I saw that look many times before. Emil had just taken his last breath. When that moment came, Emil seemed to squeeze his eyes together and take a deep gulp. Then it was over.
That’s the way death looked on the faces of others I had seen die. It’s as though you can see the body “giving up the ghost,” or as Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 12:7, “. . . the spirit returns to God who gave it.”

How God looks at death

Is that how death always looks, or is it more dramatic as shown on TV? Perhaps more important is the question, “How does death look to God?”

The unbelieving scientific world looks at death as just a natural part of the life cycle. But nothing could be further from the truth. Death is a terrible consequence of sin! That’s what God told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God had warned them, “When you eat of [the tree] you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). We know what happened next. Adam and Eve disobeyed God. When they bit into that fruit, they tasted death. In this way death has come to us all, because all have sinned. But the sight gets even uglier. Sin not only brought physical death, it also brought eternal death. That’s how the holy God looks at death!

But Jesus changed the look of death. That’s why he came into this world. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). And how did Jesus destroy death? He himself died, and God the Father looked upon his Son’s death as the payment for our sin. Having made that payment, Jesus rose from the dead, conquering it once and for all.

How we can view death

Now we can look at death differently. In Christ, we can now look upon death as the doorway to eternal life. At the moment of death, the believer’s soul goes to heaven to be with the Savior, and the body only sleeps to await the great day of the resurrection of all men.