Morality & Mortality

The English words morality and mortality sound very similar but have very different meanings and different etymologies. The word morality is from the Latin moralis, which is from mor-, which means “custom.” Morality is related to the English word mores, which refers to the moral expectations within a group of people.

The word mortality is from the Latin mortalis, which is from mort-, which means “death.” Mortality is related to the English words mortician and mortuary.

Even though morality and mortality have different meanings and have no linguistic link to each other, there is an important link that connects these two subjects together. The words themselves are not connected, but the realities represented by the two words morality and mortality are linked together in a profound way, as we shall soon see.

Mortality is just a nice way of saying we are all going to die, because we are all mortal.

Let me talk about death. I do not have a morbid fascination with death. However, since my childhood, I have had a very conscious and continuous awareness of mortality in the world around me.

My continuous awareness of mortality began one day when I was about ten years old. It was a Friday early in February. It started out as a typical day in my happy childhood. I went to school and came home on the bus. When I went into the house, my mom was weeping. She told me and my little sister that my pet beagle, Sniffy, had been hit by a truck and killed.

My little heart was broken. I loved that dog. I had gotten her as a puppy and raised her. She had been my constant companion as I explored the fields and woods around our house. I cried all that evening and cried myself to sleep that night. When I woke up the next morning, I cried most of that day, and cried intermittently for days after that. I was inconsolable.

That was my introduction to mortality. I learned that day that pets don’t live forever.

A few years later, when I was thirteen, another day started as a typical day in my childhood. It was a Tuesday, April 3, 1962. I came home from school and saw an ambulance in our driveway. When my sister and I got off the school bus, our weeping mother came running out to us and cried, “Oh, kids, your daddy’s dead!”

I was stunned into a state of disbelief. “Oh, no!” I cried. “He can’t be! He can’t be dead!”

But he was. He was only 34 years old. He had been a happy, healthy, loving family man with no apparent health problems whatsoever. But that afternoon he got up from a nap, walked into the next room, and without warning simply dropped dead.

On that day I learned a hard lesson. Not only do pets not live forever. Parents do not live forever either. Even young people can suddenly drop dead without warning.

During my teenage years I had fun, as much fun as a fatherless teenage boy could be expected to have in the 1960s, I suppose. Yet in the midst of my fun activities, I was always haunted by an overshadowing, uncomfortable presence: my continual awareness of mortality. This continual awareness of mortality planted and nurtured fear in my heart - not a fear of my own death, but the fear that my mom or my sister or my little brother might suddenly die.

That fear stayed with me and haunted me into my early 20s. But shortly after I started following the Lord, I was permanently delivered from this fear. My deliverance came when I was considering the blessings God promises in Psalm 112. When I came to verse 7, I read that one blessing promised to the man who fears the Lord and delights greatly in His commandments is this: “He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.”

When I read that verse, I knew I no longer needed to be afraid of evil tidings telling me that a loved one had died. I knew (and still know) that bad news can still come, but I no longer needed to live in fear of evil tidings.

If we have eternal life through God’s Son, we do not need to fear mortality. Some people are obsessed with mortality because they fear death. Other people try not to think about death for the very same reason. But we should neither fear nor ignore mortality, because we are all mortal.

Human mortality is first declared in God’s response to Adam’s sin: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19). Human mortality is again declared in the naming of Adam’s first grandchild: “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos” (Gen. 4:26).

Enos (more accurately, Enosh) means “frail, feeble, weak” - in other words, “mortal man.” The Hebrew word most commonly used for “people” is the plural of enosh, anashim, i.e., “mortals.” We are all anashim, mortals who are even now being drawn toward the dust from which we were taken, even now in the process of dying.

“Now in the process of dying? What do you mean, Daniel? I’m young and healthy. I’m living, not dying!”

Regardless of how young and healthy you are right now, you are still in the process of dying. Today you are one day closer to the day of your death than you were yesterday. And tomorrow you will be another day closer to your appointment with death. Therefore you are dying. We are all terminal. There’s no escape, because we are all mortals. We are all anashim, descendants of Adam’s grandson Enosh.

