The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC) wrote about a tribe that, at a birth, began a period of mourning because they anticipated the suffering that the infant would face if it lived to adulthood. However alien to us the ritual might seem, there is some logic to it.

 Millennia later, an advertisement in America in the early 20th century read, “Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?”

 Life can be hard enough, we know, even if we believe in God and in the hope of eternity. Imagine, though, how hard it is for those who have no hope of anything beyond the short and often troubled existence here. More than one secular writer has commented on the meaninglessness of human existence, since we all not only die, but we all live with the realization that we are going to die. And this realization is what makes the whole project of human life, which is often hard and sorrowful in and of itself, seemingly of null and void. One thinker referred to humans as nothing but “hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” Rather macabre, but, again, it’s hard to argue with the logic.

 Of course, in contrast to all this, we have the biblical promise of eternal life in Jesus. And that is the key: we have this hope in Jesus and what His death and resurrection offer us. Otherwise, what hope do we have?

 Read 1 Corinthians 15:12-19. What is Paul saying here about how closely related Christ’s resurrection is to the hope of our own resurrection?

 Paul is explicit: our resurrection is inseparably tied to Christ’s resurrection. And if we don’t rise, then it means that Christ has not risen, and if Christ has not risen, then — what? “Your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!” (NKJV). In other words, when we die we stay dead, and forever, too, and thus, it all is meaningless. Paul all but says that in 1 Corinthians 15:32 (NKJV) — “If the dead do not rise, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!’”

 If our present existence as carbon-based protoplasm is all there is, and our “threescore and ten years” (if we are fortunate; more if we don’t smoke or eat too many hamburgers) is all that we get, ever — we’re in pretty tough shape. No wonder Ellen G. White adds, “Heaven is worth everything to us, and if we lose heaven we lose all.” — Sons and Daughters of God, p. 349.