Letters of the Great Divide: God, Death and Eternity

By Jeff Cero

Letters of the Great Divide is based on the premise of people who have passed away and are getting an opportunity to write back to their loved ones who are still alive. Each chapter is a letter of someone who has passed away, reflecting on God, death, and the life they lived for the sake of those they are writing to. Whenever you focus on death,

• Language: English
• Publisher: TOPLINK PUBLISHING, LLC
• Release date: Jan 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948556408

Jeff Cero

Jeff Cero resides in Beaverton, Oregon, where he is a pastor at Beaverton Foursquare Church. He is a former college tennis coach at both George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon and Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, Colorado. He is studying at Corban University for his MDiv and studied at both Portland State University and Ames Christian University, where he received his bachelor's in economics and bachelor's in pastoral studies respectively.

Book preview

LETTERS OF THE GREAT DIVIDE

God, Death and Eternity

Jeff Cero

Copyright © 2018 by Jeff Cero.

Paperback: 978-1-948556-39-2

eBook: 978-1-948556-40-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Ordering Information:

For orders and inquiries, please contact:

1-888-375-9818

www.toplinkpublishing.com

[e-mail]

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

8. Final Note

Introduction

Jesus Christ is faithful to us in several ways throughout our lives, and one of them comes through the avenue of physical death. By itself, it is a very difficult concept for humanity to deal and wrestle with. At the same time, however, it is one of the most incredible and profound ways God reveals himself and his love to us. Light is best seen shining in the darkest of places; in the same way, God’s goodness is best seen shining in a place like death. Jesus revealed the full extent of his love to us through his own physical death. Since then, he has used it to reveal the entirety of his love to us, even though all of the hurt and pain of the deaths of those around us.

Letters of the Great Divide is a book that is based on the preface that people who have passed away are getting a chance to write back to their loved ones. Each chapter is a letter from someone who is reflecting on their life and death for the sake of those they are writing to. Obviously, the book is fiction in the fact that these letters are not real people. However, the content and truths of the letters are not fiction by any means, and the messages through them have great impact on the life we live today.

Whenever you focus on death, you cannot help but focus on eternity as well. Both go hand in hand. God is not limited by physical death, but is in fact over it and in full control of it (Revelation 1:18). God is eternal and everything he does in his love for us is for eternity’s sake, which surpasses physical death. The world and everything it stands for is temporary, while God and everything he does is eternal; physical death is truly excellent at showing the difference between the two. This book is intended to show you God’s love in the midst of a world filled with death, and how God uses it to bring about life in him. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1

From Alan, a 22-year-old college student who died in a car wreck. He hit a patch of ice while driving home from visiting his girlfriend, Sarah, and slammed into a tree. He believed in Jesus.

To Mom,

It is good to be able to finally write to you. Since my death, I have not only had the joy of being in God’s presence and to gain perspective on my life, but I’ve also been able to watch everything you have been doing.

From what I have witnessed, you’ve been having a very difficult time with my death, and who could blame you? It was very sudden, tragic, and out of the ordinary. It has been an extremely difficult, raw, and emotional season of time for you to accept everything that has happened to me. You mourn for me in everything you do, and you do it for several reasons. One being that I was so young when it happened, and another being the fact that my life, my hopes, and dreams—were all in an instant cut down. It’s amazing how quickly everything, including our assumptions about life, can change in an instant. We really do have no control over our lives.

There is one memory I remember vividly of you since I passed away; it was during my funeral when you described to the crowd that my whole life was before me and that the life I had lived had been cut short. There were plans and dreams beyond the day of my death that were left unfulfilled. You’re still not sure why God would do or allow such a thing to happen to me, even though you’ve started to come to grips with the fact I’m not coming back.

As of now, it’s becoming clear that you are having a harder time dealing with the aftermath of my death than you are with my actual death. You have said things like, How could a good God allow my son to die so young? How could a good God take away my son and his whole life in front of him? When will I see him again?

Death has a way of making so apparent to us that something is terribly wrong with our world. It’s something so big that only God can fix it, and only he can give us answers to it.

Your reaction and questions are similar to a story from the Bible, from the book of Revelation specifically. In the book, it describes all the events leading up to the end times when Jesus will come back to redeem the entire world and rid it completely of sin and evil. In one of those specific events recorded, there are the souls of those who had been killed because of their testimony in Jesus under God’s throne. To die for your faith is truly one of the most unjust ways to lose the life that God gave you, yet one of the most glorifying to him. The souls cry out to God, saying How long till you judge the earth and avenge our blood?

They were just like you, Mom, crying out to the Lord about an unjust death. How could something like that happen? How could life go on without God providing justice and making it right?

God’s response to their questions seems anything but rational at first glance. He gives them each a white robe and tells them that they need to wait a little bit longer.

How is clothing an adequate response from God to a deep, true question about death?

The book of Revelation continues on to show that God will one day redeem heaven and earth, and will bring those who suffered in death for the name of Jesus into his new kingdom, where there will be no more tears, death, sin, or suffering. In the story, the white robes that God gives them weren’t simply a matter of clothing; rather, they represented being cleansed and redeemed from sin by the sacrifice of Christ’ blood. Those who are dressed in white robes have been made righteous with God through Christ and have overcome death. God’s first response to their cry for help was to show them they are loved and cleansed by the most undeserved death of all: Jesus dying for all mankind on the cross.

In their cry for redemption of their world, God’s response was to show them they themselves were redeemed.

It’s interesting that God’s first response to those who gave their lives for him was reminding them that they were ultimately made righteous in him by Jesus, and no untimely death could change that amazing truth.

To live and be redeemed in Jesus’ perfect love has always been and always will be his greatest desire for us. It’s always been his hope since the beginning of time when God created the heavens and the earth.

When he created all things, there was no divide between physical life and death, because we weren’t subject to physical death the way we are now. At that time, Adam and Eve were completely pure and did not know any evil whatsoever. How would anyone know what darkness was if they only knew what was light?

They both lived with God knowing only what was good, but the moment both of them ate from the tree of knowledge, which contained the knowledge of both good and evil, everything changed. We went from being solely good to having both good and evil dwell inside of us; we went from knowing light to knowing both light and darkness.

Since we decided to inadvertently have both good and evil inside of us, we separated ourselves from God. The knowledge of darkness and the power of sin pierced us with pain & sorrow that no person should have ever needed to experience; God certainly didn’t want that for us.

In addition to sin and suffering, the knowledge of good and evil brought something new to us that we never wanted, something that mankind still struggles to understand: physical death from