Do you remember the catchy little earworm “Dumb Ways To Die?” In what was undoubtedly one of history’s most successful public awareness campaigns, Metro Trains of Melbourne, Australia, reached millions of people around the world with their message of railroad safety. They did this through an irresistibly snappy song (which, if you click on it, will be stuck in your head the rest of the day—you’ve been warned). It goes like this:
Verse 1:
Set fire to your hair
Poke a stick at a grizzly bear
Eat medicine that’s out of date
Use your private parts as piranha bait
Chorus:
Dumb ways to die
So many dumb ways to die
Dumb ways to die-ie-ie
So many dumb ways to die
Verse 2:
Get your toast out with a fork
Do your own electrical work
Teach yourself how to fly
Eat a two-week old unrefrigerated pie
All of this was visualized with cartoon figures who did ridiculous things and suffered in comical ways. It was nothing short of brilliant. Eventually, the song got to its main point with a few railway-related dumb ways to die:
Stand on the edge of a train station platform
Drive around the boomgates at a level crossing
Run across the tracks between the platforms
By my count, the song offers 21 ways to die, each one dumber than the last. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, for there are many more ways to die than these—some avoidable or dumb, some unavoidable or heroic, but all tragic. Sadly, humanity has never come to the end of the ways we can die. Yet there is also a sense in which there are merely two ways to die: There is the death of the righteous and the death of the wicked.
The wicked die in their sin. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they die in the act of committing a sin, but it does mean that they die with the sins they’ve committed still on the books. They have stolen God’s glory and presumed upon his grace. They have defied his law and harmed people he has made in his image. They have accumulated a great debt of sin and have gone to the grave still bearing it. At the moment their life comes to an end, they have not settled their account with the Lord. They have died the death of the wicked.
But the righteous die in a very different state. Even if they die in the act of committing a sin, they die with the sins they have committed off the books. They too have stolen God’s glory and presumed upon his grace. They too have defied his law and harmed people he has made in his image. They too have accumulated a great debt of sin, but they have not gone to the grave bearing it. Why not? Because their debt has been settled. Knowing that they could not pay it themselves, they have trusted Jesus Christ to pay it on their behalf. And he has! At the moment their life comes to an end, they have already settled their account with the Lord. They have died the death of the righteous—those who have been declared righteous by God because they have been given the righteousness of Christ.
You may end your days in a wreck and die a traveler’s death. You may end your days in battle and die a soldier’s death. You may end your days in a collapse and die a builder’s death. You may end your days at the stake and die a martyr’s death, or in a far-off land and die a missionary’s death. The Lord only knows how your days will come to an end. But knowing that every man will ultimately die either the death of the righteous or the death of the wicked, the dumbest death is the one that rejects the former in favor of the latter—the one in which a person rejects Christ’s righteousness to cling instead to his own wickedness.
