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NOWHERE MAN #5
MAKING SOMEONE OUT OF NO ONE
I don’t know if what I’m about to confess will resonate
with you or not, but let me try. It was a tough little moment of reality
when I first thought about it, but here goes: I could not recall, or remember
if I’d EVER heard, a single name out of the many people who died in the
Oklahoma City explosion back on April 19, 1995. Not one of them. In some
tragedies — like Columbine High School — some of the names end up etched
in our consciousness. But in the Timothy McVeigh bomb blast that rocked
the world, I think many of us just had that horrible number, 168, pound
into our brains. But no names. We didn’t know who these people were. You
had to go and look for names.
So we did. When McVeigh was finally sentenced in June of 1997, Newsweek
Magazine did a sidebar featuring two relatives of victims; they both shared
their point of view regarding whether or not this mass killer should be
executed. Donnetta Apple, who was FOR the death penalty, lost a brother:
Tom Hawthorne. Bud Welch, who was opposed to the idea of killing McVeigh,
lost his daughter. Julie Welch, who was a Spanish-language translator
working for the Social Security Administration at the Murrah building,
lost her life as well in the blast. So there we have a couple of names.
Tom. And Julie. And 166 others.
We’ve been thinking for four days now about the reality that people are
often treated as nameless, as statistics. The “Nowhere Man.” The “Nowhere
Woman.” Oh, we’ve got the numbers: 168 people dead. Ten thousand in this
earthquake. Twenty thousand over in that flood. Five hundred thousand
dying because of cigarettes each year. The tragedies pile up and the numbers
pile up . . . but we don’t have names. And maybe we’re glad for that,
for the numbing results of such anonymity.
But friend, today I’d like to take this concept of “Nowhere Man” a bit
further. We’ve rejoiced over the fact that even when WE don’t know names,
God always does. God knew Tom Hawthorne intimately; He knew absolutely
everything in the world about him: the hairs on his head, the cells of
his body, the thoughts in his brain. Everything. The same with Julie Welch.
From the moment she was conceived, we read in the book of Isaiah, chapter
42, God knew her. Starting with when she was just a single cell until
9:03 a.m., Central Daylight Time, on April 19, 1995, God knew her in every
aspect, every detail.
But now a question. In that fateful bomb blast, with two tons of firepower
created by fertilizer and fuel oil, there had to be some victims who almost
just vaporized. One minute they were there, the next they were gone. And
think with me of some of the other horrible crimes or tragedies of human
history. How about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In one fleeting instant, some
people just dissipated; they evaporated into a cloud of radiation. There
wasn’t a body left; there wasn’t DNA left; there wasn’t ANYTHING left.
They were gone. They truly were “Nowhere People.”
Ships go down at sea; half a century later some of the bodies of victims
are just plain gone. There aren’t bones left, or tissue, or remains of
any kind. The sharks and just the ebb and flow of currents and tides have
erased any and every trace of what used to be a PERSON.
Well, we could go on and on. What about cremation? Someone you loved is
simply GONE now. For a day or two there were ashes, but once you took
that final journey, that boat ride out to sea, and sprinkled those ashes
— well, what was there left but memories?
I think we could accept as Christians that even when a person is just
plain GONE — not only dead in the grave but utterly and completely GONE
— that they would not be a “Nowhere Man” to God. You and I, several years
after the funeral, or after the bomb blast, might struggle with the inner
turmoil of realizing that the memories are fading. I remember that poignant
line from Shadowlands where a grieving C. S. Lewis says to his brother,
“I can’t see her, Warnie. I can’t see her face anymore.” But that’s not
going to happen with God, is it? Again, Isaiah 49:16:
“Though she [the mother with a baby] may forget, I
will not forget you.”
God’s memory doesn’t begin to dim with the passage
of time, does it?
But now this question. Believers around the world, not just in Oklahoma
City, hold onto the Bible promise of the Resurrection. And if you read
through the wonderful Resurrection chapter — I’m referring to First Corinthians
15, of course — you notice in verse after verse God’s guarantee that you
and I and all who confess the name of Jesus will be present there . .
