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…