At the moment, many people are facing the prospect of death. whether it is a real threat or not it has become real to many as a result of the press and real deaths. 

This is a wonderful opportunity for the church to speak the truth and love about what the Bible says about death.

Death must be faced and will be faced by every living person. many people today have made markings on their skin to commemorate the death of someone in their lives. And for many of them, it hurts every day they look at it.

Scripture is the banner of truth on all matters relating to death and dying and the eternal existence of the body and the soul.



Thank you. Welcome. Thank you for joining us tonight. We are going to talk about death and dying in this new book that has just come out. And people are talking about death today, particularly with the current COVID-19 situation.

I read earlier today that just under 50, 000 people are reported to have died in the United States to date, which is a pretty remarkable number. People are concerned about death, they're talking about death. Some might be facing death. Many are talking to people who are even fearful about death and are trying to understand how they're gonna protect themselves from death, sometimes maniacally. Or maybe you're dealing with the death of a, or the impending death of a loved one and having to bear the burdens and the sorrows over the anticipation of someone who's very sick and looks like they're on their last days.

So tonight I have Joel Beekie and Christopher Bogache with me and of course you may know Joel Beekie is the president of Puritan Heritage Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids. You ought to go there if you're not going now. He's also the pastor at Heritage Netherlands Reformed Congregation and I believe Joel is the author of somewhere around 37, 322 books. You butchered all three things Scott. It's Heritage Reform Seminary, it's Heritage Reform Church, and it's a hundred books.

Okay It's only a hundred, okay All right. Well, I've been reading the code 19 never so I'm really not sure about any numbers right now Christopher serves as a chaplain and a psychiatric nurse at a new found Freedom House in Florida. It's a ministry to those who have mental health issues. And he also, he works as a, in clinical research for medicine. So people are talking about death, how do we best engage discussions with them?

And I want us to provide pastoral care, the word of God from the various angles that God speaks about death and dying. And I'm really grateful for the book he wrote. It has some very interesting things in it that we'll be able to reveal. The book, in many ways, is an explicit application of a biblical approach to everything and which you know the NCFIC is dedicated to proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life and this this book falls in the wheelhouse of trying to understand a category of human experience from God and his word alone and that's what these authors have have tried to do and okay so you guys have written a book Death and Dying to help people get rightly prepared for the Inhabitable that's the subtitle of the book and and by the way we're giving this away tonight to all those who participate. So we really appreciate you joining us.

You'll find it very interesting. Okay, Let me just begin to probe some of the issues that are in the book. You start out the book referring to the different ways that people view death in our culture. And I'd like you to explain your understanding of how people explain death today and how to explain what you might encounter in conversations today with people who don't know the Lord? Well, I'll jump in.

First of all, what Chris and I did in this book is we tried to, I tried to take the end of life issues from a more spiritual perspective and he dealt with more of the medical issues, issues associated with preparing the will and the funeral and so on, and a number of his expertise issues. So we try to be a team this way. But in terms of actually encountering people's attitudes to death, I'd say three things. I'd say, number one, you get a lot of people, I've met a lot of them on airplanes actually, who just think death is the end. And I was talking with a lady who she said, death is the end for me.

And I said, well, if death is the end of everything, what's your goal in life? And she said, well, I've got two daughters and if I could just instill a few of my morals into those two daughters, I'd be satisfied to die. Well, I'm saying to her, you know, pardon me, ma'am, but this is a very, very small goal in life, just to pass on a few morals to a few daughters, and then I'm going to die, and that's the end of it all. Then you've got other people who have an unbiblical view of some kind of spirituality, don't you? People that are, I don't know, we're floating around in the air and it's detached from scripture, but it's something that they feel that they're going to be reincarnated into something else, or they're gonna be flying around doing things.

They simply don't know what's going to happen, but they'd like to think of what they'd like to be. And so they imagine what they wanna be, and they say, that's what I'm going to be. And it's just sheer imagination. And then the third group of people I've met anyway, just simply say, I don't think about it. I'm just gonna live my life.

It's Epicurean philosophy, eat, drink and be married, tomorrow I die. I'm just gonna go on my merry way. And when death comes, it comes and everything is over, but I'm just going to enjoy life while I can. So these people would spend more time planning for a one week vacation than they would for a never-ending eternity. Amazing.

