Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of evil, You are with me.  Psalm 23:4

Of all evils we witness, the most frightening one is death.  As believers in Jesus, we don’t fear our final destination but most of us fear the process of getting there.  No one can come back to tell us what it was like except Jesus and He discloses two important things about it.  1.) He defeated it by walking out of the grave.  2.) And, He will go with us as we experience it.  Jesus understands every nuance and subtlety.  He endured the slow process in the most horrific way possible.  

The ultimate reason death can be frightening is because death is the final curse and evil’s last performance.  When God created us, He didn’t equip us with the ability to understand and cope with its atrocities.  He made us for the Garden, for a world of perfection, but the sin of Adam forever opened our eyes to the vast chasm of evil and the breadth of it shuts us down.  We try to make sense of it and that’s why we end up calling it ‘senseless’.  We take what we witness, turn it over and over in our psyche, but we never grasp it because we weren’t wired to.  

As the perfect High Priest, Jesus’ intimacy with death is a lifeline.  He was the suffering Savior who, by choice, walked into the valley of the shadow to secure my own salvation from eternal death.  He doesn’t just wait for me on the other side ~ no, He takes me there by the hand.

So many bail out on us in our darkest times. Jesus, your final display of faithfulness will be showcased in my final hours.  Amen