A Brief Meditation on the Death of a Deep Sea Angler Fish
Or: the paradox of life and death
For only the second time in history, video footage of a deep sea angler fish was captured recently off the coast of Africa. If you watch the video or look at images, you’ll understand why this beauty is aptly named the black seadevil. If the reports are to be believed, these buggers normally hang out around depths between 700 to 6500 feet. And for those of us like myself who are mathematically challenged, that puts the deepest of these little monsters at over a mile below the surface of the ocean.
So when such a creature comes as near to the surface as this one did, it is news indeed. Alas, the black seadevil apparently died shortly after its ascent was captured on film.
Reading this little anecdote put me in mind of a line from Milton's Paradise Lost -- a little melodramatic, I know, but such is the course of this world. Fittingly enough, it is a line uttered by Satan as he is pondering his own ascent out of darkness and into the upper world of Eden.
"Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light."
But for both Satan and this black seadevil, the ascent spelled nothing but doom and death. And "'twas always thus, and always thus will be." The devils rise only to fall and die, for they cannot live in the light.
But so it is for us, too. Men hated the light and loved the darkness because their deeds were evil, the Apostle John tells us – and as dark as we are, the light only threatens to end us. If we were to rise in the offer of the devils and scale the heights of the north, it would be only to our own doom and death, for we cannot live in the light.
But Christ, the Light of the world himself, has come to change that. He has come to give us that light which, far from being our death, is actually the life of men. And this he has done, not first by ascending, but by first descending into the crushing depths of death. It is altogether fitting that, in Scripture, the sea acts as a symbol of chaos and death. By faith, we are sunk in him, have died in him, and have risen again in him. Those who go down, those who die, shall live forever in the splendor of unending day; those who rise, those who hold to their lives with the ferocity of an envious toddler, shall be lost forever in the dreadful outer darkness.
Yet in the overlap of the ages, this is a hard truth. The black seadevils may seem to scale the heights as we plunge deeper into the icy blackness; and we may cry out with the psalmist, “I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.”
They may see the beauty of a new world for a fleeting moment, only to perish in the vision; and we may see the horrors of unfathomable depths, only to pass through them into the glory of the New Jerusalem. Long is the way, and hard indeed, that out of hell leads up to light – but if we trust in Christ, and die with him, then we shall be of those who have gone through hell and come out the other side, and shall stand at the last on the mountain of God.
And our eyes shall behold him, and not another’s.