You also talk, maybe Chris you have some comments about this, but You also talk in the book about those, take an agnostic approach and you spend some time unpacking the encounter there. Yeah. Well, just to back up a little bit to that question previously, you know, tying with what Joel was saying, the subject I find is avoided for the most part unless people have to face death. And at that time, when they have to face it, People see dying as a process that occurs just before death, but people forget that once we're born into this world because of sin, an original sin, we are dying. You know, the title is dying in Death for the book because we're all on that trajectory to death.

Death is an event that occurs. And, you know, death is really that culminating event at the end of dying. When we're done dying, we die. As for the afterlife, I find in my experience, you know, people have different theological systems that they hold to, that may not be Christians, and they may hold their theistic beliefs, so to speak. But for the most part, the prevailing view is that whatever you believe happens, happens, at the time with what Gil was saying.

And that's the tragedy of an agnosticism and am atheism. You know, the atheist says that, you know, I believe there's something out there, but I don't really know what it is. And the atheist, of course, is totally against any idea of God or creator altogether. Yeah, you know, you had mentioned one of your questions. I don't know if you want to, you're going to get to that question, so I'll wait for you to go to it, so before I answer it.

The question about agnostics and atheists. Yeah, yeah, okay. So, you know, what do we bring from Scripture you had mentioned and I think of second Corinthians? We're gonna install appear before the judgment seat of Christ that every man may receive the things on in his body According to that he has done whether it be good or bad but the problem of course with the agnostic and the atheist is neither one of them affirmed the authority of Scripture. If you try to go there with them, there's a strong thought that they don't want to hear that.

I find that in this ministry I have at Newfound Freedom House, there's people there that are all over the place theologically. Many of them come from very broken lives. And I try to teach them three things. Really just a very general natural religion approach, that there is a creator that exists. Everybody has had a beginning at some time, and the creator's a personal being, and it's possible to enter into a relationship with the creator.

And then I also go on to teach the people there who are challenging any type of authority in their lives that the beliefs that they hold to are not original. They haven't made them up. They're not original to themselves. And I try to, by questioning them in this group that we have to draw them to do an understanding of the authorities that they hold to, and then try to deconstruct those authorities. So anyways, my goal is to make these people aware of their accountability before the Creator, and then by the grace of God, if He should effectually call them and draw them into relationship, grant them saving grace, then to move on ahead with teaching them about, you know, Christ and scripture and all of the glories that we hold to as preformed Christians.

So anyways, I know the challenge, one of the challenges is, in our culture in general, is really, people reject the sufficiency and authority of scripture. Many Christians do that as well. You talk about what death really is and you make a connection, a very interesting connection, with brain death. We talk about people who have lost brain activity and you say that connecting brain death can be, and I'm just going to quote a phrase, can be a dangerous way to define the boundary between life and death. Tell everybody what you mean by that.

Do you mean me or Joel? Both. That's Chris's statement in the book, so I'll defer to him in there. Yeah. Well, brain death is often...

You sure you don't want that one, Joel? No, no, no. Brain death is often ambiguous and poorly defined. I mean, aside from the fact that as Christians we hold to a soul and to a spirit. So we hold to a part of us that's immaterial.

You know, that's really to die in the body is to be present with the Lord, you know, as St. Paul said. So when people are defined brain dead, their hearts are still beating. The heart is still pumping in the body. And aside from the beating heart in brain dead people, it is necessary to point out that there's still a level of physiological activity that occurs between the brain and the body.

I mean, there's certain regular factors with the kidneys and other areas of the body. And the way that death is defined for brain death, it's supposed to be the irreversible sensation of all functions of the brain. So it really, there's a really, an indifference to their own definition of death when people are defined as brain death. Because this indicates that the brain is not truly dead. And thus the brain dead people are presumed to be dead, but they're not dead in actuality.

As there's still that function between the brain and the body occurring. The dangers, of course, and I wanted to go down this road a little bit further, but it was kind of, we kind of reeled back from that. That's, I think that's probably where Chuck went a little bit, Jill and I, is that today, organs are harvested from brain dead people. This is an ongoing practice that happens every day in the US, And these are organs coming from people who are presumed to be dead because they're defined as brain dead based on the definition of death that is not even satisfying to its own criteria. But this then leads to the slippery slope of euthanizing people in persistent vegetative states.

You know, you can think about Terri Scheinwell many years ago now. But she didn't die of natural causes. She had a feeding tube removed and she was starved to death. And then of course the next thing is elderly people with dementia and then further down the slippery slope people can even come up with advanced directives and say, okay, if I'm deemed to be brain dead, then I want the doctor to use physician assisted suicide. As is legal in some states here in the United States to terminate my life.

