10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord)1
by Matt Redman has become one of my favourite Christian songs. I was first drawn
by its folksy, hymn-like tune. The lyrics (a paraphrase of Psalms 103) are simple.
But the richness of the song dawned on me when a dear sister-in-Christ who is
dying from terminal cancer requested the song to be sung to her. The last verse
reads,
“And
on that day when my strength is failing,
The
end draws near and my time has come;
Still
my soul will sing Your praise unending,
Ten
thousand years and then forevermore.
Forevermore.”
On my visits to the hospice, I sensed
her frustrations and saw that she was in quite a bit of physical discomfort. She
was a missionary and an independent, strong minded, single lady. She is now
completely bed bound, dependent on others for her care, including the simple
act of turning herself in bed. Yet, swinging between states of alertness and
confusion, she maintains her faith and witness for God. She asks for Christian
songs to be sung to her. Bible verses were read to her. She shared of visions
the Lord showed her. She had the Lord’s Supper with her family members and
close friends. In her more lucid moment, she touched a group of medical
students who visited her with her testimony. To me this was a demonstration of
dying well – one in which a Christian seeks to faithfully express her hope in
eternal life, confident that God will do for her all that He has promised and
thus glorify God and edify man through her journey of dying the physical death.
As my sister-in-Christ spend her 6th
week in the hospice, my thoughts are drawn to what death means for a Christian
and how we are called not only to live the good and beautiful life but to die well.
Rob Moll’s book3 described
these aptly:
“While dying well is often a
matter of living well, to live well we must come to grips with our death. It is
difficult, but it can also be invigorating. "It is only by facing and
accepting the reality of my coming death that I can become authentically
alive," says the Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware.
We avoid death or even fear it
because death is an evil, the horrible rending of a person from her body, from
loved ones, from the ability to be fully in God's image. "Death is not
part of God's primary purpose for his creation," writes Ware. "He created
us, not in order that we should die, but in order that we should live."
Jesus wept at Lazarus's death. The apostle Paul called death the last enemy.
Death is indeed evil.
Yet death is also a mercy; it is
the final affliction of life's miseries. It is the entrance to life with God.
Life's passing can be a beautiful gift of God. This riddle of death's evil and
its blessing is not difficult to solve. We enact it every Good Friday as we
recall the evil of Christ's death to be followed on Easter Sunday with the joy
of his resurrection. We do not rejoice in Christ's death or Judas's betrayal.
Yet there is no evil so great that God cannot bring joy and goodness from it.
That is why death deserves our attention in life. Because we instinctively
want to avoid it, to turn our face away, it is good to look death in the eye
and constantly remind ourselves that our hope is in God, who defeated death.”
Today is the first Sunday after
Easter. It is also called Quasimodo Sunday in Germany. On that day in 1944,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi German pastor held a small service for his
fellow prisoners where he preached from Isaiah 53.5 (“With his stripes we are
healed”) and 1 Pet 1.3 (“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead) No sooner than when he said the
closing prayer, he was taken away by Gestapo officers and executed by hanging
at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. As he was whisked away, he turned to his
fellow prisoner Payne Best, a captured British Secret Intelligence
Service agent, and said, “This is the end… For me the beginning of life.”
The camp doctor at Flossenbürg was Fischer-Hüllstrung. He had no
idea who he was watching at that time but years later, he gave this account of
Boenhoeffer’s last minutes alive:
“I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb,
kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by
the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his
prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then
climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a
few seconds. In the almost fifty years I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever
seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” 4
The music video of 10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord) by Matt
Redman was filmed on location at Zionskirche (Church of Zion) in
Berlin where Dietrich Bonhoeffer served as a pastor and organised his
resistance against the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews.
References
1. Matt Redman
10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtwIT8JjddM2. J.I. Packer Only when you know how to die, can you know how to live In: O Love That Will Not Let Me Go. Facing Death with Courageous Confidence in God Ed. Nancy Guthrie IL: Crossway2011
3. Rob Moll The Art of Dying. Living Fully into the Life to Come IL: InterVarsity Press 2010
4. Eric Metaxas Bonhoeffer-Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. A Righteous Gentile vs The Third Reich Tennessee: Thomas Nelson 2010
