After My Exodus
"Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance" -- 2 Pet. 1:15
After my decease." Thus Peter writes, speaking of his death, which he knew was near at hand. The phrase might be written, "after my exodus." For the word "decease" is, in Greek, the very word that has given its name to the second book of Moses, "Exodus."
It is a very suggestive word the apostle uses here with reference to death. It gives to the thought of death all the richness of suggestion that gathers about the exodus of Israel from the land of Egypt. Israel’s exodus from Egypt meant leaving the land of bondage, oppression, and poverty and going forth into the land of liberty and promise, a land that flowed with milk and honey. It meant leaving the land of aliens and going to their own promised home.
Applying the suggestiveness of this figure to death makes it an event which after all is not to be so dreaded. Many of us fear death. We shrink from it as from nothing else. Even the contemplation of it brings horror to us. But why should it be so? Death only means an "exodus" out of this life of bondage and want and disease and suffering into that land of liberty and promise where there will be no more sorrow, nor crying, nor pain, nor sad partings—that heavenly land where God will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Here we are strangers in an alien land; there we shall be at home.
"After my exodus." "Our citizenship is in heaven." To him who possesses that citizenship, death will be but going home to his own country wherein he shall dwell forevermore in peace and happiness.
