I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
—Psalm 23:4
You know from experience that you won’t get through life without pain. Agonizing ordeals bushwhack good people, not just bad ones. Those who stick to “paths of righteousness” don’t escape walking “through the dark valley.”
The psalmist wasn’t whistling past the graveyard, trying to convince himself that evil didn’t exist and that death was delusion.
He didn’t try to explain or minimize death; he only said that he didn’t fear it.
Death doesn’t have the power to make you afraid—because you know that instead of life being destroyed by death, death will be destroyed by life when “the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend.”
“Because I live,” he promised, “you also will live.”
The day of death is the birthday of eternal life.