LAST WORDS

You can't forget it—the haunting public service television ad for COVID-19 precautions that starts with a grown man giving what's a difficult, heartfelt message to his mother. As he speaks, he soon becomes the image on a computer tablet, then we see the gloved hands holding the tablet amid the sounds of a ventilator and the surroundings of an intensive care unit. He chokes out his final love message to his mother—the one he can't give in person as her death comes.  Every day as I mask up, wash up, and all the rest, I realize anew that COVID-19 is lethal, and it could end my life in just days. But I cling to something else: God's promise to never leave me nor forsake me (Hebrews 13:5). He has told us that a place is prepared in Heaven for those who love and trust in Him. 

We also have the last words of people who gave their all for Jesus, and who left a witness to eternity in their final moments witnessed by friends, family or caregivers. Fifteenth century German reformer Martin Luther reportedly repeated three times: “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit! Thou hast redeemed me, O God of Truth.” 

John Wesley, great English preacher, founder of Methodism, just before dying in 1791: “The best of it is, God is with us.”

Evangelist Dwight Moody, at death in 1899 : “Earth is receding, heaven is opening, This is my coronation day. If this is death, it is sweet! There is no valley here. God is calling me and I must go.” 

More recently: Audrey Wetherall Johnson, founder of Bible Study Fellowship, last words in 1984, as reported by her attending nurse: “The Lord is coming for me today. He's at the foot of my bed right now.” Those with her saw a light on her face. She took her last breath soon after. 

Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, dying of lung disease in 2003: “I am in the presence of the living God, satisfied at the deepest core of my being.” 

In stark contrast, consider the last words of Sir Julian Huxley, English evolutionist, biologist and staunch atheist: "So it is true after all, so it is true after all."

Someday, unless Christ's second coming precedes our own deaths, each of us will pause at the allegorical death's door. Of that moment, wrote Philip Keller in A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, “For the child of God, death is not an end but merely the door into a higher and more exalted life of intimate contact with God” (Zondervan, 1970, p. 84). 

We know that Christ is coming again—in a twinkling of an eye—to call forth those who believed in Him—both the dead and the alive. What a prospect! What a hope. COVID-19 may kill the body, but it can't take away the promise of Heaven. 

Count on it, like Dwight Moody preached a few months before his body gave up and he died: “Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield, Illinois, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now! I shall have gone up higher, that is all—out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal, a body death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.” (1)

(1) 1. J.C. Pollock, Moody (New York: The Macmillan Col 1961), p. 316).