AN UNEXPECTED END

"There is but a step between me and death."

By ROBERT MILITELLO

Composed for a missionary to Jewish military guys.

David, the great King of Israel said this while in fear of his life and told Jonathan, King Saul's son how near to death we are at times.

Dear friend, we do not always perceive how near death really is to all of us. For years, I worked in a building just a few blocks from the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Often, I had been in both towers and observed how tourists would marvel at the structure. To a lifelong New Yorker, tall office buildings were just part of the everyday landscape. For close to three thousand human souls, the towers were to become their tombs.

September 11, 2001 dawned like any other workday in New York. The rush hours (7:30-9:30 A.M.) bring hundreds of subway trains into lower Manhattan and from the exits a swarm of bodies move swiftly to their buildings and assigned cubicles.

How many of those poor souls were thinking what David thought some three thousand years ago? None, I suppose. Only the terrorists had prepared for eternity that morning. The killers were convinced that their god would give them a hero's welcome in paradise. I suppose it never dawned on them that they could be sincere in their beliefs and yet be sincerely wrong.

Does being sincere in your beliefs and judging yourself to be tolerant of others comfort you? King Solomon addressed this issue and left us his thoughts on the mater in writing:

"There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." (Proverbs 16:25)

What is the good of being sincere and horribly wrong?

For the first thirty-two years of my life, I had never read a book that spoke to my heart and mind in equal measure about a real escape from life's futility and varied contradictions. Thank God, I was challenged one day to read the Jewish scriptures and search them diligently for life's real meaning.

It didn't take long for me to realize that all the books I had read in college while acquiring Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees were seriously deficient in their treatment of man's mortality and eternity. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil and Homer are listed among the greats, but Solomon's wisdom made them seem like B movie scriptwriters.

What I found in Solomon's Proverbs and Ecclesiastes was a wisdom that seemed higher than human and able to bridge the sometimes, irksome gap between understanding in the mind and likewise, in the heart. Have you read Solomon? Are you at all interested in knowing what the point of life is?

More than four hundred years after Solomon died, Israel's weeping prophet, Jeremiah, wrote concerning the lesson Judah was to learn by being taken captive to Babylon. "and ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye search for me with all your heart.: (Jeremiah 29:13)

When you grow tired of being captive to fallible, human rea- soning, tradition, superstition and living among a race of creatures who never learn from their mistakes – take a journey, a quest and seek for the wisdom that humbles man's pride and gives glory to the creator and not the created.

"THE FEAR OF THE LORD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM." (Psalms 111:10a)

Unless you have been in a coma for a while you know that man is going in the opposite direction away from God's right- eousness. Catastrophe is just ahead and unlike the unfortunate souls who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001, you can prepare for the disaster. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear on evil." (Psalms 23:4a) King David was prepared.

Death is a certainty. It may be just a step ahead. We have no way of knowing for sure. Solomon gives us his ultimate gem of wisdom in the last two verses of Ecclesiastes.

Look it up – it is worth the effort. If the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob give you light to see that you are a sinner and that atonement just be made for your sins, you will find help in Leviticus 17:11.

There you will see that a bloody sacrifice is required to make reconciliation between you, a sinful human and a holy God. Do you have a high priest to do what is called for on Yom Kippur?

You need a spotless lamb. Almost two thousand years ago in the Judean wilderness, an itinerant preacher spotted one coming to him to be baptized. John the Baptist upon seeing the particular man said, "Behold the Lamb of God" (John 1:29). When this man, the Lamb of God was slain – atonement was made for me. What about you?

Shortly after God's Lamb was slain, the temple was destroyed as foretold and there has been no sacrifice since. You think perhaps, there is a connection here? Keep searching. Forget what you have heard from others – think for yourself!

Friend, you are, or you are not going to be ready to meet your creator at death. You will have either been reconciled to the God of the Hebrews or you will die lost – a failed life, another exercise in futility. What a tragedy.

"For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul" (Mark 8:36) What is your life compared to eternity – less than a grain of sand on the beach.

Hear Solomon in Ecclesiastes 7:2: "It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart."

Please, take this message to heart. Don't gamble with your soul. Death oftentimes touches people without warning. Death can be rude and abrupt. Seek after the Holy One of Israel now, not later. Thank God, a Jewish book led me to a Jewish Savior who graciously showed mercy to a gentile dog like me.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." (Psalm 90:12) V