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| Is death better? |
I have always found it depressing when I hear people, inevitably at a funeral, say it is better to die than to be born. (Side note: This isn’t comforting to the family, so if you say it at funerals quit!) To me, it seemed an admission that life is meaningless which is what the preacher in Ecclesiastes keeps repeating. However, that doesn’t seem to me what the rest of the Bible teaches.
So how do we reconcile the wonder of birth and the seemingly “goodness” of death?
I found the answer in the Pulpit Commentary. “If a man's life is such that he leaves a good name behind him, then the day of his departure is better than that of his birth, because in the latter he had nothing before him but labor, and trouble, and fear, and uncertainty; and in the former all these anxieties are past, the storms are successfully battled with, the haven is won.”[1]
This says to me that if you have lived your life well then death isn’t anything to fear. Tie this back into the idea that there are different seasons in life and we can see that if you have a good name then the season of life know as death is glorious.
It is like a race. Winning the race is better than beginning the race, but you can’t win if you don’t start. One seems better, but both are important, in another way you can never win if you don’t begin so though death may seem better, without birth there isn’t anything to celebrate. So, I’m still going to celebrate births as the potential for greatness.
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