Burial is a big deal in every culture. In ours you will see caskets with locking screws, a long parade of cars with high beams on, concrete vaults with rubber gaskets, plastic flowers at grave sites, green carpeting around the hole as mourners gather, polished granite markers with names and two very important four-digit numbers.

The whole scene is solemn, respectful, and a little creepy. As hard as we try to prettify the death business, we know there’s a lot of pretending going on. Our loved one is not just taking a nap in an expensive steel or mahogany bed. Cemeteries are not merely lovely picnic sites. Graves hold the casualties of mankind’s war with God. Whether the people died of illness or injury or old age, they are still paying the ultimate price for the wages of sin.

Only God has a solution. But wow—what a solution! He is going to undo it all: “On this mountain [the Lord] will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever” (Isaiah 25:7,8).

Did you get that? Faith in Jesus Christ makes you immortal in soul and body. Death itself will die when Jesus comes back, never to intimidate you again. Funeral directors will need to find new work in heaven.