All sorrow, hardship, difficulty, struggle, pain, unhappiness, and ultimately death itself can be traced to rebellion against God's love for us.

The root of all sin goes back to the garden of Eden. The result of Adam and Eve's disobedience was exile for them and all their descendants after them. Living in exile means living in a perpetual state of disconnection and separation that ultimately leads to death if not remedied. There are four aspects to exile: spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical.

God hates sin—not because it harms Him but because it hurts us. When sin enters our lives, it seeks to destroy us. When our lives or society surrender to sin, we become like the demoniac—possessed by a self-destructive spirit that brings great pain and shame into our lives.

The tragedy of sin is that it diverts gifts. The person who has a genuine capacity for loving becomes promiscuous, maybe sexually, or maybe by becoming frivolous and fickle, afraid to make a commitment to anyone or anything. The person with a gift for passionate intensity squanders it in angry tirades and, given power, becomes a demagogue.

No one was innocent in the sight of God anyway. Now imagine the cannibalism, rape, murder, child sacrifice, and so on. Yet God was patient. He gave a 120-year countdown to the Flood (Genesis 6:313) and even sent a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:514).

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

the swallowing up of death in victory, and death is here pointedly named as the penalty for sin imposed by the Law, so that the resurrection is the final removal of the condemnation of sin.

Who at the present time thinks of Easter as intended and adapted to fill the soul with a new jubilant assurance of the forgiveness of sin as the guarantee of the inheritance of eternal life?

Oh, may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Even though we can't have all we want, we ought to be thankful we don't get all we deserve.