I get slightly amused and somewhat puzzled by some people’s fear of old age. I want to get old, because the only alternative to getting old is to die young. The older I get, the less I have to worry about dying young.

I also get puzzled by the slow pace of some old people. If an old person is feeble, sick, or disabled, I understand the need to move slowly. But when I see healthy old people moving slowly, just plodding along absent-mindedly, I wonder why they aren’t moving faster. Don’t they realize that their time is short? Don’t they want to hurry up and accomplish some things before they die? I glance at the obituary page in the newspaper and I am reminded that people are dropping dead every day. And some of them are younger than me! The older I get, the faster I want to move, because I’ve got several projects I want to finish before I die. I want to finish my course like a marathon runner, powered by a final burst of speed as he approaches the finish line. As I approach old age and death, I want to speed up, not slow down, because the clock is ticking. Time is running out.

Time is running out for you, too, even if you are young. You might be young and strong and buff and have smooth skin and shiny hair right now, but it won’t last forever. Time and gravity do their work. The aging process will soon sap your strength and alter your youthful shape. Your smooth, tight skin will sag and droop and wrinkle. Your healthy, shiny hair will become dry and coarse and brittle, and will lose its color and shine.

“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of Yahweh bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass” (Isa. 40:6f).

It is ironic that this statement in Isaiah 40 is introduced with the words “Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God” (Isa. 40:1). The prophet then asks, “What shall I cry?” What message shall I cry to comfort the people, Lord? What words of comfort wilt Thou have me to speak, Lord?

Then the Lord tells him to speak these words about people being like grass that withers and fades away! Where is the comfort in those words? How is it comforting to be reminded that all flesh is grass and that our mortal body will someday wither and fade like the flower of the field? Where is the comfort in words that remind us of our mortality?

The very next verse says, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever” (Isa. 40:8).

There is the comfort. Even though we are mortal and temporal, there is something immortal and eternal that will outlast us. The word of our God shall stand forever. And that written word declares that our faith in God’s incarnate Word, Yeshua, guarantees that our mortal bodies will be raised to immortality. We can take comfort in this.

“For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Messiah shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (1 Thes. 4:16-18).

Our comfort is in knowing that our mortal state is only temporary. As we await our immortal bodies, we can also take comfort in knowing that the wicked, too, are mortal. Like the grass, they too will wither and fade away. Even the most powerful cruel tyrants are temporal. They and their evil empires will fade, but the kingdom of heaven will remain forever.

Like Isaiah, Job also compares mortal man to grass. “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not” (Job 14:1f). The older I get, the more I realize that man is indeed “of few days,” as Job said.

“But Daniel, you’re 75 years old. That’s approximately more than 27,000 days. Why do you think 27,000 is ‘few’? If you had 27,000 dollars, would you say that you had ‘a few dollars’?”

True, 27,000 days may not seem like just a few days. But compared to eternity, it is indeed a very short time.

The older I get, the more aware I become of two twin truths, each linked to the opposite ends of this present time. I become more aware of the shortness of the time I have left, and I become aware of the shortness of my time that has already passed.

You might hear very old people say things like “I can’t believe how fast the years flew by! I can’t believe how quickly the children grew up! It seems like only yesterday when they were toddlers!”

Why does time seem to go by slowly when you are young and faster when you are old? Well, when you are ten years old, if someone says “five years,” that sounds like a long time. It seems like half a lifetime to you if you are only ten years old. But if you are 50 years old and someone says “five years,” that doesn’t sound like a real long time. It only seems like one-tenth of a lifetime to someone who’s 50.

“My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle.” Job said (Job 7:6). Your life is a tapestry being woven by the Master Weaver. Just as a weaver swiftly passes the shuttle that carries the woof to go between the threads of the warp to create the fabric, so the Master Weaver causes your days to swiftly pass as He weaves the fabric of your life. Someday the tapestry will be complete. The shuttle will make its final pass between the threads of the warp. The cord on the shuttle will be cut off from the tapestry, like an umbilical cord is cut off to separate a newborn babe from the mother. Then the tapestry will be removed from the loom, and your life will be displayed for all to see, whether your works were good or evil.

