It has become fashionable in our culture to hold the view that death is a perfectly natural occurrence. The Bible teaches that it is not, and even those who deny the afterlife witness that God “has set eternity in the hearts of men.” The following extract from Charlotte and Howard Clinebell’s The Intimate Marriage (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 188, serves as a good illustration of this truth:

One of the roots of the need for spiritual relatedness is the experience of man as the animal who knows he will die. How can one cope constructively with the dizzy flight of the years, with the knowledge that every tick of the clock brings death closer? How can one confront the brevity of one’s membership in the human family? How can one deal constructively with the ultimate threat of non-existence? The fact that a man knows he will die colors all of his life.… behind the will to relate is man’s existential loneliness and anxiety—the normal, nonpathological anxiety which is a part of what Paul Tillich once called man’s “heritage of finitude.” Erikson calls this form of anxiety the “ego chill.” It slips up on a self-aware human being whenever he becomes conscious of his fragile position in the face of sickness, nature, fate, and, ultimately, death.

There are echoes of such anxiety in any depth study of life or time. Consider this line from R. M. Maclver’s The Challenge of the Passing Years, My Encounter with Time: “The deeds of men sink into the melting pot of time, with countless ripples that quickly disappear.”