When I Die

I have your Bibles with you today. Turn with me, if you would, to 2 Samuel chapter 23, and we're going to be looking at verses 1 through 7. I have spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me, when one rules justly over men, ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth. For does not my house stand so with God? For he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure. For will he not cause to prosper all my help and my desire?

But worthless men are like thorns that are thrown away, for they cannot be taken with the hand, but the man who touches them arms himself with iron and the shaft of a spear, and they are utterly consumed with fire. Bow with me as we go to our Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we lift up the Baileys to you today as Barry has been able to come home from the hospital. We thank you for that answered prayer and pray, Lord, that he'll continue to heal very quickly, that you would be with him and just encourage him and help him to heal fast.

We pray, Heavenly Father, for the Ephraim family that you might continue to be with them in their sorrow, and that you would give to them that peace that passes all understanding. Heavenly Father, the passage before us today was written by David, who was elderly and was making preparations to die. His soon coming death was a certainty. He wanted to be prepared for eternity, but he also wanted his nation to be prepared for eternity.

Over the last two years, we have been through a pandemic and are still in it. We've had loved ones and friends to pass away, and it has forced all of us to consider our own mortality. David prepared for death, so should we.

David stood face to face with death without trembling. Help us to have that type of faith. Help us to fight fear and intrepidation.

Help us to be ready to die well. Help me preach this morning. May Jesus be exalted. May your flock here at Grace Church be edified and helped and fed. For it is in the precious and holy name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.

You may be seated. What does it mean when it says that these were the last words of David? Does that mean that David was on his deathbed, and that he uttered these words, and then he closed his eyes, breathed his last breath, and was taken to glory?

No, not in this case. What we have here are David's last public words to Israel. David has last words that he says from his deathbed, and we will see that when we get over into 1 Kings 2. David is speaking to Solomon as he's getting ready to die, giving him instructions on how to become the new king of Israel.

But folks, what we have here is much more glorious than that. It's written in the form of a psalm. I don't know about you, but it sends shivers up and down my spine when I think about people speaking their last words and just how important they are. I've been pastoring now for 42 years, and in that time of pastoring, I have been with people on their deathbed over and over and over again, and so often I have heard them speak their last words. I'll never forget one particular situation where a Christian dad was dying, and he loved the Lord.

He was on his deathbed. He had his four sons and his wife there, and I was there with them. Three of the sons, the oldest ones, were all Christians. The youngest one was not.

He was a wild, just rebellious hellion. And the father began to go around the bed and speak to each one of them. Spoke to the oldest three sons first, one by one, and he said to them, I want you to know that I love you, and I will see you soon. He got to the last son, and he looked at him, and he got quiet for a minute, and then he said, Son, will you repent of your sins and trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? And the boy said, Dad, I can't do that right now.

I'm not ready to do that right now. And the father said to him, then son, all I can say to you is this, goodbye. A few minutes later, that man died and went to be with the Lord. I looked over at this young man, and you could just see the shock and the bewilderment in his face. And I said to this young man, I said, nobody escapes death.

Hebrews 9, verse 27 tells us that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that, the judgment. And that young man looked around the room, and he said, Dad said to each one of you, I will see you soon, but he said to me, goodbye. And he burst into tears.

R.G. Lee, the great Baptist pastor, was on his deathbed, had his family and some close friends that were around him, and he went into a coma for several hours. As he was in that coma, all of a sudden, he just stopped breathing for about a minute, and everybody thought, well, he's probably gone. And then all of a sudden, he sat straight up in bed, and he looked right over at his daughter-in-law, and he said to his daughter-in-law, he said, honey, do you remember that sermon that I preached called A Place Called Heaven? And she said, yes, sir, that was my favorite sermon that you've ever preached.

And he said, I want you to know, I didn't do it justice. And he fell right back down on his pillow. A few minutes later, he was with the Lord.

D.O. Moody was preaching a sermon, and he felt himself dying as he was up at the pulpit. His heart was just giving out. He looked down on the front row, and there was R.A. Torrey, great preacher on the front row, and he said to Torrey, Torrey, I need you to get up here quickly, and you need to finish this sermon.

I believe that I'm dying. He said, I need several of the deacons to come up and help me to the back room. And he was a huge man, and several of the deacons came up.

They literally picked him up. They carried him to the back room. They laid him out on the floor, and he was laying on the floor. He passed out and was unconscious. After a few minutes, he awoke out of that unconsciousness, and he said, the earth recedes.

Heaven is open to me. And his son, Will, said, Dad, I think you were dreaming. And he said, oh, no, I was not dreaming.

