Facing Death

W. Carl Ketcherside

[Page 60]

     "It is appointed unto man once to die." This appointment has been made for us by God and we must keep it. There is no evading it. One outstanding feature of the Way is that it teaches us how to die by showing us how to live. The apostle Paul wrote from his Roman prison, "I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better" (Philippians 1:23).

     One time we were driving in the mountains and came to the mouth of a narrow gorge. We enquired of the operator of a filling-station about the road. He replied, "You can get through without too much difficulty, but you can't come back if you change your mind. There's no place to turn around." In our own section of Missouri there is an area covered by huge red granite boulders. It is called "Elephant Rocks" because it looks like a herd of large pachyderms on the hillside. Some of the rocks lie so close together it is hard to work your way between them. One narrow defile is even called "Fat Man's Misery."

     The word for "strait" is senechomai. It is the very word for such a narrow passage between rocks as we have described. Paul was walking a narrow trail between two conflicting desires and he knew that he was not coming back. One cannot reverse time. The fountain of youth exists only in the imagination.

     But it is the word for "depart" which gives me a genuine inner uplift of the spirit. It is analuo, and it was used in three different senses by the Greeks.

     (1) It was employed for the act of loosing the moorings of a ship in preparation for sailing. As a lad Paul had probably played around the docks at Tarsus and watched the ships put out to sea. He knew that the cable which warped the ship into the wharf had to be untied and cast off before the ship was free. To him death was not the end of the voyage, but the beginning. Death was loosing the ropes.

     (2) The word was applied to taking down a tent in a military campaign. William Barclay translates the passage: "I am caught between two desires for I have my desire to strike camp and be with Christ." Charles Kingsley Williams renders it, "My desire is to fold my tent and be with Christ." Soldiers take down their tents when the horrors of battle are over and they can return home. It is not true that Christians leave home when they die--they go home!

     (3) Last of all the Greeks used analuo to describe the loosing of the yoke or saddle girths to remove the burden from the back of a pack animal. This is what death does for us at twilight. The loads of life are lifted and the burdens taken down so that the spirit is set free. We can readily see why Paul, writing from prison with such a philosophy, would want to depart.