So those are certainly some of the dangers. You pointed out the matter of life beginning at conception. I think most people who are listening to us tonight believe that life begins at conception and that to kill a human being made in the image of God is murder. But you pointed out, if I remember correctly, that the brain doesn't develop until eight days later or something like that. And I thought the point you were making was that life actually even begins before the brain is formed.

Is that what you were saying? Yeah. That's exactly what I was saying. Once the sperm and the egg unite, I mean, and then the embryo attaches to the uterine wall. I mean, life is that beginning.

So really we have to define life and we get into it in the book a little bit. Life has to be defined from the cellular level. You know what I mean? How we're gonna do life and stuff like that. That's why, you know, all vital organ systems need to be shut down, you know, for death to occur.

You know, no breathing, no heartbeat, no neurological function, which was the traditional definition of death prior to the 1980s. So all these are pretty relatively new. The definition of death is, the brain death is a new innovation. Yeah I found that very interesting. I had never, never thought of it that way.

Well, let's talk about communicating to people about death or who are facing death or healthy people who are concerned about it. And we often forget the biblical language. And one of the elements of the biblical language that you bring out in the book is the term second death. So tell us why this is an important category for our conversations. Yes, well, second death is actually particularly a category that is assigned to those who've died and then go to hell.

Hell is like a dying death. So in hell you can say we are always dying if we come there yet never dead. And in Revelation 2, I think it's 16 and 20, that term is used. So we need to understand that Revelation is using this in a bit metaphorical way. Speaking of hell as a lake of fire, we don't know how literal fire is in hell.

Maybe there's some, maybe there's not, but it's describing the very worst of possible existence. It's the opposite of heaven. Heaven, all good is walled in, all evil is walled out. In hell, all evil is walled in and all good is walled out. So in hell, there's a constant flow of this never dying worm, this knowing conscience, this anger and bitterness against God, ongoing sin.

We receive the due reward of our deeds in hell. We deserve it. We deserve this second state of constant dying. And so it's called the second death. So some people actually have a conscience that speaks to them about fear of second death because they're not prepared for the first death.

And there's a wonderful example of this in William Perkins, the Puritan. He ministered to prisoners and there was a prisoner going up the scaff... Going up a ladder to scaffolding where he was going to be decapitated. And he was trembling as he was going up and Perkins was standing at the bottom of the ladder. And he called out to the managers going up the ladder.

He said, are you afraid to die? And the man said, no. And Perkins said, well, why are you trembling? He said, I'm not afraid to die. I'm afraid of what comes after death, the second death.

And Perkins said, well, come down, man. Come down, man. The man came back down. And the story goes that he prayed, he prayed and prayed until about the enormity of sin and the enormity of the man's guilt till the man started just weeping about his guilt. And then he prayed on and on about the blood of Christ that could wipe away all the sins and the man actually was converted right there in the spot and received the Lord Jesus Christ in truth.

Went back up the ladder, asked the guy who was about to decapitate him if he could speak to the people, and the guy said only five minutes, and he preached the gospel to them the last five minutes, and said, I die gladly in the Lord Jesus Christ. See, if you're in Christ, you don't die the second death. So the great fear, I mean, I don't wanna minimize death. Death is a terrifying experience, but the great fear really is what comes after death. And so the Bible uses that language as the second death.

And that's an eternal death, no intermission there. Yeah, it's a very interesting question. One of the participants here tonight asked a question online to comment on Hebrews 927 and it is appointed for men to die once but after this the judgment so I think we're answering that question right now. Any more on that? I would from a doctrinal standpoint I think you know the second death really informs our Christology, of course, our eschatology and sanctification.

You know, there's a Jesus is coming again, there is a second coming, and the resurrection of the body. And the second death is a death of body and soul. The body and soul are reunited and there will be eternal torments from believers in the body and soul. That experience is going to be a full whole body and soul experience. There's also some Christian teachers, they teach the doctrine of annihilation.

There's conscious existence after the second death. And there's an ongoing experience of the torments and the awfulness of that state of eternal separation from the creator who really gives people what they wanted in life all along, you know, and that's just that part of it. And for sanctification, you know, we are going to be judged not only for what we do, for our thinking and thoughts, but also what we do with our bodies. You know, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit and we need to take seriously these sins of the flesh, like, you know, sins that we sometimes will turn blind and I too, but God the Father doesn't, you know, sins like blood and those types of things that We need to be accountable for our bodies and souls and I think the second death really harkens to the quality of the world When Christ comes again, it's on his judgment from there's a little bit of resurrection, the wicked, and the just at that time. You talk about in the book, those who are dying and then how to bring hope to them.