He said, this was like a trance. And he said, if this is death, and death is sweet, it is not a valley to cross. He said, I am going to be with the Lord, and I can't wait to see him face to face.

I think of Simon Peter's death. Simon Peter was in prison in Rome. His wife was in that same prison in another section. And they got ready, Nero did, to order him to be crucified. And Nero said, when you crucify Peter, I want you to crucify his wife first, and I want you to make him watch her crucifixion.

Maybe it will break him. And so they brought Peter and his wife out to this hill. They laid his wife out on a cross. They took huge nails, and they drove those nails through her hands and through her feet. And they lifted the cross up in the air, and there she started just bleeding, and he was there under the cross looking at her. And tears were rolling down his cheeks, and he began to encourage her and say, honey, remember the Lord, remember the Lord, remember the Lord.

She died very quickly. And then the executioner turned around to him and said, Peter, do you have anything to say? We're getting ready to crucify you. And he said, yes, when you crucify me, crucify me upside down, for I'm not worthy to be crucified like Jesus. Brothers and sisters, that's the way to die.

That's the way to die, glorifying Christ even as you go. Now back to David's last words to Israel. And I got four points I want to share with you. Point one is God-given authority. Look with me at verses one and two. Now these are the last words of David, the oracle of David, the son of Jesse, the oracle of the man who was raised on high, the anointed of the God of Jacob, the sweet psalmist of Israel. The Spirit of the Lord speaks by me.

His word is on my tongue. Let me get personal. How often and how deep do you think about death? Here's another question.

How often and how deep should you think about death? I got a call this couple weeks ago, it's been two or three weeks ago now, from Doug Colwell. And Doug Colwell's a good friend of mine. He lives down at the beach now.

He's 72 years old. And Doug said, Doug, I want you to know that I've been to the doctor. They diagnosed me with stage four cancer.

They have said that it's metastasized all over my body to the major organs, and they're not giving me long to live. He said, could you send me some verses to meditate on? Could you send me some sermons that might help me to prepare for death? I prayed for him and assured him that I would do these things, and then got off the phone. A little bit later, I saw Eugene. And I told Eugene about what was going on with Doug Colwell. And Eugene said, Doug, you ought to get him to read the book Heaven by Randy Alcorn. He said, man, that put a hunger in my heart for heaven. And I thought, man, that's a great idea. And I said, it put a hunger in my heart for heaven too, and it was just filled with scripture.

And so I called Doug back and told him to get that great book. In his book on heaven, Randy Alcorn said this, As human beings, we have a terminal disease called mortality. The current death rate is 100%. Unless Christ returns soon, we're all going to die. We don't like to think about death, yet worldwide, three people die every second.

180 every minute, nearly 11,000 every hour. If the Bible is right about what happens to us after death, it means that more than 250,000 people every day go either to heaven or to hell. David said, show me, O Lord, my life's end and the number of my days. Let me know how fleeting is my life. You have made my days a mere hand breath. The span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man's life is but a breath.

Picture a single breath escaping your mouth on a cold day and dissipating into the air, such as the brevity of life here. The wise will consider what awaits us on the other side of this life that so quickly ends. Most people live unprepared for death, but those who are wise will go to a reliable source to investigate what's on the other side.

And if they discover that the choices they make during their brief stay in this world will matter in this world to come, they'll want to adjust those choices accordingly. What is the reliable source that Randy Alcorn was pointing to? It is simply and plainly the Word of God. Folks, man's ideas and man's prognostications are not enough. But the Word of God is what we can trust, and we can trust implicitly. David is saying, what I'm writing to you, Israel, it is not just my conjectures, it's not just my ideas.

What I am writing to you is this. It is the plenary, verbal, infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God. Folks, what do you believe about the Bible? Do you believe the Bible contains eras? Do you believe that the Bible has contradictions? Do you believe that the Bible contains the Word of God, or do you believe the Bible is the Word of God? In 2 Timothy 3, verse 16, Paul said, All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and instruction in righteousness. And then in Hebrews 4, verse 12, the scripture says this. It says, For the Word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and the joints of the marrow, and the discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

In Matthew chapter 5, verse 18, Jesus said, For verily I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or tittle shall pass away from my law. And what is a jot? A jot is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It's called a yod. It looks like a little apostrophe. What is a tittle?

A tittle is one little mark on some of the Hebrew letters. And so what was Jesus saying? He was saying, not only are the books of the Bible inspired, not only are the statements of the scripture inspired, not only are the words of the scripture inspired, but even the letters and even portions of letters are absolutely accurate. Folks, I want you to know that truth is not relative. Truth is absolutely absolute. And as the writers of the New Testament wrote there the scriptures out 2,000 years ago, it came off their pen exactly as God wanted it as perfect truth. In the Old Testament, when they wrote there the prophecies, when they wrote the history, what we have there is perfect, absolute truth.

