Can Death Ever Be Good?
Death comes to us all, and God can and does work through even this for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28), but never lull yourself into the lie that death itself is anything but the terrible wages of our sin, from which we desperately need salvation (Romans 6:23). Remember that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). Scripture is abundantly clear that we were never meant for death. And lest we forget, the experience of grief — to borrow from C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain — shouts as with a megaphone to remind us.
“What do you consider a ‘good death’?”
A furrow creased my eyebrows. The interviewer and I had spent the last ninety minutes discussing the intricacies of end-of-life care, delving into hard topics such as life-support measures, hospice, and advance directives. I navigated those delicate subjects with confidence, but this question so troubled me that I lapsed into silence. “I hate that phrase,” I finally answered.
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Really? Why?”
While she awaited my reply, a plethora of faces and voices cluttered my mind. I saw swollen eyes and tear-stained cheeks. I felt desperate grasps of my arm as loved ones crumpled to the floor in agony. I recalled the questions that hung in the air after the dying drew their last breath. I heard cries of shock and heartbreak echoing on and on, like breakers on a relentless sea.
“Because death is never good,” I said. The memories gripped me, and my voice caught. “Grief testifies to the backwardness of it. That we cry hints at an undoing of God’s created order. He designed us for something different.”
Is Death Ever Good?
The question of a “good death” may seem reasonable, even natural, given shifting views on death in Western countries. In 2021, ten thousand people in Canada died by physician-assisted suicide (PAS), wherein a doctor prescribes a lethal dose of medication for a person to self-administer, ending his own life. Canadian law now permits individuals with mental rather than terminal illness to pursue the practice. In other words, those who are otherwise healthy but suffer from psychological conditions, like depression, can seek medical help to end their own lives. In the United States, the legalization of PAS creeps across more and more states yearly.
Such trends hint at an increasingly prevalent viewpoint that death, rather than a terrible consequence of the fall, is a reasonable option to escape suffering. According to this thinking, death can be “good” if it provides relief from pain. What is more, the movement reflects a culture that upholds self-determination as an ultimate good; we live for ourselves, rather than for God.
Dear friend, when you encounter such ideas, remember that Scripture refers to death not as a phase to celebrate, but as the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death comes to us all, and God can and does work through even this for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28), but never lull yourself into the lie that death itself is anything but the terrible wages of our sin, from which we desperately need salvation (Romans 6:23). Remember that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).
Scripture is abundantly clear that we were never meant for death. And lest we forget, the experience of grief — to borrow from C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain — shouts as with a megaphone to remind us.
For Now We Groan
God has confronted me with the harsh realities of death and grief more frequently than I ever would choose. As a trauma surgeon, I witnessed deaths both sudden and prolonged, peaceful and traumatic. Many of these losses imprinted on my memory, the tragedies and sorrows burned into my mind as with a branding iron.
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Replanting Our Churches
The discipleship gap in our churches has been exposed. What are we going to do about it? The more robustly we can connect our church re-planting efforts to making actual disciples of Jesus Christ, the deeper and wider and healthier our churches will be as we launch into the future.
Every church in America is now a church re-plant. This is a hard truth, but healthy churches will own it, while those who ignore it will be walking down the path towards a painful decline.
American Christianity has learned numerous lessons during the past 25 months: live stream, zoom meetings, and endless pivots to make worship happen. America has witnessed the further political polarization of our nation, increased tensions about racism, and heightened distrust of institutions which all have meant endless challenges for local churches and her leaders.
Yet the biggest takeaway for most churches regardless of size, denomination, or geographical location has been this: the coronavirus exposed a massive discipleship gap in nearly every church in America.[1] The discipleship gap, in my opinion, is the most pressing problem for leaders to reckon with in today’s world.
Over the last 20 years, American churches have mostly majored in “conducting worship services”. We have hoped (sometimes wistfully) that “discipleship would spontaneously happen” or that “attending a worship service” or “serving on a ministry team” would lead to discipleship. Much of this line of thinking has been exposed to be a pipe dream during the coronavirus.