And there's quite a bit of help there. And you speak about a reality that breaks upon the person who's dying. And you called it, quote, putting on blinders of self-denial. Could you talk about that? Well, what do those blinders of self-denial look like?

And what do you do when you encounter that happening. I looked at that statement and I hope it's all making it so I'll wait for that to go. I'm sorry I couldn't understand you. I couldn't understand that. What did he say?

What did Chris say or what did I say? What did Chris say? I'm getting some feedback. He was gonna pass the question to you. Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Well, I think when you put on blinders of self-denial is one of twofold. One, you can deny that you're unprepared for eternity. You convince yourself you're prepared. And most people do that by just comparing themselves to other people rather than comparing themselves to the living God and his holy law. And when you compare yourself to other people, you can always find someone who's outwardly a little bit worse than you are, so God wouldn't send me to hell.

There's no concept, you see, of the idea of a holy, righteous God, and that we all deserve hell because we're all hell-worthy sinners. It's interesting, a study was done about five years ago in America of two questions. Do you believe in hell? 84% of Americans said yes and then the question was asked, do you believe there's any possibility God would send you there? And 96% of Americans said no.

Well, I don't think the Bible says 96% of people are going to heaven. So a lot of people are deceiving themselves, they're putting on blinders, they're looking at eternity and hell through their own opinions. And they're doing exactly what God said, angers him so much in Psalm 50, when he says, you make me all together like yourself, as if we can stand before God, as if we're standing before man's judgment bar. So the only way we can get people hope is by telling them there's no hope in you. You need to die to your own righteousness.

You need to flee to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's where that text you just mentioned, Scott, Hebrews 9, 27, 28, is a wonderful text to preach because it goes on to say after that is the judgment and those that look for Christ, the lookers for him, he shall come the second time without sin unto their salvation." So if the whole trajectory of our life is to be looking to Christ for our righteousness and we're found in him and we can say with Paul, for me to live is Christ. Then you see, to die is gain, he goes on to say. And so that's the hope, the only hope, the all-sufficient hope, and the exclusive hope, Jesus Christ. Amen.

So he's asking Puritan work or sermon that embodies how the Puritans spoke of believers being prepared for death and dying. Anything just comes to mind off the top of your head? How the Puritans spoke about believers being prepared? Yeah Yeah about believers preparing them. Yeah, one one believer said one Puritan said this He said the way to prepare yourself for death is to be dying every day to your own righteousness.

So then when you actually have to come to physically die you just have to die one more time. So you get used to dying because we're dying as Chris said we're dying physically every day really But we also die to our own righteousness every day. So we have this attitude of humble dependence and looking outside of ourselves to Jesus. The Hundeburg Catechism puts it this way, which in a sense was a Puritan document, just as Puritanism was the beginning at least. My only comfort in life and death is that I don't belong to myself, but I belong to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ.

And I think that's the Puritan attitude, is that we learn to live from him outside of ourselves. But Christ without us, as one Puritan said, must also be Christ within us by his spirit. As Chris said, we're temples of the Holy Spirit in our bodies, but the spirit also indwells us, and so we live by that faith in the triune God and that's the way that's the way to die to be living and abiding in Christ so that when we actually come to die whether it's suddenly like my dad who fell over on the pulpit and went straight from the pulpit to glory, whether it's very gradually like my mother who died over a period of seven years ended up with dementia but could still even say in the midst of dementia sometimes I'm ready to go to be with Jesus. That's the way to live. Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish Puritan, now if I could quote him, he said, "'Build your nest in no tree here on earth, "'because God has sold the entire forest to death, but build on the rock of salvation, Jesus Christ.

I love that quote in the book, that quote's in the book, as well as a few more right around it, yes it sure is. Yeah, that's a great one. One of the other things I appreciate about the Puritans is a lot of times they would see going to bed at night as laying in the grave and as going to bed as they're going to their grave at night. And then as they awake in the morning they're waking to new life in the spirit. It's something that I really appreciate in the Puritan book of prayers that banner of truth has offered us.