Truth does not change. In verses 1 and 2, David is saying, Listen to these words carefully, for these are not my words that are being spoken, these are the words of God. Point 2, gratitude for God's grace, verses 3 and 4. The God of Israel has spoken.

The rock of Israel has said to me, When one rules justly over men ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining on a cloud this morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth. David, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, praises God for the grace that made him king and helped him to live out his kingship. He remembers back to Samuel, the prophet, coming to his house when he was 16 years old and coming to Jesse's home, his dad, and he was going to, by the power of God, anoint one of the sons of Jesse to be the new king of Israel. He passed over the first seven brothers and he chose David by God's inspiration.

David would never forget that. He anointed him to be the king. And then not only that, but he remembers back to his fight against Goliath the giant and how the Lord directed the stone that came right out of his slingshot, directed it right to the forehead, right between his eyes of the giant and killed him there on the spot. He remembers how Saul came after him to kill him time and time again and God protected him every single time. David realized that there were times of failure in his kingship. There were times when he gave in to the flesh. There were times when he trusted David instead of trusting God. But David was a king who knew this truth. God is the rock.

God is the rock of Israel and I will live out my kingship by fearing God. I think most Americans are extremely sad in the day and time in which we live as we have seen a shift to secularism and socialism. We have seen an acceptance of almost every form of sexual immorality that there is. We have political corruption that is so nasty and so entrenched that it seems almost impossible for us to see a genuine change take place. We have seen the Holocaust of abortion where abortion, the killing of babies, has been just pushed down our throat whether we liked it or not.

We have seen a horrible deadly disease, COVID-19, used to create political oppression. And we've asked the question, why has this happened? David is telling us here because you have rejected the Lord as your rock, as your foundation, as your light, and as your strength.

And because you are not living out your life in the fear of God. You know what we can do as the church? We can say it's not our fault.

It's the culture. We can't point at the culture because what has God commanded us to do? He has commanded us to be a bright shining light to this nasty, ugly culture that we are living in. And we haven't done that. We haven't lived in the fear of God.

We've done pretty much what we wanted to do, lived out how we want to live. We've chosen compromise over holiness. We've chosen social justice over biblical justice.

We've chosen relativism over the Word of God. Look at verse 4. See God's promise to those who truly fear Him. It says He dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloud this morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth. Earlier in this sermon I mentioned Simon Peter as he was preparing for his own crucifixion.

His wife had just died. And the executioner says, Do you hear anything you want to say before you're crucified? And he says, Yes, crucify me upside down, for I'm not worthy to be crucified like Jesus.

And folks, they did that. He was crucified upside down in order that people would realize how much He loved Jesus and how much He wanted to glorify Him. Now I want you for just a minute, if you will, to think about that and what a glorious situation that was and where Peter was in his spiritual life at that point in time. Then I want you to go with me, if you will, all the way back in time to the night before Jesus is being crucified. And at that point in time, Peter is in the courtyard. They are taking Jesus through this mock trial. Peter has already denied Jesus two times.

And this teenage girl comes up to Peter and she says to Peter, I think I know you. Yeah, yeah, you're one of the disciples. You're one of his followers.

That's who you are. And what did Peter do? Peter says, No, I'm not. I don't know him. Have no idea what you're talking about. And he cursed and swore that he did not even know who Jesus was.

Just didn't know. Just as Jesus prophesied, the cock crowed the second time right after his third denial. And the Scripture says that Peter went out and wept bitterly. How do you get from there, where Peter was at this point in time, to Peter standing before those that were crucifying him and absolutely blowing them away with his faith, with his spiritual intestinal fortitude, and with his great desire to glorify God?

How did he get that far along spiritually? I think most of the heart growth took place in Peter when Jesus came back in his new resurrected body and met Peter there at the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus asked Peter one question three times. He said, Peter, do you love me? Peter said, Yes, Lord, you know I love you.

Jesus said, Then feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Peter, do you even like me? Oh, yes, Lord, you know that I love you.

Then feed my sheep. Peter had denied Jesus Christ three times. Jesus compelled him at this point in time to confess his love to Jesus three times. And when he did, all of a sudden there was a change that took place in Peter's heart. He realized Jesus still loves me. He has forgiven me, and he is going to use me. Peter made plenty of mistakes for the rest of his life, but let me tell you one mistake he never made again. Never, ever again did he deny the Lord Jesus Christ. Why not?

Here's the answer. Grace, grace, grace, sovereign grace. Folks, Peter was able to die well. Why grace? David was able to die well.

