Death!

September 20th, 2014| Topic: RaMbLeS | 3

James Brady died last month. You might remember him as President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who got shot during the assassination attempt on Reagan on March 30, 1981. Brady was hit above the left eye and the bullet entered his skull, shattering into more than two-dozen fragments. Resulting in multiple surgeries to stop leakage of spinal fluid, for pulmonary embolism, not to mention epileptic seizers, pneumonia, fevers, paralysis ….

James S. Brady, 73, passed away in an Alexandria, Virginia, retirement community.

I’ll come back to him in a bit ….

After God placed Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, he gave them all they needed … and added a prohibition.

The LORD God commanded the man, saying,
“… From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
Genesis 2:16—17

You know what the pair did: they did exactly what God told them not to do.

She took from its fruit and ate;
and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.
Genesis 3:6

We’ve no idea how long the missus lived, but Adam lived a total of 930 years, 800 years after having his third son, Seth.

Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth
were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters.
So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years,
and he died.
Genesis 5:4–5

What happened to “in the day that you eat from it you will surely die”?

Well it all depends on “you will surely die.” In the Hebrew it is “dying, you will die.” And “in that day” need not be all that precise: it can simply mean “when.” So: “When you eat it you will [begin to] die.”

And since that time when sin entered into God’s world, it’s all been falling apart—for all of us!

Back to Brady …

Thirty-three years after the event, the medical examiner’s office in Virginia ruled that Brady’s death was a homicide! He had been killed by a shot from a madman, John Hinckley, Jr., 33 years ago. And had been dying since.

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world,
according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.
Ephesians 2:1

Our lives, before salvation, is one of death. We were all born dead. Alienated from God. Non-responsive to God and the things of God. Dead.

… we were dead in our transgressions.
Ephesians 2:5

… you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh.
Colossians 2:13

Doesn’t mean we literally die instantly, but the process of death has begun and continues inexorably until we die.

Just as Hinckley caused the death of Brady, 33 years before the latter died.

(That raises another question: Will Hinckley face new criminal charges, since Brady’s death was a homicide? Of the shooting itself, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. There is precedence for this retrograde charging of individuals: A man who had served time for 16 years for shooting a police officer in 1966, was charged with murder when the officer died 41 years later, in 2007. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said that prosecutors were reviewing the medical examiner’s ruling of Brady’s homicide to see what needs to be done next.)

Death, the sure consequence of our sinful state.