It's really profound because it's you know our life is a dying you know we're that banner of truth, it's really profound. Our life is a dying. We're spiritually dead and we die unless the seed goes into the ground and dies, it's not going to sprout and bring forth the new spirit, right? And you know, just that whole motif of dying to ourselves, And not dying to ourselves, but having a much more profound life in Christ, who is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, And the life that I live in this body live by faith in the Son of God who loved me gave before me You know, what are the things I have written down here about this question look to Christ fleet to Christ and the unbeliever. And for believers when they're at, you know, when they're, you know, administered to many believers at death's doorstep, and always remind them that the smallest faith still gets the same big Christ, because it is all about Christ, you know?

I really like the way you spoke about awaking in the Spirit. The psalmist talks about I will awake in thy likeness. It's such a beautiful thought. There's a question that someone has though about hell. And I know, I don't believe you addressed this in the book.

And the question, is there any scriptural evidence that the damned are aware of each other in hell? And he talks about people who have communicated to him that he liked to go to hell because his son is there and they can see each other. Yeah, I have a really interesting experience with that when I was in high school, but I just, I wanna, you know, when you talk, you asked me the question about what the Puritans say, my mind just keeps racing. So I gotta say one more quick thing there. The Puritans, you were throwing me a softball there.

The Puritans always have one eye on eternity, That was their life philosophy. So one eye on dying and eternity, the other eye on time, what is my duty to do here? And one of them said like this, every morning you get up, I'm picking up on Chris's comment now, every morning you get up, you go and you lift up the shade in your bedroom as you look out to the east to see if Jesus is coming and you lower it and you say, oh, he's not coming yet. I have a lady that works for me who's now retired but every time she had a birthday, I'd say happy birthday Edna. And she'd look at me and she'd say one year closer you know that's a Puritan attitude you know can't wait to be with Jesus we have lost that in our modern day of comforts and actually this coronavirus is a lot the type of thing that Puritans lived with a lot.

There were a lot of pandemics and plagues and people dying. Fifty percent of the children of the Puritans didn't make it to adulthood And so they were used to dying and they embraced the pain of death and they were longing to be with the Lord. One Puritan called, my death day is the second best day I ever have. The first one was when I was born again. Second one is when I die, because the day of my death is better than the day of my birth, because I get to be with Jesus.

That kind of attitude. Too many Christians today think, I wish I was younger. Really, younger? The churches would say, younger? You want to be further from being with Christ?

Okay, I'm rambling now, but. Yeah, that's great. This example, this next question you brought up is this. When I was in 12th grade, there was a really decent girl, but she got a marijuana, got in the wrong friends, and I lovingly warned her, I thought she actually was a Christian, but proof she wasn't, and she said to me, I'll never forget that statement, why I don't mind going to hell because at least my friends will be there. And I wish I had said to her at that time, I didn't have enough experience, that there's absolutely zero friendship in hell.

The rich man in hell had no friends. He couldn't even get a drop of water to cool his tongue. And when I first became a minister, my very first pastoral visit was to a dying member. And I've never had anything like it before or since. But I literally stood between two people that were eight feet apart from each other in a hospital room.

And one was groaning, the member of my church was groaning, just groaning with the death pangs. And the other person was dying, who I didn't know at all. And that person just kept saying, I had a God-fearing father, I had a God-fearing father. And It struck me, I was there before anyone else arrived. I was alone standing in the midst of the dying.

And I had this overwhelming conviction. You know what? These two people can't even hear each other. They're like just so consumed with their own dying that there's no communication between them. And I think that's what hell is like.

Dying but never dead. There's no friendship in hell. There's only that constant gnawing worm of conscience that will condemn you and Agonize you and you won't have room or space or wherewithal to care about anyone else Or to have any kind of friendship Yeah, hell's an awful place terrifying You write some really interesting things about people who are getting ready to die, and you write that the best place for death for the Christian is at home or in the context of the church. I found that section very touching and insightful and I hadn't really heard anybody talk about it like that. Could you tell us more about, give us some the detail behind that.

Yeah sure. Well in the past you know most most of the people died in hospitals. Thankfully where since the hospice movement came about there's been more of a group of people who go home to die when they have terminal illness. The struggle today, of course, is a lot of people are housed in nursing homes, and that's a whole other problem in and of itself. I mean, it's not a hospital, but in a nursing home.

You know, that can be some pretty, if you go into nursing homes, you'll probably know what I'm talking about at some level. So anyways, I think that, you know, when somebody is at home, the church can be the central hub, if you will, of history to the person who's dying and the family. And then what you do is you bring in these the hospice people, the professionals, the nurse, the doctor, the social worker, and all these other people who can help with those professional components. And it's a wonderful adjunct to the church to be able to, you know, to be at the bedside of the person who's dying, to be able to sing praises to God, if the person's well enough to bring the person to worship service. That's what I had in mind when I was writing that section Because you know so many people they they they think they have to go to the hospital, you know That's that's what they believe that that's where they go now when they're sick and they're facing death.