This is the reason there is a link between mortality and morality. Because “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27). Your judgment after death will be based on your deeds, whether they were good or evil, moral or immoral.

“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Messiah; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:10f).

Paul wrote these words to believers, not to unbelievers. If you are a believer, this judgment you will undergo will not be a judgment to determine whether you go to Paradise or get thrown into the lake of fire. This will be a judgment to determine your position and rank in the kingdom, and the measure of eternal glory that you will receive as a reward for your service to the Lord. It will be a judgment to determine how brightly you will shine for all eternity in the resurrection. “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor. 15:41f).

A true believer is not in danger of being thrown into the lake of fire. But there is a judgment of the believer for the works done in the body, whether good or bad. This judgment is not to be taken lightly. For some believers, it will be a fearful, terror-filled judgment, which is why Paul said “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” - i.e., we persuade them to live good, moral lives.

The moral standards in America have plummeted over the past six decades since I was a kid. When I was a kid in the 1950s, people didn’t “have affairs”; they committed adultery. Unmarried couples didn’t “live together”; they were fornicators living in sin. There were no “single moms”; there were unwed mothers. There were no “children of single mothers”; there were bastards. There were no “gays”; there were homosexuals, sodomites, queers, faggots. I am not pointing this out to suggest that we return to using these pejoratives to insult sinners. I am pointing it out to show how differently sin was viewed by the general population 50 to 60 years ago.

One of my hobbies is collecting what I call Obsolete Religious Tracts. These are tracts from past decades that address various forms of behavior which probably 90% of church-going Christians nowadays consider perfectly acceptable behavior. Some of the Obsolete Religious Tract titles that I have include:

Tobacco and Its Evils; Gambling, the Subtle Sin; Card-Playing and Theater-Going ‘Christians’; Death in Cards; Minced Oaths (saying words like gosh, golly, gee, darn, heck, etc.); Bobbed Hair, the Mark of the World (women cutting their hair short); Given to Her For Her Glory (which claims “this sin of a woman cutting her hair is the most terrible sin a woman can commit, aside from rejecting Jesus or committing some immoral act”); The Painted Face (an anti-make-up tract); What About the Dance? (which says “a dancing foot and a praying knee do not grow on the same limb”); The Christian and Sports (which says “Sports are sins which ought to be exposed for what they are -- darkness. They are works of Satan, and the Christian should have no part in or with it”).

My favorite, though, is Inspiring Temperance Hymns, a small hymnal I picked up for a nickel at a yard sale about 30 years ago. It contains the words and music for several anti-drinking songs, with titles like: “Let Rum Alone”; “His Name is Rum”; “Be Strong to Say ‘No!’”; “Bessie, the Drunkard’s Child”; “Water for Me.”

It also has an anti-smoking hymn titled “The Horrid Cigarette,” written in 1907. The first verse says: “There’s a horrid little tempter, Who seeks the heart and hand, Of all the little boys about, To kill them from the land.”

Then the chorus: “’Tis the cigarette, The horrid cigarette! He leads to woe, He leads to death, this dirty cigarette; Put him down and out [at this point a footnote instructs the singers to ‘stamp with the foot’], Be not tempted with his breath; He’s a deadly foe, He’s a little fiend, O this horrid cigarette.”

It is five verses long. The fourth verse says: “O many a manly fellow, Who sought him for a pet, Has walked away to prison, Led by Mister Cigarette.”

When a 21st-century believer reads these Obsolete Religious Tracts, it makes a person wonder: Why did Christians of 50+ years ago focus on these sorts of things? I suspect it was probably because these were the worst forms of behavior which were considered acceptable by Bible-believing Christians of those times.

Think about it. A hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher feels obligated to preach against something in the church. He looks around, and the worst things he sees Christians doing are things like playing cards, going to theaters and dances, bobbing the hair and painting the face, smoking the horrid cigarette, and saying words like gosh, golly, gee, darn, heck.

Preachers 50+ years ago did not need to preach very often against sins like fornication, adultery, homosexuality, illegal drug use, etc., because 50 years ago no true Christian questioned the sinfulness of such behavior.