I believe over the next 10 years, the people who (still) come to church will be disciples. The people in our churches who will come through the pandemic, giving sacrificially, serving selflessly, and worshipping robustly—despite every obstacle—will be the true disciples of Jesus Christ. Thus, if we want to re-plant our churches during and after this global pandemic, we need to get back to the life-on-life ministry of making actual disciples of Jesus Christ. How is your church doing this? What flourishing next step are you taking to make actual disciples of Jesus Christ?
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John Newton: Parent with Intention, Grace, and Confidence in God
Some good people have wearied their children by expecting conduct from them as if they were experienced Christians, and have thereby given them a disgust and distaste for religion, and made them look upon it as a burden.” Parents should instead use a light touch: “A little advice now and then, always in the spirit of love and not too much at a time, is the best course.” After all, he writes, “If any correction or restraint is attempted . . . in anger and heat, . . . it is like Satan casting out Satan. If you do not bring in the authority of God and act in a spirit of meekness and steadiness, you may make them fear you, but you will do but little good.”
ohn Newton’s mother spent the first six years of his life, and the last six of her own, teaching her son in the ways of the Lord. But after her death, Newton’s life changed drastically. He was treated harshly, first by his stepmother and then by the headmaster at his boarding school.
Soon, Newton ran away to become a sailor and dove headfirst into a life of sin, before turning to the Lord at age 22. John married two years later, and within five years, he became a pastor. John and his wife, Polly, were unable to have children. But in 1774, after almost 25 years of marriage, they adopted 5-year-old Betsy, one of Polly’s nieces who had been orphaned. Nine years later, they adopted another of Polly’s orphaned nieces, 12-year-old Eliza. When Betsy joined the family, Newton was almost 50; when Eliza entered, he was nearly 60.
Until recently, most of Newton’s writings on parenting were inaccessible, but now Marylynn Rouse has collected them as part of a year-long devotional. As I’ve worked through these writings, Newton’s unique parenting perspective has encouraged me. It was sown by his mother’s influence in his early years, shaped by amazing grace, and forged in the maturity of middle age.
Here are six intentional principles Newton taught Christian parents preparing to launch their children.
1. Set a good example for your children.
Integrity is the oil that allows the rest of the parenting engine to run. Some parents think loving their children means protecting them from harm. But embodying before your children what you expect from them is one of the highest forms of parental love, and it protects them from great harm. Newton said, “Many poor children are forced to blush every day for the behavior of their parents. If you love them, be careful of laying stumbling blocks in their way.”
2. Talk frequently with your children.
Newton encourages parents to train their children in God’s truth, but he wrote, “I mean more by this than to teach them a catechism by rote as you would teach a parrot. They should be conversed with, and every occasion laid hold of, to explain and make them know that God sees and hears them and that this God is only to be known and worshipped in Jesus.”
Newton said parents should leverage their children’s natural curiosity, and he used this approach with Betsy:
When you read our Savior’s discourses, recorded by the evangelists, attend as if you saw him with your own eyes….
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The Enneagram, the Angel, and the Divine Coma
McCord attempts to rehabilitate the Enneagram by using biblical language and is doing so with no one calling her out for it, other than myself (as far as I know). Even pastors who should know better are falling for McCord’s fake gospel Enneagram. By crafting the right-sounding terminology, it can sound biblical. With a modest amount of effort, I could make astrology sound biblical. All I have to do is transpose Christian meanings into astrological terms without changing the content of astrology.
A 2018 article, “The Rise of the Enneagram,” was recently brought to my attention by MCOI Senior Editor, Corkey McGehee. It has a surprising story that begins with fallacies by Beth McCord.
The article first references Enneagram “coach” Beth McCord, who, by her own admission, learned the Enneagram from New Age psychic Helen Palmer and at least five New Agers whom she named. Beth, along with her husband, Jeff, an ordained PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) pastor, founded Your Enneagram Coach in 2015. In 2019 Thomas-Nelson publisher produced her nine-volume set of Enneagram books. Beth also claims to teach a “gospel-centered Enneagram.” Apparently, by just incorporating the words “gospel-centered” or “Christcentric,” into a heretical occult tool you can have a million-dollar business (that is an actual fact for the McCords). The writer, Tyler Huckabee (not related to Mike Huckabee) quotes Beth:
“They’ll say well that’s not in the Bible,” she says. “Well, the Myers-Briggs isn’t in the Bible. You know, there are lots of things that aren’t in the Bible but are still helpful.