But it wasn't always that way. Joel had mentioned the Puritans and misery that they've experienced in their lives. I mean, they just had some awful living conditions and a lot of suffering. But people would gather around the home. You know, you added that book many years ago, maybe you don't even remember it, but that was Thomas Halliburton, you know, and we have his death experience in there, and I think I mentioned that in the dying and death book.

Did you? I did, yeah. I didn't get into, I think I wrote a biography. I kind of extrapolated it for a biography or something else. But anyways, just what a wonderful testimony.

And it really talks, it's really about the suffering that he experiences, but then the moments of just jubilation and praise in Christ, really just a wonderful, realistic, and visceral testimony of a deathbed that really brings glory to God in so many ways, not only by him, but the doctor would come by and visit and then the minister of the church would come by, the elders would come in, the family would be gathered around, and it was just a wonderful testimony. So that's really what I had in mind, because we're blessed today to have some professional services out there that can kinda help with all this offering and stuff like that associated with the Spirit. That's a big piece and the ministry of the church and the family is just so crucial. You talked about kind of weariness in terms of depriving people who are dying from the ministry of the church and the family by you know choosing different kind of care and I think you were asking asking us to consider are you know are all the kinds of care offered to us necessary? And do they deprive us of this presence of the church of Jesus Christ and the families?

I just thought that was a very interesting question and I don't think many people even think of that. Well, I think one of the biggest contributions that Chris made to me as a co-author was he really persuaded me that if I erred on one side, I probably erred on the side of sympathizing with people and going along with the idea that you've got to do everything, even in the believer's life, at the very end, to try to keep life going. And he's actually influenced me to back off from that a bit, because I think one of his major points, and he can speak to that himself, but one of his major points is that sometimes we're just not bowing under the sovereignty of God as a Christian. It's God's time for the life to end. And we're trying to artificially prolong a little.

What are we doing? We're just keeping that person in misery. We're keeping the family in agony. We're spending millions of dollars that have to come from somewhere with there's no possibility of going forward this person's quality of life, it's done. But we're not accepting it.

And I think it becomes a point without falling in, of course, to the euthanasia side, where you say, God is speaking, right Chris? And we have to let go. That's one of Chris's points that I think too many Christians feel guilty about. I love my dad, I just can't let him go. But if you really want the best for your dad, there comes a time when the sovereignty of God says, he's mine and I want him home, and stop trying to prevent that.

You know, I was having a discussion around our dinner table just tonight about this very point that you guys have made in the book. And it was a it was a great discussion. And, you know, my father's 97. My mother's 92. And we have another one who's in her 70s living in our home and they were just telling stories about the beauty of dying in a family member's arms and and And I know this sounds very difficult for anybody to really hear rather than rushing them off to life support and things like that.

It's just a very difficult question. I don't know what the answer is but I think probably most of us would think it would be we would just as soon die in our loved ones arms and not go through all the trauma of trying to keep us alive for another two days. So but those are those are very... That's a massive subject I think we'll just let that one drop. People could read the book and decide what they think about it.

But I found it very interesting, very stimulating, and different than things I've thought before. So I really appreciate it though. Okay, let's talk about some advice. You guys give some advice to Christians for how they should pray for death, and It was, I thought it was compelling advice. And it seems like around page 75, as you guys were explaining that.

Let's talk about that. And what's that? It would be some of the stuff that you were talking about kind of segues into that. It's really, I mean, I forget the percentage, but most people, when they're asked if they wanna have aggressive life support, they usually say no, You know what I mean? Of course, that becomes a whole different issue when you need it a lot of times.

But having these discussions like you had around the dinner table, I mean, what a wonderful discussion to have, although it seems to be morbid to most people, talking about death around the dinner table, but a necessary discussion to have about, you know, what are my wishes and my wife's wishes, you know, when we're confronted, you know, what happens if I, I mean, Just last week, I ended up in the hospital. I had an appendix that was ready to burst. Here I was laying in the emergency room And I'm in excruciating pain and my heart rate went down into the 30s. My blood pressure dropped to 60 over 40. They had to run to the room and I was passing out, passing out.

