And for all the commonalities in our experience and our handling of death, bereavement and loss, every death is as personal as the life behind it. No-one lives for us, and no-one dies for us – these issues we face alone. 'All go to one place', says the Good Book; but no two go to it in the same way, and none return from it.

That thought struck me forcibly when I visited Aberfan two years ago. There were the pristine, whitewashed graves of the victims of the school disaster in 1966 – row upon row of graves, eloquent in their silence and united in their diversity. But there were other, older graves in Aberfan cemetery, all made to a similar design, with a foot-high enclosure around the grave, a roof over it, and a door marked 'Entrance'. No door marked 'Exit'. The river is crossed, but there is no bridge to bring us easily over, or to enable us to return.

The wise woman of Tekoa in the Bible spoke more than she knew when she said 'We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again.' The life is lived, the spirit departs, we sow the remains into the grave, and the chapter is closed. The vapour vanishes away, the tale is told, and we fly away.

It's all so very, very sad; we cannot experience death without tears, and rarely do we experience it without regret, longing and heartbreak. We feel that there is something about death that is alien to our experience; something unnatural and aberrant. It is with reluctance that we yield, and we take every measure possible to prevent the closing of that last door.

So we should; the Bible is not being rhetorical when it speaks of death as an enemy. The gift of the Creator was the gift of life and the potential of life. Death was a threatened penalty, not a natural development. It was intrusive, not expected. It was an enemy, not a friend.

And that is one reason why I cannot be an evolutionist; the biblical account at least reminds me that the bad stuff was not there from the beginning; it came in, marring and spoiling, like a thief, coming to kill, to steal and to destroy. Natural selection – the chief corner stone of modern biology – argues that bad stuff gets jettisoned to make room for good stuff, and that all of this has been going on for zillions of years.

I just don't buy it. That is not our experience of living in this world; and, further, it is infinitely less preferable than the Bible's insistence that an originally good world came to be groaning and travailing in pain. There is a longing within us that the pain will stop and that something better will result. The yearning for Heaven is always there – even in the hearts of those who deny its existence; and evolution won't get us there.

So when I come to deal with the issue of death, and the assault on human dignity that death makes, I am awed, but not silent. I want to say at least three things.

I want to say, first, that death brings many things to an end, but that is not its meaning. In Christian theology, the soul, the seat of the personality, does not die. But it does become separated from the tent in which it has resided. Death is the separation of body and soul, not the extinction of our being. It is not the end of our existence, simply the end of our existence here.

That point is eloquently made in the darkness of the crucifixion, where Jesus commends his spirit to his Father, and his body to waiting disciples. There was part of him that could be handled, carried, wrapped in linen and placed in a grave. But there was part of him that could not. The dissolution of his human constitution, the separation of soul and body – that is the meaning of death.

I want to say, secondly, that the crisis of death is not to be ignored, but overcome. That is the consistent language of Scripture: Jesus destroys the one who holds the power of death; he overcomes the enemy; he triumphs through his cross.

It is the language of warfare. The river of death is in occupied territory – it is unfamiliar, dark and full of foreboding and dread. The vanquishing of death is at the very heart of the gospel. The primitive confession that Jesus was risen became the very pulse of gospel proclamation.

And the Bible applies that language to our human experience. In one of the most moving passages of the New Testament, Paul calls believers 'more than conquerors'. They overcome as Jesus did. They defeat the enemy as he did. Like victors with their feet on the necks of their enemies, they stand in triumph, able to say 'O death, where is your sting?'

And I want to raise, thirdly, the prospect of a place where death is no more. A place where sorrow and sighing flee away; where God wipes tears away from every eye. That prospect, too, arises out of the pain of the cross; if I believe in Heaven, it is only because Jesus did. 'I go,' he said, 'to prepare a place for you'.

For him the cross was no risk; death was no accident. There was something on the other side, a joy before him, for which the pain of the cross was endurable, and towards which his work and life were pointing. Not only did he expect to experience that something, but to arrange in it a place where he and they might be together without distraction, pain or loss.

The Christian hope, even in the face of death itself, is not based on our experience of death but on our experience of Christ. In him life, not death, has the last word. Little wonder, then, that Peter should say to him 'To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life'.

iaind@backfreechurch.co.uk