(By David Giarrizzo)

Two weeks ago today the soul of my grandfather, Joseph Giarrizzo, passed from this life into the next. He lived 83 years.

When I received the call from my dad just before 8am, I was sitting in front of the computer in my 8×8-foot cubicle at work. I had one hand on the mouse and the other gripping my coffee cup. It was the middle of a busy week during a busy time of year, early in the day with lists of tasks to be attended to and appointments to be met.  But as soon as my dad’s words “Your Grandpa Giarrizzo died this morning” came through the phone and penetrated my inner ear, I immediately dropped what I was doing. I pushed away from the keyboard and my eyes began to well with tears as I bowed my head and began to pray for God’s comfort upon my family.

I can think back to a handful of similar sad moments in my life when I received phone calls notifying me that someone I knew had died. At every one of those instances, my reaction was the same: All other thoughts and anxieties about my life’s activities faded into the distant obscurity of my mind. In other words, the death of another caused my life to pause.

I want to briefly list a handful of reasons why I believe it is important to “pause life” when someone we have known dies:

1.) Pause to grieve the death of a loved one.

This may seem like a point so obvious it’s not worth listing. However I believe it is important for us to remember to take an appropriate amount of time to mourn. Grief is both a natural human reaction to a saddening event and a biblical reaction. Ecclesiastes 3:1&4 says,

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
…a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance…”

We read in John 11 that Jesus himself took time to show his grief in front of his disciples and those present at his dear friend’s Lazarus’ tomb. Jesus wept whilst knowing that he would soon raise Lazarus from death back to life. As with everything, we should grieve to the glory of God, with full dependence on Him for our comfort. May we follow the example of our Lord by taking time to cry when our friends and relatives leave this world for the next.

2.) Pause to experience the joy of God’s comfort.

When we consider verses like Psalm 116:15 (“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.”), we begin to develop a different picture of the death of a believer in Christ. Ironically enough, for many Christians, the death of a fellow believer is often accompanied by joy and celebration as sad as it may be initially. Truly, the death of a brother or sister in Christ is a bittersweet time for the surviving family and friends. On the one hand we mourn the loss of someone close to us; on the other hand, we must be reminded that if our loved one knew the Lord Jesus in a saving way, he or she no longer knows sadness or pain, but only the indescribable joy of being in the presence of Christ. I remember when my great-grandmother died, my dad said that we had not “lost Nana,” because when you lose something it implies that you don’t know where it is. Instead, we knew that because Nana believed in Christ alone for her salvation, she was safe and secure in the arms of her Savior.

Not only should we pause at the death of a saint to be comforted, but also to comfort others. When my grandpa Joe passed away fourteen days ago, the outpouring of love expressed by the kind words, encouraging notes, generous acts, and continual prayers from the family of God was probably the most visible example of God’s comfort that the Giarrizzo family could have experienced. I am so grateful for the body of Christ. I hope that I will remember to pause and show my love to anyone else who has to experience the death of a loved one.

3.) Pause to consider the unnatural concept of death.

I have recently been following the HBO miniseries, The Pacific, a 10-part history following a group of US Marines and their campaign against the Japanese in World War II. Like with many military dramas based on real life, in a scene where a fellow soldier is shot and killed, the surviving soldier next to the fallen one will typically hesitate with terror, pause with the shock of seeing his friend’s life extinguished in an instant. The next time you watch a show like this, pay attention to the expression on the faces of those around the person who is killed. You will see the look of surprise, confusion, sadness, and fear blended together.

Death is shocking to us partly because it can be unexpected, but mostly because it is unnatural. When God created man in Genesis, the concept of death was known only through God’s command, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” For Adam and Eve death was hinged on the conditional and not based on God’s natural order of creation. It was only after Adam and Eve had sinned by disobeying God that death entered the world as an effect of their sin (Genesis 3:19). Therefore, for us, the children of Adam who are conceived in sin, we too are under sin’s curse of death.