And, You know, they didn't put an IV and kind of squeeze it on in me. I would have been dead, you know But if I would have went unconscious for some reason my wife would have known okay, this is what Chris wants and it's important of course that the person that you do have who makes those decisions to be able to stick to them, you know, and to really take in all the information and make decisions that are lost. Because sometimes it may be necessary to go against a decision that I have made because there's new information that, okay, he may be able to come back from this or whatever. So I ended up in the operating room within two hours after. But anyways, just in preparation, I was ready.

And not only that, when I was passing out, you know, and I think, Jill, you can speak to this too, because I think you had mentioned you had an experience where somebody had mugged you in the past. And I thought I was gonna die. And I didn't get anxious or anything. I just comforted Jesus at that time. It was the most incredible thing.

And whether I lived or died, it really didn't matter at that moment. And I rejoiced. And as I reflected on that after, You know, I pray a prayer in the morning that that I recognize that God has delivered me from the dangers of the past. And as I pray that section of that prayer that I usually pray, it took on a profound meaning that next day after I went through surgery and pain in the hospital bed because God was just so gracious, merciful and kind and to comfort me as I was there. But not only that, to be willing to pull me through and to be able to do this webinar today.

You know, it's just, you know, whether we live or die with the Lord's. So anyways, preparations and stuff like that. I think the most important thing is having discussions and open discussions. I mean, unfortunately, there is a lot of people. It's what they think of the room.

You know, it's there and nobody wants to know about it. I mean, and unfortunately, I'm acquainted with some people who think that they talk about death that somehow they're gonna curse themselves and they're gonna die Dead the next day, you know what I mean? They get that type of superstition, you know Yeah, so that's kind of those are some of the things that I had in mind anyways So the guy who wrote the book, Death and Dying, almost died last week, huh? There you go. I'm dying in death.

Amazing, that is really amazing. Well, about 14- So you, Go ahead. I was gonna just say about 14 years ago, Chris was referring to an experience I had in an Eastern European country where I came back from lecturing and two guys accosted me and they shouted they were the mafia and they maybe lay it on the ground. They took everything from me, my belt, my wedding ring, I mean everything. And I had heard that if you're accosted by the mafia, there's absolutely no hope for your life.

And so I just was reconciled immediately in my mind. I was dying, so I just wanted a little time to pray, commend my ministry, my wife, my family, of course, first in ministry and RHB, PRTS, commended all to the Lord and I did all that and I had just what Chris said, just this incredible overwhelming sense of peace that I was in Christ. And text after text flowed into my mind. I can't explain it. All related somehow to the blood of Christ.

Text I didn't even know I had memorized. And I just felt so much peace at that moment that I was safe in Christ's blood. That I actually was relaxed. And then I started thinking about not being able to talk to my children again. And then I thought, well, what would I say to them if I ever saw them again?

And I thought, well, I've talked with everything I could ever think about talking with them through family worship. Thank God the Bible talks about everything. And so I just come into my children to the Lord. But then I thought, well, I'd love to see my grandchildren. And I started getting a little anxious and my hands were tied, really tight behind my back and numbness started to go up my arm, both arms up to about my elbow.

And I said, you fool, think about Jesus. And I started thinking about Jesus, and the numbness went right back down out of my arms. I thought, this is a miracle. I thought it was a miracle. A doctor explained to me later, you know, you just start to relax because you're in Christ.

And it just went out of your arms. Of course, it's not a miracle, it's just common sense. But anyway, to me, it was a miracle at the time. And then they took me to a motel after they left me and I was able to get out of the whole situation and untie myself. When I walked into that motel room, this is an unforgettable thing, but I, it's like I lost the presence of God.

I started having all these flashbacks. And I experienced that night, like maybe never before, how important it is to be in Christ and be under his blood. And that even if that sense of that is removed afterward as it was for several hours. And I was in more anxiety in the hotel room by myself than I was when when they were rubbing the knife up and down my back. So the Lord is sufficient for death and I say to people if you really want to be prepared to die You've got to be in Christ by faith and abiding in Him.

And that's your best preparation every single day. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and live a Christ-centered life. Life is all about Jesus. For me to live as Christ, to die as gain. That's the way to live and that's the way to die.

Amen. One thing I really appreciate about the book is you had a long section on the death of Christ and the implications of his death. That was a beautiful section. You, of course, borrow a phrase out of scripture, putting your house in order. You give advice about how to put your house in order.

So let's just talk for a minute about that And I've just got one final question, Corey, after that. I guess, well, putting us in order, I don't know if anybody's ever heard of advanced directives. I don't know if that's a new term. Those are typically like a health care proxy, forms, living will, those types of things. And as we were talking about before, the most important thing is to make sure that putting our house in order is really having things arranged so that if I'm not able to be the head of my household and the leadman of my home, that things would be put in place to foster my leadership and to hand it over in the proper ways.