. WITH . . . BODIES. We won’t be disembodied; we won’t be just “(quote)
souls.”
“The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised
IMperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown
in weakness, it is raised in power.”
And it goes on like that for verse after verse, talking
about bodies, REAL bodies, IMMORTAL bodies. In fact, in the New International
Version, the heading for the passage beginning in verse 35 is exactly
that: “The Resurrection BODY.”
Philippians chapter three says much the same thing. Notice:
“When [Jesus] comes back He will take these dying bodies
of ours and change them into glorious bodies LIKE HIS OWN, using the same
mighty power that He will use to conquer all else everywhere.”
Let me ask you a question. When Jesus came out of the
tomb on Sunday morning, did He have a body? He most certainly did. That
body had nail scars in the hands and a jagged scar in His side where that
Roman spear went in. What’s more, when Jesus reappeared to His disciples
— you can read about it in Luke 24 — He made the very point: “I have a
BODY. Feel My hands; feel My feet. I’m not a ghost.” In fact, He then
said, “Hey, what have you got to eat? I’m hungry.” And here in the New
Testament we have the promise that all of us, even if we’ve been in the
grave for fifty years or fifty THOUSAND years, are going to have bodies
again too.
So friend, how does this work? Bodies in a casket decay. After a while
there’s just bones left, then nothing. Bodies in the Alfred P. Murrah
building disappeared in the blast. Bodies on the Titanic were swallowed
up by the deep. How will God take these “Nowhere People,” these people
who have literally vanished from the face of the universe, and bring them
back out of NOTHING?
Well, let me make two points about that. First of all, in the words of
the recent contemporary Christian song: “All Things Are Possible.” With
God, that is. Listen. God doesn’t need body remains or DNA or a skin sample
in order to recreate one of His children. The almighty Father who fashioned
me and you in the first place can do so again. Out of scratch. Bombs and
sharks and holocaust fires are no match for the creative power of the
God who knelt down in the dust and made Adam out of dust.
But here’s the second point, and I tip my hat gratefully to our friend
Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi, who has written a great, scholarly book entitled
Immortality Or Resurrection? It’s an in-depth study on the Bible questions
regarding death and the resurrection and just what is going to happen
to us when Jesus returns to this earth.
He establishes, first of all, that in the new earth, you and I, with our
new bodies, WILL have identities. You will still be you; I will still
be me. The disciples recognized Jesus that Sunday; it was HIM. Even in
glorified, perfect, never-to-die-again bodies, you and I and all of God’s
children will still have that essential spark, that imprint, that makes
us US. Maybe you remember the line from the great “Love” chapter, First
Corinthians 13:
“I shall know fully, even as I am fully KNOWN.”
But now the second word picture about the awesome power
of our God. Bacchiocchi reminds us of how often the Bible talks about
a special book up in heaven; it’s called the “Book of Life.” Philippians
4:3 mentions it; so does the book of Revelation. We read about how God’s
saints have their names written in that book.
“The survival of personal identity,” Bacchiocchi writes,
“is not dependent upon the continuity of physical or spiritual substances,
but on GOD’S preservation of the character or personality of each individual.”
What does this mean? It means that God remembers you.
Your body may decay: “dust to dust.” Doesn’t matter. A bomb may destroy
every tiny piece of tissue. Doesn’t matter. A million years could go by;
photographs would fade; archives describing you might be destroyed. Doesn’t
matter. If your name is in that book, if your identity is imprinted in
the loving mind of God, He can bring you back in glorified perfection
. . . IN AN INSTANT! “In the twinkling of an eye.”
Bacchiocchi quotes from theologian Charles Hartshorne, who shares this
beautiful truth:
“At death human beings ‘live on in the complete and
INFALLIBLE memory of God. . . . Death cannot be the destruction or even
the fading of the book of one’s life; it can only mean the fixing of its
concluding page. Death writes: “The End” upon the last page, but nothing
further happens to the book, by way of either addition or subtraction.’”
And of course, when God has you in HIS Book, the last
page of OUR little book isn’t “The End” at all.
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