I think that there should be an essay set for all Christians. It would be to respond to and/or reflect upon the death of Yehuda. It is captured in the essay My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.
This young man was only 19, and his older brother posted on his website...follow the link.
Death is confronting. Having attended funerals of many relatives, including my parents, aged from 11 to 80, I know the dull weight of loss that death entials: the permanence. Eliezer captures it in his essay.
But there are a few things that are said about death, by Christians, and by Eliezer, that are both unhelpful and inaccurate: the former because of the latter.
They revolve around God willing death. God doesn't will death. It is a consequence of living in rejection of him and that we live in a world that is disjoined from God. Not his world any longer, but ours. Fellowship, family denied. We wrested from him. Death is the end of relationship with all the implicative vastness that this implies.
Yeshua wept because death was not of him, but contrary to him, the creator. His world was not like this! The warning to Adam was that the knowledge was not a thing to be sought, but a thing that would be experienced. The sentence in Gensis 2:17 is recursive. Yeshua stepped through death to undo it; because what is finally real is not material, but person-al.