I believe this is part of why humans have a hard time grasping the idea of death: because it is not natural to man from the beginning. The death of a loved one can be surprising, confusing, saddening, fearful, or all of these. Thankfully, though, because God’s grace was made known to sinful man through His Son, death is not a punishment for the child of God, but a passage to glory. (More on this under point #5.)

4.) Pause to contemplate our own impending deaths.

Life is short and death gets closer with every passing breath. Moses understood the brevity of human life as well as anyone. Thankfully he paused to write his contemplations for us to read in Psalm 90.

You turn men back to dust,
saying, “Return to dust, O sons of men.”
You sweep men away in the sleep of death;
they are like the new grass of the morning-
though in the morning it springs up new,
by evening it is dry and withered.
The length of our days is seventy years—
or eighty, if we have the strength;
yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:3, 5, 6, 10, 12)

It was the end of my senior year of high school that I attended the funeral of a dear friend. Dan was 30 years old when the Lord took him home quickly in a car crash. The days and weeks following Dan’s death, I remember taking time to think about my own life. “Will I make it to 30, or will God take me home at a young age?,” I wondered to myself. To this day I think often about the shortness of life and the imminence of death. (Ask my family and they’ll say I’m just morbid.) God used Dan’s death to remind me to take life seriously, to number my days aright. What better an opportunity than the death of a friend to consider mortality, eternity, and the importance of salvation through faith in Christ? Likewise, what better opportunity to preach the Gospel to other sinful mortals?

“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.” (Ephesians 5:15-17)

5.) Pause to remember that Christ conquered death.

Finally, and most importantly, the thought of death and dying should cause us to think of Christ, our Prophet, Priest, and King. The sacrificial Lamb of God Who bled and died on our behalf is resurrected and ruling over heaven and earth. Only because of the death of Christ can the Christian sing, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” By His death and resurrection, Christ has removed the power of death. In fact, even the fear of death should be lessened or abolished for he who dies in the Lord. May we always remember the words of Isaiah 43:2, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.” As Bunyan’s Hopeful in Pilgrim’s Progress spoke to Christian who struggled through the River of Death, “Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole,” may we also be of good cheer knowing that we have a great Savior Who has Himself endured death in order to grant us everlasting life.

Where, O death, is your sting?
To Christ, my hope, I do cling!
The water is deep and the darkness is dense,
But great is His light in the night of my death!

Surely there are other reasons why it is important for us to pause at the deaths of loved ones. I would love to hear from you if you have your own thoughts on why death should give us cause to pause.

(By David Giarrizzo)

[Hope for All Time, Part 1]

When I read this part of Scripture here in Lamentations, I can’t help but wonder whether our Reformed Baptist predecessor, John Bunyan, had Lamentations 3 in mind when he penned a part of his classic work, Pilgrim’s Progress. The scene I’m thinking of finds Christian and Hopeful imprisoned in the dungeon of Doubting Castle, the residence of Giant Despair. The two pilgrims had strayed from the Narrow Way when they found themselves in this dark, dark place. It was after numerous beatings and torture and mocking by Giant Despair that Christian spoke these words to his friend Hopeful:

“Brother, said Christian, what shall we do? The life that we now live is miserable. For my part, I know not whether it is best to live thus, or to die out of hand. My soul chooseth strangling rather than life, and the grave is more easy for me than this dungeon. Shall we be ruled by the giant?”

We know that this illustration is meant to be an allegorical picture of the Christian life. We have all probably found ourselves trapped in Doubting Castle, in the dungeon of Giant Despair at some point in our Christian lives. But think back to the story of these two men and do you remember how this part resolves? They had talked and prayed all night when by morning Christian remembered something very important. Bunyan writes,

“Now, a little before it was day, good Christian, as one half amazed, brake out into this passionate speech: What a fool, quoth he, am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty! I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle. Then said Hopeful, That is good news; good brother, pluck it out of thy bosom, and try.

Then Christian pulled it out of his bosom, and began to try at the dungeon-door, whose bolt, as he turned the key, gave back, and the door flew open with ease, and Christian and Hopeful both came out.”

We all have been given that Key of Promise; it is the Word of God!

