Dead or alive ... he always wanted one.
And he finally found one!
When Gary was young, his father taught at Mississippi State. He and his family lived in the faculty housing on campus; a great place to be a little boy with lots of interesting places to explore. There was also a railroad track Gary and his friends liked to walk down.
Shiny railroad tracks led them to the nearby garbage dump. Now, you may think that is disgusting, but for young exploring boys it was a mystery and possibly a treasure chest.
One day as Gary was slowly meandering around the garbage dump, he came across a body ... of a large German shepherd dog. It was beautiful! The dog looked like it was asleep, comfortably snoozing away on that crisp fall day.
Gary approached it quietly.
He watched it.
He got a nearby stick and prodded it gently.
Nothing happened.
He took his sneaker-clad foot and touched it. Nothing.
Then he hurried off home.
“Mom!” he said incredulously, “I found a perfect, beautiful, big dog! The only problem is he’s dead!”
The Bible teaches us about death. Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
How do we escape the wages of sin? 1 John 2:2 tells us about Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, “He is the payment for our sins and not only for our sins, but also for the sins of the whole world.”
Romans 3:2 also tells us, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
John 11:25-26 declares: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Most of the scribes and pharisees did not accept Jesus as the saving Messiah sent by God. They tried to obey every single bit of the law. But Jesus told them in Matthew 23:27-28: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”
John 3:18 tells us, “Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”
So, dead men walking? A phrase used to describe men in prison waiting for execution on death row. Walking dead to describe the movie’s zombies?
Be sure you are not one of them.
