A minister of Christ was seeking to help a stubborn atheist. This unbeliever had declared: "I do not believe what you preach.”
"What do you believe?" asked the preacher.
The man promptly replied: "I believe that death ends all.”
“You do? And so do I," was the surprising answer. "What!" exclaimed the atheist. "You too believe that death ends all?”
The believer in Christ replied positively: "Yes! Death ends all your chance for doing evil. It ends all your joy, all your prospects, all your ambitions, all your friendships. And death ends all the gospel of God that you will ever hear. Death will end it all for you, and you will be cast into outer darkness.
“As for me, death will end all my wanderings, all my tears, all my perplexities, and all my disappointments—all my aches and pains. Death will end them all, and I will go to be with my Lord in glory!”
“Well, I never thought of it that way," said the atheist.
What a thought it was to ponder over! The words so solemnly spoken found lodgment in his unbelieving heart. Day and night the fear of death—the end of all earthly things—ate into his aroused conscience. The preacher's avowed prospect of eternal joy with the Savior aroused in the darkened soul of the 'atheist a burning desire for similar blessing. In his quandary he turned to the hitherto despised Word of God; and, as has been found so often, that Word is true: "Seek, and ye shall find." Matt. 7:77Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: (Matthew 7:7).
In his earnest search of the Scriptures the distressed man came across Heb. 9:2727And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: (Hebrews 9:27). He read: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die." Of course he believed that. It was true, so maybe the rest was too: "but after this the judgment.”
What would he have to face then? Surely he would have to answer for his sins, for his unbelief, for his long neglect of the good of what he now knew to be his never dying soul.
Crying for light to the God he had denied, this Seeker after truth read on in verse 28: "So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many." Could he be counted among the "many"? The next phrase gave the answer: "And unto them that look for HIM." Ah, there was the root of the matter: "look for Him"— believe in HIM—put their trust in HIM. The unbeliever must cast aside his God-dishonoring reasonings. He must take God at His word and in simple faith accept, as for himself alone, Christ's wondrous work of atonement on Calvary.
Through the grace of the God he had spurned, all the poor man's doubts and fears were swept away in a cleansing flood of repentant tears. In the joy of his new-found belief in a God of mercy and a loving Savior, the atheist became a worshiper and could cry from the depths of his soul: "My Lord and my God.”