Why grace? Do you want to die well? Then revel in God's grace. Folks, what if you go to the doctor this week, and your doctor says to you, You have cancer in advanced stage.

You're not going to live more than two more weeks. What are you going to do? Are you going to just fall apart? Are you going to give up and throw up your hands?

No. You go back to those times of grace in your life. That time when you had a loved one to pass away, and you thought it was just going to destroy you. And you prayed about it, and the Lord put it into your heart a peace that passes all understanding. You remember that time when you sinned. It was a bad sin. And you thought, God could never forgive me for this. And yet you confessed that sin. And you repented of that sin. And you felt the Lord's loving arms coming around you and holding you.

And you knew that you had been forgiven for all of eternity. Maybe it was a sermon that you heard. And as that sermon was being preached, the truth of God just drove down into your heart, and drove that fear away.

That's the power of sovereign grace. And folks, that's what happened to Martin Ephard. Less than two weeks ago, I preached Martin Ephard's funeral message.

I told the congregation at that point in time that a few weeks before that, that Martin had called me up. They had just taken him to the hospital. He had COVID.

It was just really bad. He was having a hard time talking, a hard time breathing. He was just really, really struggling with all this.

He was going through this very difficult time. And as we talked, he said, Doug, he said, I had the privilege of watching Grace's Sunday night service online last Sunday. And he said, Jay Krestar was preaching the sermon, and said he preached out of Isaiah on the sovereignty of God. He said, Doug, please tell Jay how much that sermon immensely helped me. For it reminded me that God is sovereign over this situation.

He said, Doug, I want you to know that I belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. And this situation that I'm in is not in my hands. It is not in the doctor's hands. It is not in the devil's hands. It is in God's hands. And if this is my time to go to be with him, then so be it I'm ready to go.

And I couldn't wait to talk to Cindy about that. And I said to her, bless God, that's the way we all ought to die. We ought to die with no fear, with no confusion, but with an unbridled confidence that Jesus holds us fast.

That's what David is doing here. In his last words to Israel, he is expressing gratitude for grace. Gratitude for grace that helped him to defeat a giant. Gratitude for grace that helped him lead the people of Israel. And gratitude for grace that gave him boldness as he's approaching death. Takes us to point three, dependence on future grace. Look at verse five. For does not my house stand so with God? For he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things insecure.

For will he not cause to prosper all my help and my desire? In his dying, David trusted God for what he had done in the past. Let me tell you, he was trusting God even more for what God was going to do in the future. For he admits his failures in verse five, how there were many failures in his life and he knew that. But then he remembers back to the promise that God gave him in 2 Samuel 7. He remembers the promise that God gave him of the everlasting covenant, that God was going to send his promised Messiah. And that promised Messiah would be a perfect and sinless king. David did not have full revelation here, but he knew this, that God had a plan. And that plan was not built on David's integrity, it was built on the integrity of the coming Messiah. Folks, God's plan before Adam and Eve was created, God's plan before the foundation of this earth was that he would send his only begotten Son to this earth to live a perfect and sinless life, and then to die a substitutionary death for his people. That where he would take our sin and give us his righteousness, where he would take our hell and give us his heaven. If you're a born-again Christian today and you fear death, then my advice to you is this, quit looking at yourself and start looking at Jesus. Did Jesus promise to save you?

Yes, he did. He said, He who comes to me, I will in no wise cast out. Paul said that all the promises of God in Christ Jesus are yes and amen. In John 10, Jesus said, The thief cometh not, but to kill, steal, and destroy.

But I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it abundantly. In John 10, Jesus said, And I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall anyone pluck them out of my hand. In Romans 8, verse 38 and 39, it was Paul who said this, For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you're a Christian and you fear death, then remember this, you weren't saved on the basis of your goodness, or your righteousness, or your merits.

You were saved on the goodness, and righteousness, and merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when you stand before the Lord in that final judgment, and you stand before Him, and He looks at you, He's not going to see your sin, for it is washed away in the precious blood of Jesus. And what will He see?

He won't see your sin, He will see His own perfect righteousness. Death is not fearful to us. Paul said, For me to live is Christ, but to die is gain.

Folks, there will be no waiting period for us. 2 Corinthians 5-8 says, For the Christian to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Why was David so fearless?

Because he quit looking at King David, and he started looking at King Jesus. If you're a Christian, you're afraid to die, then you are believing a lie. You're believing a lie. 2 Timothy 1-7 says this, For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind. Notice what he says about fear here. He doesn't call it a feeling.