All of this goes to show how far the morals have fallen in 50 years. The church has always held a higher moral standard than the moral standard held by the unsaved world. But as the unsaved world lowers its moral standards a notch at a time, the church likewise lowers its moral standards a notch at a time. We still have a higher moral standard than the world, but all we are doing is maintaining the distance between the two. As someone once said, Show me what the world considers acceptable behavior today, and I will show you what the church will consider acceptable behavior in about 10 to 15 years from now.

A case in point is homosexuality. When I was a kid, it was considered immoral and it was illegal, even between consenting adults. But let’s go back in time even further, to the year 1642, and let’s see how the Pilgrims dealt with perverts in Early America. The following is from the writings of Pilgrim father William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth colony:

There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. (His father and mother lived at the same time at Scituate.) He was this year detected of buggery [sodomy], and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey. Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it.

He was first discovered by one that accidentally saw his lewd practice toward the mare. (I forbear particulars.) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though at first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others; and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; and confirmed it at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not be so well known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642.

A sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus 20:15 [“And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death; and ye shall slay the beast”], and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them. (Book II, Chapter 32. Anno Domini 1642)

What do you suppose William Bradford and his peers would think if they could see how many 21st-century American churches accept practicing perverts not only as members but even as clergy? Or what do you suppose the authors of those Obsolete Religious Tracts written 50 to 100 years ago would think if we could bring them back and discuss the various concerns which they so seriously wrote about?

“We’ve read your tracts,” we would tell them. “We know you were serious about the things you wrote. But your tracts are just a joke now, because now we have more serious moral issues to resolve - issues like gay marriage.”

“Gay marriage? What’s wrong with that?” they would say. “Marriage is supposed to be happy and gay.”

“Um... There’s been a semantic change,” we would explain. “The word gay means something totally different from what it meant in your time. Let us tell you what it now means....”

We would explain the modern meaning of gay, and tell them that Christians are debating whether or not “gay marriage” is immoral.

Their response would be, “You’re joking, of course, right?”

The solution to immorality among believers is not to treat the external symptoms only, but to treat the disease. A good physician is not satisfied to just bring the patient some temporary relief by treating the symptoms. A good physician points out the symptoms to persuade his patients that they have a serious disease. But the solution is to treat the disease, not the symptoms.

What is the disease? The disease is half-hearted allegiance to the Lord and to His kingdom. Instead of loving the Lord with all of the heart, soul, mind, and strength, many believers love Him with only 50%, or 75%, or 90% of their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

The proof of this half-hearted devotion can be seen in people’s misplaced priorities. Yeshua said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things [food, clothing, physical needs] shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33). But instead of seeking first the kingdom of God, many believers seek first financial security to provide their food, clothing, and physical needs. Seeking the kingdom of God takes second place to seeking their physical needs.

Another proof of people’s half-hearted devotion to the Lord can be seen in people’s compromises with the world. The behavior, speech, goals, concerns, and external appearance of many believers is not much different - sometimes not at all different - from that of the unredeemed worldlings around them.

These are some of the symptoms of the spiritual sickness that afflicts many believers today. If you see symptoms of half-heartedness or worldly compromise in your life, wake up! Don’t remain in a state of denial. Admit that you are spiritually sick, and take the cure.

What is the cure? It’s not some deep, distant, mysterious secret that can only be unlocked by decoding mystical texts of kabbalistic writing or anything like that. It’s a simple cure. Maybe not easy, but simple. Just sincere, genuine, old-fashioned repentance and returning to your first love for the Lord. That was the prescription that the Great Physician gave to the church at Ephesus after they left their first love, and it is the prescription He prescribes for all who have left their first love:

“Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works” (Rev. 2:5f).

Take this three-fold prescription. Remember, Repent, and Re-do. Remember what it was like for you when you first found the Lord. Remember the love and devotion you had for Him then. Repent of the things you have allowed to creep into your life and quench that fiery first love. Then Re-do. Get back to the basic disciplines. Seek the Lord in prayer, in His Word, in fasting, and in serving others. Do that which He put you on earth to do. Then you will not live in fear of that day when you must appear before the judgment seat of Messiah to give an account for the things you have done in your body, whether good or bad.

| DB