. . . In the sweat of your face shall you
eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for
dust you are and to dust you shall return.(Genesis 3:19)
What is life and
death? Where did life begin and end? Where did death begin and end? These
questions will be answered as you continue reading this essay.
The definition of
life and death varies in the eyes of people giving the meaning of them.
To beggars, life
is when someone gives them a piece of bread to eat that will help them to
survive the day. And death is something they fight every day because they want
to experience first the comfort and happiness before leaving the Earth. How
amazing really they are.
To in love people,
life begins when they met their special someone as if everything is beautiful
and perfect. Because of this, they recite unconsciously the famous poem for
elementary pupils
“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.”
It’s so great! It was so great!
Until . . . their partner cheated . . . The life ends. How foolish!
To people involve
in medical profession, life begins when egg cell and sperm cell met in the mother’s
womb and ends when a person’s heart stop beating and pumping.
It’s more than
those! The meaning of life and death is deeper than those. According to the
Bible, Genesis 2:7,”Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the
ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man
became a living person.” Life comes from
God. God created man with beautiful plans for Him like prosperous life and a
beautiful future until sin entered. Death is the cause of the sin of Adam and
Eve for not obeying our God. This is when death took place. In Genesis 2:17-19,
“And to Adam He said, Because you have listened and given heed to the voice of
your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, saying, You
shall not eat of it, the ground is under a curse because of you; in sorrow and
toil shall you eat [of the fruits] of it all the days of your life.
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth for you, and you shall
eat the plants of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread until you return to
the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you
shall return. (AMP)”
The consequence of
Adam’s sin and disobedience is sin until Jesus was born which has the gift of
salvation and eternal life for everyone who will believe in Him. Just like what
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,
that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (NIV)” It
is clear that for us to have an everlasting life all we have to do is to
believe in what Jesus did for us - - - that Jesus was nailed and died for
sinners like me.
The life I have is
not my whole story. It’s just the preparation of what kind of life I have after
death. We should use our life the best out of it. We don’t know when our life
ends. In James 4:14, “How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow?
Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.” We
should not be confident in the life that we have for we don’t know when it will
end. No one can tell until when he/she will live. Only God Knows! So we should
make sure that we use our life fruitfully. No one knows when our life will end,
but I’m sure it will end!
. . . In the sweat of your face
shall you eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were
taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return.(Genesis 3:19)