He doesn't call it an emotion. He calls it a spirit. And if that spirit is not coming from God, guess who it's coming from? It's coming from Satan. Folks, you don't have to put up with that if you're a believer.

You do not have to put up with that. Believers, listen. Don't fear death. I promise you this. Heaven will not be a disappointment.

Point 4. A warning of neglected grace. Look at verses 6-7. But worthless men are like thorns that are thrown away, and they might not be taken with a hand, but the man who touches them arms himself with iron in the shaft of a spear, and they are utterly consumed with fire.

David ends his last words to Israel with a powerful warning. Worthless men are like thorns that are thrown away and consumed in the fire. Now, who are these worthless men that he's talking about here? He could have just been talking about his enemies. He could have said the Philistines, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, all those. It's not what he does.

Race or ethnicity is not the question here. The question is, what will these men do with God's covenant? What will they do with God's covenant? The worthless men did not rejoice over it. They did not approach it with fear and trembling. They ignored it. They repudiated it. And they lived as if God didn't even exist. They rejected the revelation of God.

They rejected the Word of God. They said truth is relative. We will only believe that which pleases the flesh. So you've got your truth, and I've got my truth, and everybody's happy.

There's a problem with that. My truth and your truth are not truth. There is only one truth, and that is God's truth. If that truth is rejected, there are eternal consequences. Listen to what Jesus said in John 3, 18-19. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment.

The light has come into the world, and people love darkness rather than light because their works were evil. We don't have the full revelation of hell in the Old Testament. But David understood that wicked people who die in unbelief would spend forever in an eternal hell.

He understood that. We get over into the New Testament, and there's great revelation about what hell's really like. And pastors today who will preach on hell are mocked, and they're made fun of, and they're laughed at. And people say, well, they're just cruel, and they're harsh, and they're mean. Why aren't they like Jesus, who was kind and always loving?

Let me tell you something, folks. Jesus spoke more on hell than anybody else in the Bible. Jesus spoke twice as much about hell as he did about heaven. Jesus never watered it down.

He never soft-pedaled the subject of divine judgment in order to placate an unbeliever. He described it. He described it as a place of eternal suffering, as a place of burning, as a place of solitary confinement, as a place of darkness so great that it could be felt.

He described it as a place of memory. So those that are in hell will remember every sermon they've ever heard. They'll remember every gospel tract they've ever read. They'll remember every tug of the Holy Spirit upon their heart, and they will know that they are in eternal torment, and it can never change, and it will never, ever end. With that said, I want to close this sermon with some questions that Randy Alcorn gives us that I think are great questions to ask ourselves, and I think we ought to read them often.

So in your newsletter today, I have those questions written out for you, so listen very closely to what he said. What will last for eternity? Not your car, your house, degrees, trophies, or businesses. What will last for eternity is every service to the needy, every dollar given to feed the hungry, every cup of cold water given to the thirsty, every investment in missions, every prayer for the needy, every effort invested in evangelism, and every moment spent caring for precious children, including rocking them to sleep and changing their diapers. The Bible says we'll reap in eternity what we've planted in this life. Setting our minds on heaven is a discipline that needs to be learned. Pastors and church leaders should train themselves and their people to be heaven-minded. This means teaching and preaching about heaven. It means presenting a biblical theology of heaven that can shape and transform people's lives, liberating them from the shallow hopelessness of life centered on a fallen and failing world.

Here's the questions. Do I daily reflect on my mortality? Do I daily realize that there are only two destinations, heaven or hell, and that I and every person I know will go to one or the other? Do I daily remind myself that this world is not my home and that everything in it will burn, leaving behind only what's eternal? Do I daily recognize that my choices and actions have a direct influence on the world to come? Do I daily realize that my life is being examined by God, the audience of one, and that the only appraisal of my life that will ultimately matter is His? Do I daily reflect on the fact that my ultimate home will be the new earth, where I will see God and serve Him as a resurrected being in a resurrected human society, where I will overflow with joy and delight in drawing near to God by studying Him and His creation, and where I will exercise to God's glory dominion over His creation?

Take those questions home. Go over them often, and the Lord will use that in your life to help you get ready to die. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, there are important issues in life, but there are none more important than where we'll spend eternity. I pray that you'll convict us all, convict us as Christians, that we might love you more deeply and obey you more faithfully. We pray for any unbeliever here today, that you would open spiritual eyes and ears and show them that Jesus Christ is our hope, our only hope. Help us to realize the urgency of the gospel.

Help us to fight the temptation to procrastinate. Do not let us live with delayed repentance. Our prayer this morning is this, sanctify the believers and save the lost. Thank you, Jesus, for your death on the cross, the shedding of your blood, your resurrection from the dead. You are our hope. For it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.