Thoughts on Death and Dying
By: Deji Yesufu
In February 2024, I did a video titled “A WhatsApp Group of Death”. I had lost a relative and I remember that she had told me before her death that she belonged to a WhatsApp group where she and other patients undergoing similar treatment at the hospital belonged. Another patient explained to me that those WhatsApp groups could be difficult sometimes because after a while because they were all treating terminal diseases, people begin to leave the group. Not out of a will to go, but as they die, they become non-functioning members. Ultimately, everybody in the group dies out and there may be no one even to close the group. I chose to call that WhatsApp group, a group of death. In that video, I explained further that we all belong to a WhatsApp group of death. The only difference is that while the one the patients open may close up in two or three years, ours last longer. An example is the WhatsApp groups we belong to that have our secondary and university mates on. If we notice, especially for those of us nearing fifty, a number of us would have been dropping dead – one by one. One day, after say thirty years, the group will close up.
Death is perhaps the one sure thing in this life and we ought to give some thought to it from time to time. The biblical admonition on how to do this is to visit the home of those mourning. Today, my wife and I visited Prof. Fasanmade, former head of the Department of Physiology, University of Ibadan, and long-time senior medical Consultant with the University College Hospital, Ibadan. Mrs Fasanmade had battled her illness very courageously for three years and eventually succumbed to it in the early hours of Monday, 14th October 2024. Prof. told us that his wife was one of fifteen other women who received their diagnoses about the same time three years ago. She was the last one standing. He said that when he looks at it all, he considers it the mercy of God that one has a death-bed to lie upon. In such a situation, you can prepare for the life to come; you can make peace with your maker, and your neighbours, and move right into the afterlife in a blaze of glory. He thinks that it might be God’s judgement on some people to die suddenly. He said he did his best to prepare his family for the passing of their mother and his wife. I could not agree with him any less.
In my essay, Ready to Die, which is one of the articles published in my book HUMANITY, I made the point that the gospel of Prosperity is rendering many Christians powerless in the face of death. Rather than making peace with God and their neighbours, many people spend the end of their lives “faithing” some recovery from the illness. They go from one church to the other, calling on pastors to pray for them to be delivered from the sickness. Some put away all their savings into a church offering, hoping for a miracle which never comes. The sad part is that there are many thieving pastors out there who take advantage of these vulnerable people, collect money from them; and promise that they will see healing, and these people end up dying. It is the families that are left with the burden of burying the dead and living with the losses that have been accrued from all the seeds sown and all the medical bills to offset. If anyone is still listening to these men, who preach the gospel of prosperity, health wealth, etc, you are doing it at peril to both your body and your soul. These men will reap you off in this life, and you will enter eternity without any reward. That was a digression.
At forty-seven, I am giving a lot of thought to my dying already. I have had close shaves with death to want to get this part of my life right. The first thing is that I want to be sure that the peace I have with God is not a phoney one. I want to be sure that I am a true Christian. So, I weigh my comprehension of the gospel message. Do I believe in Jesus or my faith is in another Jesus? Do I espouse the core doctrines of the Christian faith, or am I a heretic? Do I bear the fruit of the Spirit, or am I deceived in my heart? Do I have the witness of the Spirit in my heart that I am a child of God, or am I playing church? How have I handled trials and tribulations? Have I forgiven those who hurt me, and have I sought forgiveness from those people whom I hurt? Again, do I have peace with God? I weigh these questions carefully because even a true Christian can die suddenly, and when I die, I want to meet my God prepared.
Another way I have been preparing for my death is to learn hymns off-head. Paul tells us to sing hymns and spiritual songs in our hearts to our God (Ephesians 5:19). Now, if you do not know these hymns off-head, you cannot sing them off-heart. So, these days I have downloaded hymns to my phone and I just sing a few of them every morning during my devotionals. I want them stuck in my brain – so that when one is incapacitated by illness, I can withdraw them in those times of need and sing the praise of my risen Redeemer. There is one hymn that we are right now learning in the church that has become a favourite of mine. It opens this way:
I’ll Praise My Maker while I’ve breadth;
And when my voice is lost in death
Praise shall employ my nobler powers:
My days of praise shall ne’er be past,
While life, and thought, and being last,
Or immortality endures…
How does a human being talk about praising God while he has breadth, and even when his voice is lost in death? There is something the Christians of those days knew that some of us might never know. This hymn was written by Isaac Watts (1674-1748) who was an English Congregational minister and who also wrote hymns like “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “Joy to the World”. He was regarded as the godfather of hymnology in his time (gleaned from Wikipedia). Watts lived in the days of the English Puritans. It was during those times that the best Protestant theologies were written. It was also during that same period that the confessions were crafted.
Someone mentioned, in the light of a recent sexual scandal that enveloped the reformed world, that not one sexual scandal was ever mentioned among the Puritans. These are the men who could talk about praising their maker when they have breadth and when their voice is lost in death. I can assure you that the day anybody says such a thing in Living Faith or Redeemed Church, that is the day they will send him out of the church. Yet, such thoughts are indeed exceedingly profound. It is now that we make our death bed so that when we lie on it, we can rest assured that all will be well with our souls when we cross to the other side of eternity.
If there are no deaths, and if there are no dying people, there would be no need for church. I was trained in seminary to prepare my parishioners to die. That is all. We live in preparation to meet our maker. Somebody may call it morbid Christianity; I call it biblical Christianity. A cursory look at history and you will see how people’s names are written: they have a start date and an end date. Recently, I was reading the account of Obafemi Awolowo’s trial in his book “The Travails of Democracy”. Many names were mentioned in the books – an incident that happened in 1962. And I noticed that all the individuals mentioned, including the author, are today dead. The only person whose name was mentioned in the book and is still alive is Papa Ayo Adebanjo – the man is almost 100 years old now. Therefore, the healthiest way to think is to think of one’s coming mortality and then make preparations for it.
Amen.
Deji Yesufu is the Pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church Ibadan. He is the author of HUMANITY.
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