If God has shown us His mercy through salvation, we have nothing to fear. The importance of the first part of Lamentations is to give us the bad before the good so that the good can rightly be understood in light of the bad. We see this in our own theology. The glory of God’s grace and the importance of Christ’s atonement cannot be completely realized until we consider the state of man’s total depravity and rebellion against God. And when we seek to evangelize the lost, we must give them the bad news about themselves before we can give the good news of Jesus Christ.

The same is true with the way we look at our own lives. We must think back to our days before God extended His mercy to us. We were God’s enemies, living under His wrath. But here’s the good news for us today: God tells us in Romans 8:1 that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And later in verse 18 we see that there is no suffering in this world worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us in the world to come. Finally, Romans 8 closes with this classic assurance:

For I am sure that neither death nor life,

nor angels nor rulers,

nor things present nor things to come,

nor powers,

nor height nor depth,

nor anything else in all creation,

will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So what have we to worry about? From the biggest calamities in life to the smallest cares, God is good to those who fear Him. (Ps. 146:3-7; Lam. 3:31-32; Matt. 6:25-30)

Matthew Henry writes, “…Bad as things are, it is owing to the mercy of God that they are not worse. We are afflicted by the rod of his wrath, but it is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed. … Things are bad but they might have been worse, and therefore there is hope that they may be better.”

Therefore, have hope! May we be reminded that no matter how terrible things are in the world around us—how terrible things may seem even in our own physical bodies, our homes, and our lives—our sovereign God is still on His throne reigning over all as the King of the universe. And if that was not enough to cheer our hearts, that same God died to save His own—a sick and wicked and rebellious people, but His elect from every tribe, tongue and nation—Jesus died for these and presents them clean and spotless in His righteousness before the Father who adopts them as His own beloved children for all eternity. What a joy, what a comfort, what a Savior!

May we be renewed with a sense of God’s greatness, a sense of His love, a sense of His presence in our lives—from hour to hour—as we seek to glorify Him above all else.

(by David Giarrizzo)

Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity, and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity; as is the saying of the wise, “All that cometh is vanity.”

This fair is no new-erected business but a thing of ancient standing.

So writes John Bunyan in his classic allegorical work, The Pilgrim’s Progress, as he described this world with all of its vanities. This section on Vanity Fair accurately depicts the spiritual tension between living in the world without becoming a part of it that every true believer should experience. Additionally, what makes this illustration especially poignant is the fact that Bunyan simply echoes the truths of Scripture.

The wise King Solomon’s commentary on life in the book of Ecclesiastes is timeless in its application for the popular culture of any generation:

• Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2)  
• …The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. (Ecclesiastes 1:8b )
• What has been is what will be, and what has been one is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
• I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:14)
• I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity. (Ecclesiastes 2:1)
• I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?” (Ecclesiastes 2:2)

In this celebrity-obsessed, YouTube-crazed generation, it is important for us to remember these wise words of God, that there is nothing new under the sun, that the senses can never be satisfied, and that all is certainly vanity. Considering our natural, sinful tendency to please man over God, the glittery allure of popular culture can easily entangle an undiscerning believer and take his eyes away from Christ, the greatest treasure. But the flashing lights, electrifying graphics, and lively sounds of popular culture should never diminish the glory of Christ in our hearts and lives.

 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21) Here Jesus reminds us that the things of this world are temporary, fruitless, and disposable –even when they are popular and in vogue.

The basis of what is popular today was popular at one point in the past and will indeed be popular again someday. But in the end, all of what is popular today will be forgotten and lost. The Word of God, however, while not popular by any of the world’s standards, will never lose its power. May we always be men and women who are more concerned with the eternal things of God than with the distracting things of this world.

Allow me to close with another excerpt from Pilgrim’s Progress. As Bunyan’s characters Christian and Faithful head towards Vanity Fair, the character Evangelist gives a strong and applicable admonishment to them and to us:

Let the kingdom be always before you, and believe steadfastly concerning the things that are invisible. Let nothing that is on this side the other world get within you. And, above all, look well to your own hearts and to the lusts thereof; for they are “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Set your faces like a flint; you have all power in heaven and earth on your side.