730 The Spiritual Man
resist aright, they would triumph. How often saints attribute these to
their age or to some other factor and miss the real import of it all.
The Lord Jesus is returning soon. We must therefore wage a total
war with death. Even as we fight against sin, the world and Satan, so
must we fight against death. We should not only ask for victory; we
should also lay hold of it. We should claim the triumph of Christ
over death in all its fullness. Were we to review our past experience
beneath the light of God we would discover how many times we
have been assailed by death without our knowledge. We endlessly
attributed happenings to other causes and thereby lost the power to
resist. If we had recognized certain events to have been the assaults
of death, we would have been strengthened by God to have
experientially overcome death. In that case our experience would
have been like passing over broken bridges and torn-up roads: for in
that experience all our surroundings appear to demand our death—
yet we cannot die: time and again we despair of life, still we cannot
die: we ask ourselves why we now must die, for though the battle
fiercely escalates, we do not feel like dying: we seem instead to cry
out—I do not want to die! What is the implication of this kind of
experience? Simply that God is leading us to fight our last battle with
death before we are raptured. These assaults are designed for no
other purpose than to frustrate our being raptured alive.
We should clamp shut the wide-open gates of hades with the
victory of Christ. We should stand against death, forbidding it to
make any inroad in our bodies. Resist everything possessing the
disposition of death. View sickness, weakness and suffering with this
attitude. Sometimes the body may not be conscious of anything, yet
death is at work already. Anxiety in the spirit or sorrow in the soul
may produce death as well. God is now calling us to the rapture;
accordingly, we must subdue whatever might hinder that event.
God places His children in various circumstances which impel
them hopelessly and helplessly to commit their lives by a thread of