The Testimony of the Cemetery

I was driving today in between meetings in a particularly older section of Omaha and saw the sobering testimony to sin. The cemetery was decorated with headstones marking the lives of the individuals who occupied the bodies that are now occupying the dirt below the signs.

The headstones mark the individual testimonies of the pervasiveness of sin. Sin has been destroying and taking lives since the garden…the cemeteries proclaim this.

As I drove I was reminded of the transitory nature of life through the reality of death. We indeed are dying people who need to like the Psalmist in Psalm 90, need to pray that we ‘number our days’ in so doing live with the divine mission on our forehead and in our hearts.

While cemeteries remind me of the faithfulness of God’s promise to punish sin with death (natural, spiritual, & eternal), I am also greatly encouraged and my heart is enflamed with thanksgiving to the Lord Jesus Christ who tasted death on my behalf (Heb. 2.9), knowing that the one who is in Christ will never taste death (John 8.52).

What blessed providence to remind me of grace through the morbid headstones and the legacy of sin. Sin is morbid, but grace is beautiful, for Christ is beauty!