He did for His creatures. We tend to think of God as if man were His chief end, as if He had no right to a supreme concern for His own holy name, as if His prodigals were more to Him than His only begotten Son in whom He made the worlds and has all His delight. We think and worship as if the only question was whether God loves us, instead of whether His love has absolute power to give itself eternal and righteous effect. Modern science is especially prone to remind us of this egoism latent in Christian faith, and is eager to prune it. Accordingly we are told of the infinities of space and time, amid which our earth and its history swim but as a mote in the air; and we are urged, with such knowledge, to moderate our ideas of a future, and our expectations of divine attention. Now, though science is wrong in asking us to suppress our soul or conscience before world on world of spacial or temporal existence (because the spiritual is not spacial), yet the advice is not without value. There are considerations which should quell a crude, racial egoism, and should lift mankind out of the self-absorption which blights and shrivels the individual. But they are not considerations of the Creation but of its Creator, not of a Universe but of a Sovereign God, who is so much to us because He is more to Himself, and whose love is infinite because it is holy, and must be hallowed, even if He spare not His Son. His Son spared not Himself in the hallowing of that name. It was the first function of His Cross. And so He was Saviour—because He loved God more than man, and glorified His name over all weal of ours. We have no final weal but our share in that worship and glory of the Father by the Son.  

 

P T Forsyth, in The Justification of God, pages 10-11

Doubts

From George MacDonald and His Wife, by Greville MacDonald. 
Page 494 ff 


After the death of her daughter, Louisa MacDonald, struggled with doubt...


[George MacDonald] took to himself the mother's own misery, namely, that the old conventional forms of religion's comforting were failing her utterly.  In this present renewal of 'Death's terror' we find the victory over it.  Just as death's denial is forced upon us by its fearsome evidences -

Have pity on us for the look of things

When blank denial stares us in the face -

and declares our utter dependency, so is life's triumphant affirmation of its immortality, independently of any evidences, the essence and truth of all religion.  Death and its trappings we may know of, Life and its resurrection we believe in.  Just as we will not, cannot put our trust, our belief, in Death, so we cannot know - in the way we know the beloved body lies dead in that box - that the darling life has realized Love's own immortality   Small wonder - with battalions of braggart facts ranged before our senses and souls in denial of Him who is the Resurrection and the Life - small wonder that, in days of this poor mortality, we have always, day by day, year by year, to fight 'the Apollyon of Unbelief.' [A phrase MacDonald used more than once.] For us to doubt that my father and mother did in the spring of 1879 triumph over the enemy, while still they must remain in the fighting line, is to throw down our arms and turn traitors.  Yet proof of immortal life, as proof is counted by the scientist, can never be given.  Nor shall we ask for it when at the last we are delivered from the body of this death; for we shall understand that such faith as George MacDonald's was not other than divine knowledge.  This he puts very definitely:

To make things real to us is the end and battle-cause of life.  We often think we believe what we are only presenting to our imaginations.  The least thing can overthrow that kind of fatih.  The imagination is an endless help towards faith, but it is no more than a dream of food will make us strong for the next day's work.  To know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, the present one existence in all things and degrees and conditions, is life; and faith, in its simplest, truest, mightiest form is - to do his will.  [From the novel, Donal Grant, 1883 pg 14]

Do you ask [again writes my father] why no intellectual proof is to be had?  I tell you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that better, that best, that only vision, which by its own radiance will sweep away doubt for ever.  Being then in the light and knowing it, the lack of intellectual proof will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence...The mists and the storms and the cold will pass - the sun and the sky are for evermore.  [from the novel, Paul Faber, Surgeon, 1879, pg 217]