After seeing my first bad death, it became clear to me:
The goal is to die a good death…
I don’t want to go kicking and screaming. I don’t want to approach death as one at odds with the process ordained by the Father.
The Ethiopians say this about the Burial of Moses:
And Moses fasted forty days and forty nights, and every Friday he used to take sheets of cloth for his funeral shroud and sew them together; ready for the day of his death. And according to what God said unto him in the mountains, one day he met two angels who were digging a grave; Gabriel was one and Michael was the other. And Moses said unto them, ‘May the Lord give you help!’ And the angels said unto him, ‘Show us a favor. Come and show us our measure for the grave by lying down in it.’ And when Moses measured it by lying down therein, they covered him over with earth and left him therein. And they cried out and said, ‘We have buried the man of God.’ And when they were saying this they were standing among a crowd of people. And the people ran up the hill into the mountain, and they were unable to find the place wherein Moses had been buried.
This gives us an expansive view of the Biblical narrative in Deuteronomy 34, where Moses dies “by the word of the Lord.”
Moses died a good death…
The angels dug his grave.
“Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died. His eyes were not dim nor his natural vigor diminished.” He didn’t die from any ailment. He didn’t die in weakness. He had not grown feeble.
“Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab by the word of the Lord.”
That good death was the culmination of a life that had led his people to the Gates of the Promised Land. The Lord Himself had just shown Moses the land. It was really there. Off in the distance. But, it was really there. They, the People of Israel, had gotten “there.”
Moses had seen the Promised Land…
It’s sounds similar to what we say of Martin. Of Dr. King.
Pr. Jimmie and I spoke about that mountaintop speech Dr. King gave before his death in the wilderness. Check it out here…
To die a good death…
What does that mean, in the context of these times in which we live?
How does that good death relate to ones proximity to the Promised Land?
How do we reconcile with dying so far from the Promised Land? With dying no closer to the Promised Land?
King said we were at the Gates…
The Word says Moses delivered the Hebrew people to the Gates…
They died a Good Death.
And it takes a Good Death for Black Lives to matter…
Join us for live sermon and discussion at 9:30AM EST, Sunday, October 25, 2020 on JahBread TV.
