I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. 

I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.
On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check. My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.
I spent a few harrowing minutes looking online at the dire survival statistics for pancreatic cancer, and caught a glimpse of On Death on a table nearby. I didn’t dare open it to read what I’d written.
My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief. We were both turning 70, but felt strong, clear-minded, and capable of nearly all the things we have done for the past 50 years. “I thought we’d feel a lot older when we got to this age,” Kathy said. We had plenty of plans and lots of comforts, especially our children and grandchildren. We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” “Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?” “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”
A significant number of believers in God find their faith shaken or destroyed when they learn that they will die at a time and in a way that seems unfair to them. Before my diagnosis, I had seen this in people of many faiths. One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God.
What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice?
One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. Instead of acting on Dylan Thomas’s advice to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I found myself thinking, What? No! I can’t die. That happens to others, but not to me. When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.
The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the denial of death dominates our culture, but even if he was right that modern life has heightened this denial, it has always been with us. As the 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin wrote, “We undertake all things as if we were establishing immortality for ourselves on earth. If we see a dead body, we may philosophize briefly about the fleeting nature of life, but the moment we turn away from the sight the thought of our own perpetuity remains fixed in our minds.” Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality.
For the same reason, our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions as well. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.
I’ve watched many others partake of this denial of death and then struggle when their convictions evaporate, and not just among the religious. I spent time as a pastor with sick and dying people whose religious faith was nominal or nonexistent. Many had a set of beliefs about the universe, even if they went largely unacknowledged—that the material world came into being on its own and that there is no supernatural world we go to after death. Death, in this view, is simply nonexistence, and therefore, as the writer Julian Barnes has argued, nothing to be frightened of. These ideas are items of faith that can’t be proved, and people use them as Barnes does, to stave off fear of death. But I’ve found that nonreligious people who think such secular beliefs will be comforting often find that they crumple when confronted by the real thing.
So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work.
I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties. The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions. Proverbs says, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, rational conviction and experience might change my mind, but the shift would not be complete until it took root in my heart. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death.
Paul brand, an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U.S. “In the United States … I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs,” he wrote in his recent memoir. “Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”
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The Bible is no longer accepted or believed as fully trustworthy by many.  As one seminary professor described it, “What we are experiencing is an existential mood in the country.  Many of our students come to us with a relative view of the Bible.”  If the evangelical Church does not awaken to this situation, it will not be able to stand for or recognize God’s truth in an increasingly unbelieving and pluralistic world.

As Stephen Nichols writes in his biography, R. C. Sproul: A Life, “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy made and makes some wince.”[1] Perhaps the main reason for that wince is the nature of the Statement. It is a line in the sand. It is a boundary marker. In our day, when something as sturdy biology becomes elastic, many fail to appreciate such lines. However, the council creating that statement, The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, was led by two friends: R. C. Sproul (President) and James Montgomery Boice (Chairman). Lines did not make these men wince. And under their leadership a document was created that has guided generations since.[2]
The story of the Council’s beginning and first formal meeting at the Hyatt Regency at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on October 26-28, 1978, is a human-interest story in itself.  The Bible was under attack and in 1976 Harold Lindsell published a bombshell of a book titled, The Battle for the Bible. To say that it caused a stir is an understatement. However, despite the Council’s beginnings, the statement they produced is chiefly what matters most because the attack on God’s word never takes a respite.
But why is the ICBI still necessary?  The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals web page answers that question.
The authority and accuracy of the Bible are foundations of the Christian faith.  Yet we are witnessing the erosion of these foundations.
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The wrath of death make life necessarily brief! Fear of wrath and hope of bliss means, for sinner and saints, there is no more time to waste! Break with guilty past! Seize the blessed hope! Bear fruit while life lasts before you leave to be with Christ!

Psalm 90 in Psalter Sequence
Canonically positioned by Ezra at the beginning of Book IV of the Psalter, it provides a long-term solution to the trauma of the exile and Dynastic kingdom crisis.
The congregation returning from Babylon in the Second Temple Persian period now answers the call of the Prophets of the LORD, and at last turns back to Moses.
Past Anguish v1-11
A heart-rending, broken-hearted, cry of repentance bubbles up from the depths of pain of Israel’s shepherd-man-of-God on the plains of Moab in sight of Pisgah.
The prayer of this penitent, face-to-face, with the Eternal, Holy, God, confesses repeated, rebellious, Covenant breach and fully-deserved, all-consuming, terrifying, deadly, wrath.
For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you? – Psalm 90:7-11
For the Generation who fell in sand, before Israel reached the Promised Land, there could be no escape – as Adam found out, there is no such thing as truly-secret sins with God. All is laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.
For the Generation who fell by sword, the experience of Jews in Exile was the same – chastened by wrath both now unite, by the Spirit of Christ, to break with their guilt and come back home to God, their true and timeless Dwelling Place.
The stench of the deconstruction of death now gives way to the smile of the reconstruction of renewed covenant life and Israel’s everlasting hope
Present Anticipation v12-17
With selfless intercession, the brother of High Priest Aaron prays for the conquest generation – and by implication, he also supplicates, for the post-exilic remnant he knew would return, sorely-chastened, just as he had predicted.
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