Skip to main content

God is an Undertaker








I recently came across this article about Chloe McKnight one of the youngest female funeral directors in the UK. She was inspired at the young age of 12 to one day become a funeral day after visit the local funeral home on work placement. She remembers that on arrival, she was confronted with a corpse in the chapel of rest and felt "strangely comfortable with it".  It is quite a thought - being comfortable with death.

I was very assured though when she later says that the job has tonnes of sadness : "When the police call you to remove a body on behalf of a coroner, you don't know what you're going to see – an accident victim, a suicide …It can be overwhelming at times – even now I sometimes have to take a deep breath – and it's always unsettling when the person is younger than I am". 

 This double tension of anundertaker - comfortable and yet unsettling is worth bearing in mind as we come to one of the most interesting descriptions of God in the Bible. According to Nahum, God is apparently an undertaker.   
The Lord has given commandment about you: “No more shall your name be perpetuated; from the house of your gods I will cut off the carved image and the metal image. I will make your grave, for you are vile.”  (Nahum 1:14) 
The prophet Nahum was raised by God to declare an oracle against Nineveh for its long list of sins, especially subjugating God's people. At the time of this prophecy, Nineveh is materially prosperous culture. In fact earlier on, Nahum reminds Nineveh that though it commands a mighty army in the end its military might will prove futile against God's judgement.

 So while everyone sees the wealth and power of Nineveh, God sees Nineveh as a worthless nation. It is nation full of idolatry and God's assessment simply says "you are vile”. Being vile in the sight of God can only lead to one thing : total destruction. Nineveh shall be cut  down and its reputation and fame will come to an end. God will bury it as an undertaker puts the coffin in the ground. To this day Nineveh has been buried into historical extinction. 

We are living in age when we only want to see God as one who gives us stuff. T D Jakes last year tweeted a comment by Jasmin Sculark where she says, "We don't need an undertaker because God is our upper-giver, He's going to resurrect some stuff!" The hashtag was #DontBuryItJustYet. 

 There is certainly room for trusting God to keep things in our lives going. But the warning for us from Nahum is not only that God is an undertaker who specialises in burying those who oppose him, but it is also that we are at risk of the undertaker's shovel. Our modern societies are really no different from Nineveh. We may be materially rich but we are really a funeral already hapening, we just don't  know or refuse to admit it!

 Many of us are only living for ourselves. Individually, our lives are graves of the idols of money, sex, power, technology and worship of the self. Nationally,we have built economic models that promote oppression of the poor and promotes social relativism. Many rich countries continue to turn a blind eye to millions of poor people dying across the globe from starvation and poverty. They have also turned their backs on followers of Jesus who  are being persecuted at the hands of tyrants in the Western Sahel, Middle East, Afghanistan, Somalia and many other places. 

Nahum reminds us that God is not silent! He is an undertaker who has prepared the grave of sinners of all shapes and sizes. He has appointed the day of the Lord when full justice will be done!  This should comfort all followers of Jesus. But most importantly it should move us to share the good news of Jesus around the world because only though Jesus is the grave an empty tomb. If we trust in him though we are buied we still live! It should also challenge to live lives that honour God and does not promote vile and worthless societies. To live as those who have escaped theshovel of the Great Udertaker through Jesus! 
Series Post:


 Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2014
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →