Death

2 Corinthians 5:1-5
Of all the fears that plague the heart of man, none is greater than the fear of death. It is our greatest fear, the sum of all other fears.
We are afraid to die.
We are afraid of what happens when we die.
Death is the fundamental human problem.
Life is short and so uncertain. “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14b). Moses said to the Lord in Psalm 90:5-6, “You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning-though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.” It is sometimes said that nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. But that is not wholly true. A clever man with a good lawyer can find a way around most if not all of his taxes, but no one escapes death. As George Bernard Shaw remarked, “The statistics on death have not changed. One out of one person dies.”
Worldwide, there are approximately 56,600,000 deaths each year. That works out to 4.7 million per month, 155,000 per day, 6,500 per hour, 107 per minute, and 1.8 per second. The Greek playwright Sophocles said it this way: “Of all the great wonders, none is greater than man. Only for death can he find no cure.”
Does death win in the end? On this side of the grave it’s hard to tell. Left to our observations, we don’t know much beyond the familiar words of Ecclesiastes. There is “a time to be born and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:2). Visit any cemetery and you can’t really tell much difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. Oh, you can intuit something by reading the markers, but the dead lie buried side by side, six feet underground. There they are, all grouped together, young and old, male and female, rich and poor, famous and infamous, Christians and nonbelievers.
Does death win in the end? On this side of the grave it’s hard to tell. 
Or so it seems.
Death is not the end of the story for those who know the Lord. The Bible tells us what lies ahead for those who know Jesus. As we come to 2 Corinthians 5, we discover wonderful truths that give us hope as we face death with all its dark fears.
This passage as a whole is one of the most difficult among all the things Paul wrote, and yet once you get past the difficulties, there is a simplicity about it that attracts the believing heart. Even if we do not understand every detail, the first impression it leaves with the reader gives hope as we look ahead to the end of our earthly journey and wonder, “What’s next?” Paul tells us in very picturesque language that we have nothing to fear, that no matter how we die or when or where, and no matter what may be our physical condition at the moment of death, we have a promise from God that death itself cannot break.
I. The Certainty of the Resurrection Body 
“Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands” (verse 1).
Surely the most important part of this verse comes in the first three words. “Now we know.” Death itself confronts us with many mysteries. No one who reads these words can say with certainty how much longer they will live. In the last few months I celebrated my 20th birthday. Will I live to celebrate my 21st? The odds are in my favor, but the odds are nothing more than actuarial calculations. Every single breath we take is a gift from God. I’ve been breathing more or less continually for 20 years and not thinking much about it, but it’s true. Every single breath is gift from the Almighty. I am not guaranteed another day, much less another year.
As to what happens after we die, science has nothing useful to tell us. The great researchers have no certain knowledge about what happens a minute after we die. We will not get the answer from philosophy or from history. If you visit a vast cemetery, all you know for certain is it is full of dead people who once were alive. Try as you might, you cannot divine from studying the dead what happens when we die.