Psalms 104:29-30

Thou hidest Thy face, they are troubled: Thou takest away their breath, they die.

Views of death

I. Death disorganizes and destroys our corporeal frame. The words of the text merely announce the execution of the original sentence, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

II. Death puts an end to all worldly distinctions. Sometimes, indeed, they may appear to remain. One man is honoured with a splendid and imposing burial. Another has a blazoned monument erected over him. A third may have historians to record his name, and poets to sing his praise. And in contrast to all these, a fourth may be laid in the base earth, and have not even a stone to tell where he lies, and fade from the remembrance, almost as soon as he passes from the sight of that world, in which he did little more than toil, and weep, and suffer. But let your eye penetrate through those showy forms which custom, or affection, or vanity has thrown over the graves of departed mortals, and behold how the mightiest and the meanest lie side by side in one common undistinguished ruin. Receive, then, and practise the lesson which all this inculcates. It speaks to you who occupy distinguished situations in the world; and it says, Behold the nothingness of earthly grandeur, and power, and riches. Though elevated in station, be humble in spirit. The same fact speaks to you who are moving in the humble walks of life; to you it says, Why repine that you are not invested with the insignia of worldly greatness?

III. Death terminates all labour and all pleasure under the sun. “There is no work, nor wisdom, nor device, in the grave;” and “as the tree falleth, so must it lie.” Let no good action be unnecessarily delayed, or carelessly performed.

IV. Death dissolves the dearest and tenderest ties.

V. Death blasts the fairest prospects of individuals, of families, and of nations. He teaches us to put no confidence in our own life, or in that of any of the sons or daughters of men. He teaches us to recollect how feeble are all our efforts, and how short-sighted are all our best-laid schemes, and how perishable are all our most sanguine hopes.

VI. Death introduces us to judgment and to eternity. This is the most important view which we can take of it. (A. Thomson, D.D.)

The death of animals

Pain, suffering, and death, we know, may be of use to human beings. It may make them happier and better in this life, or in the life to come; if they are the Christians which they ought to be. But it seems, in the case of animals, to be only so much superfluous misery thrown away. Of the millions on millions of living creatures in the earth, the air, the sea, full one-half live by eating each other. In the sea, indeed, almost every kind of creature feeds on some other creature: and what an amount of pain, of terror, of violent death that means, or seems to mean! The Book of Genesis does not say that the animals began to devour each other at Adam’s fall. It does not even say that the ground is cursed for man’s sake now, much less the animals. For we read (Genesis 9:21). Neither do the psalmists and prophets give the least hint of any such doctrine. Surely, if we found it anywhere, we should find it in this psalm. But so far from saying that God has cursed His own works, or looks on them as cursed it says, “The Lord shall rejoice in His works.” Consider, with respect and admiration, the manful, cheerful view of pain and death, and indeed of the whole creation, which the psalmist has, because he has faith. There is in him no sentimentalism, no complaining of God, no impious, or at least weak and peevish, cry of “Why hast Thou made things thus?” He sees the mystery of pain and death. He does not attempt to explain it: but he faces it; faces it cheerfully and manfully, in the strength of his faith, saying--This too, mysterious, painful, terrible as it may seem, is as it should be; for it is of the law and will of God, from whom come all good things; of the God in whom is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. Therefore to the psalmist the earth is a noble sight; filled, to his eyes, with the fruit of God’s works. And so is the great and wide sea likewise. He looks upon it; “full of things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts,” for ever dying, for ever devouring each other. And yet it does not seem to him a dreadful and a shocking place. What impresses his mind is just what would impress the mind of a modern poet, a modern man of science; namely, the wonderful variety, richness, and strangeness of its living things. Their natures and their names he knows not. It was not given to his race to know. It is enough for him that known unto God are all His works from the foundation of the world. But one thing more important than their natures and their names he does know; for he perceives it with the instinct of a true poet and a true philosopher--“These all wait upon Thee,” etc. (C. Kingsley, M.A.)

Life by respiration

It has always been supposed that man’s power to breathe lay primarily in the united action of heart, lungs and blood. But a recent scientist of recognized authority declares that this is not altogether the case. He asserts, and apparently proves it to the satisfaction of many scientific minds, that although heart, lungs and blood assist the act of breathing, and constitutes man’s physical safeguard against suffocation, the actual breathing--i.e., the taking in of the oxygen and hydrogen of the atmosphere, is done by the living substance of the human body. Practically we breathe, so to speak, at every pore, and not simply by the elaborate parts hitherto looked upon as the only human agents of respiration. Plants and animals as well as men thus breathe through the living substances which severally compose them. And what is equally wonderful, perhaps, is that, as this authority declares, “the mutual action of plants, animals and men upon the atmosphere in respiration is one of the most beautiful harmonies in nature.” What one gives off as waste product is taken up and utilized by the other. Truly “we are fearfully and wonderfully made”! (Homiletic Review.)