Dying?

September 22nd, 2018| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

The Window of the World is a theme park in Shenzen, in the People’s Republic of China. A few years ago, they opened a new attraction—a death simulator. For about $35, you can get a “death experience.”

The experience begins with a journey through a “morgue,” after which guests are placed in a coffin that transports into them into a faux incinerator. Once inside, these coffin-ated folks are blasted with hot air at 104°F. Recorded screams and shrieks echo through the chamber, though where these sounds are supposed to come from in an actual crematorium (and whether the really dead can hear them), are left to your imagination. The ride is called “The Cremator.”

Declared its creators, Huange Weiping and Ding Rui:

We wanted to create an authentic experience of burning.”

Promised one woman, laughing nervously as she left the ride:

I am never coming back. It was horrifying.”

(Of course, if The Cremator is not your thing, you could go see the astonishing 130 miniature models of the world’s landmark attractions, like the Buckingham Palace, Eiffel Tower, Colosseum, Mount Rushmore, Taj Mahal, etc.)

In any case, when the “cremation” is over, the volunteers are to crawl out till they reach a large, padded, white-colored area, through a latex “womb,” so that they can be “reborn.”

Well, the Bible does assert that humans are dead.

And while you were dead in your transgressions and sins …
Ephesians 2:1

Dead to God—a lack of response to God or anything related to God. Dead to spiritual things. Dead to the things that really matter. Dead!

Dead in our “transgressions and sins.” We lived in the realm of sin. Dead in sin. Immersed in sin. Dead!

And in that sphere, we lived—we “walked”:

… in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world,
according to the ruler of the authority of the air, [the ruler] of the spirit that is now working.
Ephesians 2:2

We, dead to God, we followed the powers conspiring against God—supernatural beings antagonistic to God, evil entities that now control the “course of this world.”

… we all also formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh,
performing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath.
Ephesians 2:3

The next verse in Ephesians commences with one of most powerful conjunctions in all of Scripture,
the 3-letter word, “but” (two letters in Greek):

But God being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
even while we were dead in transgressions, co-enlivened [us] [i.e., made us alive] with Christ—
by grace you have been saved—
and co-raised and co-seated [us] in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus,
in order that in the coming ages He might demonstrate the surpassing riches of His grace
in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus;
for by grace you have been saved through faith; and this not of yourselves, [but] the gift of God;
not of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2:4–9

That’s the way to be reborn!

As sinners, we were separated from God. But now God has taken the initiative, sending his son, Jesus Christ, to pay the price of our sins by dying on the cross and rising again.

If we accept that gift, believing in our hearts that Christ has paid for our sins, at that instant of belief, at that moment of faith, at that juncture of trust, we become children of God, and part of God’s family.

God has given us a free gift. Will you accept it?