So in addition to living wills is where you kind of talk about, you know, you write out what your desires would be in such and such a state, do this, don't do that. But again, you don't want to just have that on paper and give it to your doctor. You want to have somebody to be able to know you wish to see them written down there and be able to implement them, because there may be factors that may be changed. Last will and testament, of course. A lot of people, you know, they don't have too much.

They don't say, well, what do I need a last will and testament for? But what ends up happening is that whatever you do have, and sometimes there are things you worked at, you know, some company 25 years ago and there was some plan the company paid into and here you are deceased and now the funds go into probate court, you know what I mean? Those funds could be used for the family or for the church and for the defense of the Christ in the world. And then, of course, funeral arrangements. And I think we talked about that at length a little bit in the book.

What a great opportunity to, your funeral, you can put it together in such a way that you can even write out your sermon and you can, you know, have somebody preach it to Uncle Billy who's that rank atheist who's been? Antagonistic and really say this is me saying that this is you know so it's always in the grave, you know preaching it to you and You know to really have a wonderful joyful experience in a funeral but also to really communicate Christ, even when one is dead and still speaks. So I would suggest that after that, Bill. Yeah, I'd like to just say two things on that. One is, Chris does really well at taking care of all those things.

I'd like to just do something else too in terms of preparing for death. I think as parents or as grandparents, it's good. Not every day, of course, but once in a while, just to speak to our children. I remember my dad taking me aside one time and saying, you know, when your mother and I die one day, we're not gonna have much money to leave behind to you guys. That's not been our goal in life, but I want you to know, we're going to leave behind for you a treasury of prayers at the right hand of the father.

And as Matthew Henry said, my dad said to me at that time, as Matthew Henry said, better to leave behind a treasury of prayers than a treasury of gold and silver. And to me, that's also talking to your kids like that, your grandkids, is part of setting your house in order. Chris went through a monumental experience last week. So did we here the last couple of weeks. We had a chairman of our Deacons, he was chairman many years, not right now at the moment, but seven weeks ago, he's 65 years old, he got word that he had stage four pancreatic cancer and went into the hospital.

He was allowed to have one person, his daughter stayed with him and his wife even could visit him. It was just terrible, just terrible. If pastor, you couldn't even see him, it was just awful. But then when there was no hope anymore, they brought him to another home for a couple of weeks. And he happened to have a home that had outside window.

And people gathered there, up to 30, 40 people outside the window. And they were talking to him through the phone. We could see him just laying right on the other side of the window and he had one of the two best deathbeds I've ever seen in more than 40 years of ministry. Every single person that came to the window he told them to flee to Jesus, make sure your life is in Christ. He was so ready to die.

It was a vibrant testimony. It was all the more powerful because in actual life, he was a very quiet man. And you knew he was a converted person, but he didn't say much about Jesus directly to you because he's very shy that way. But the Lord just unloosened his tongue. He was so ready to die that I'd watch these people come to the window to talk to him and every one of them would end up just weeping, weeping for joy, weeping out of impression.

I mean, his deathbed, I think was the time of eternal life for several people. And that's the way to die, telling other people, look to Jesus and I'm ready to go to be with him. Amen. You know, the last chapter in your book is called, Dying Delightfully. That's a great illustration of that.

Well, hey, thank you so much. What a rich time. And You listeners, thank you for joining us. I hope it was very helpful. And join me next week as we enter into kind of a controversial subject, when to disobey the government.

And I know that's on every pastor's mind right now, and I'm gathering men who have different views on the subject. I expect it to be stretching, interesting, and you know the the men who are coming know how to speak honorably to one another about things like that. But you can reserve your seat to join me and John Snyder and Jason Dome and Gavin Beers, and we're gonna add some others too. So we'll keep you updated on that. But at the end of this, you'll see how you can register for that.

And also if you'd like a free copy of this book, Death and Dying and Death by Joel Beekie and Christopher Bogosh, You're gonna need to send us your physical mailing address and we'll send all of you participants tonight who signed up by email in a few minutes. We'll send you a note and you can reply with your physical mailing address and we'll send those out to you. Thank you so much for joining us. And brothers, thank you, thank you Joel and Chris. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Good to be with you. Thank you so much. Okay, goodbye. God bless.

Okay, goodbye. God bless. 1