Coffins, Rottenness, Glasses and Pieces of Paper

I don’t remember exactly when I attended my first funeral and made the long walk down to the casket to look at the recently deceased… maybe when I was a young adult. However, at this point in my life I’ve been to plenty of funerals and seen plenty of caskets.

I’m always kind of shocked by the cost of coffins. They can be quite ornate and I guess you can spend as much as you want to on them. Coffins of course are single use items… they end up being buried 6 feet underground where no one can see their magnificent beauty. And in that vessel are the remains of perhaps the most beloved person in the world to you… slowly disintegrating in that beautiful container.

Jesus told the Jewish religious elite that they were like beautiful coffins full of dead men’s bones. He meant by that… that on the outside they had the “right” look. They dressed appropriately, they washed their hands before their meals, they prayed like angels from Heaven and even cried with you at the loss of a loved one. But on the inside… they were rotten.

Looks can be deceiving unless God is the one doing the looking and when God looked at them they looked like folks who were destined to burn in the fires of Hell for eternity.

So what did God see that we can’t see?

- He saw people who were prideful and loved attention from others.

- They loved their money and wouldn’t spend it on the people who needed it for just the basics of living… food, clothing and shelter.

- They loved “judging” other people, like prostitutes, adulterers, the sick, etc. They were too holy to associate with those types lest somehow by association they too would be stained with uncleanness.

- They emphasized their favorite spiritual directives like tithing (giving 10% of everything they owned) and minimized God’s favorite spiritual directives… justice, mercy and faithfulness.

- They would fabricate lies to achieve their goals… like accusing Jesus of Blasphemy.

Well the reality is you don’t have to be God to see some of those things unless you are wearing rose tinted glasses and everything looks rosey to you.

I don’t remember anything about that first funeral I attended but I do remember my dad’s funeral. They said the embalmer did a great job and dad “looked good” but he didn’t look good to me. The only thing I like to remember about that open casket were the grandkids writing notes to their grandpa and sticking them in his suit jacket.

When I think of him I like to think of his great love for the Lord that manifested itself in the way he treated other people… with justice, mercy and faithfulness.

His coffin may be filled with dead men’s bones and a few tattered pieces of paper but that’s not him and that’s not where he is.

The most important person to look at is our selves. Let’s be sure to start with that person before we take on our brethren, family and friends. Let’s pull those rose tinted glasses off and take a long look at ourselves through the lens of God’s eyes which are found in his word and we can all conquer the curse of the coffin which is filled with dead men’s bones doomed to suffer for eternity.