“If they take the time to hear how we use it from a biblical perspective they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, this makes sense. There’s no problem there,’” she continues. “It’s when they have misconceptions that they get all freaked out.”
Beth employs false dilemma and red herring fallacies in this first response. The false dilemma is not whether it is in the Bible or not that determines the usefulness of the Enneagram. I know of no sound critique of the Enneagram that rejects it because it is not in the Bible (who would make such a ludicrous statement?). Moreover, it is a red herring to bring up the Myers-Briggs which, unlike the Enneagram, is not derived from spirit contact. Myers-Briggs is not in the same category as the Enneagram. It is claimed the Enneagram is a spiritual tool; Myers-Briggs makes no such claim. While Myers-Briggs claims to assess the personality, the Enneagram was never designed for that. The Enneagram is not to assess personality types but to figure out which of the nine paths to God each one must take to reconnect with their “true self.” In addition, Myers-Briggs is no longer viewed as valid by psychologists. Many have stopped using it.
McCord attempts to rehabilitate the Enneagram by using biblical language and is doing so with no one calling her out for it, other than myself (as far as I know). Even pastors who should know better are falling for McCord’s fake gospel Enneagram. By crafting the right-sounding terminology, it can sound biblical. With a modest amount of effort, I could make astrology sound biblical. All I have to do is transpose Christian meanings into astrological terms without changing the content of astrology.
Facts are not misconceptions. If McCord is referring to factual information on the Enneagram as “misconceptions,” such as its occult origins and the spirit contact involved, those are not misconceptions. If that is freaking people out, that should be a normal reaction for a Christian. Apparently, it does not freak out McCord. She did remove the names of her 6 New Age Enneagram teachers from her website once I made this broader public knowledge. It seems McCord may have thought those facts might have freaked people out.
The Flexible Enneagram
The article continues:
Ask 100 devotees of the Enneagram what it is and you’ll get 100 answers, most of them bespotted with vague language and words that don’t seem to mean much of anything, and several definitions contradicting one another so violently you wonder if these people are talking about the same thing. It’s a personality test. A path to wholeness. A way to process your trauma.
The above only validates my warnings that the Enneagram can be anything to anyone, that it’s flexible and fluid. The reason I made those claims is that the Enneagram has no standard or basis in reality or facts. So, it can become whatever one may want it to be or think that it is.
Ironically enough, a system designed to help people understand themselves is in danger of being misunderstood.
Even more ironically, the Enneagram was not designed to help people understand themselves. It was designed to help people deconstruct the false self (the belief they are a sinner) they were conditioned to be so they can uncover the true Essence of the Self which, in contradiction to Scripture, has never been separated from God.
Enter the Angel & Archetypes
The article moves on to Chris Heuertz, author of The Sacred Enneagram, who cautions against using the Enneagram as Beth McCord tries to use it, as a way to discover your personality. Give credit where credit is due – Heuertz is correct. Read carefully:
“It is helpful,” Heuertz admits. “It is clear that the Enneagram does sort of expose repeating patterns in human character structure archetypes that are sort of observable. But I think if you don’t really understand the essence of what’s behind it, you’re just fueling your own narcissism and you’re weaponizing something. You might be super interesting at a dinner party, but that’s not the point, you know?”
Well, then. What is the point?
“I usually try to say that [the Enneagram] is a sacred map of our soul,” Heuertz explains.
“And, you know this, the map isn’t the journey. The map informs the journey. So, if the Enneagram is a sacred map of our soul, if it’s a compassionate sketch of possibilities of who we can become, then what it actually helps us do is excavate our essence.”
Notice the language:Archetypes
repeating patterns
what’s behind it (the Enneagram)
map of our soul
excavate our essenceRead More
