You Can’t Take it With You

Culture dies when we die. Our human values and rituals and fears and prides and clothing styles and economic statuses and properties all get snatched out of our hands when we take our last breaths. If we are watching someone die slowly, we may have the misperception that their hands’ grip is loosening slowly, but at any point at which they might be raised from the proximity of death, their grip usually regains strength. Unless they spent time with the King in the days of their weakness. Then, they may have had a change of mind and heart.

Even what culture we pass on, and what property we pass on, is only going to exist while the beneficiary breathes. What we pass on that is above culture, and instead is spiritual and eternal, will survive.

Now the Messiah has appeared, high priest of the good things that have come. In the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands (that is, not of this creation), He entered the holy of holies once for all, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who are defiled, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of the Messiah, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to serve the living God?
Therefore He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called might receive the promise of the eternal inheritance, because a death has taken place for redemption from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.
(Hebrews 9:11-15 HCSB ©®)