Daily Bible Reading 18th June 2026 // Luke 11-17
11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. 12 As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. 13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” 15 And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” 17 And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.
To say that death is the dark shadow that comes, soon or late, upon every life, the solemn hand that knocks at every door, is simply to describe the effect of death on human experience, and does not say what it is. One can describe death only by using theological categories. Death, the Scriptures teach us, is the wages of sin, and the coming of death into the world was associated with man's disobedience. Sin entered the world, and death entered by sin. Death as we know it, therefore, in all its horror and distress and sorrow and grief, is not something that is natural to human experience, but something alien, something intrusive, from outside. It can be understood, therefore, only from a theological standpoint. As the wages of sin, it represents man's predicament, not his misfortune and woe. It is an eloquent reminder to us that sin is a grim reality, accountable to God, that guilt before God is no religious fiction, or something that belongs to religious folk to be exercised about, but not others. For death does not knock only at religious folk's doors; it is not only believers in God who die: atheists, agnostics, the scornful, the cynical, the depraved, the debauched - all alike die. Death is a religious matter, however irreligious a man may be or have been. It is in this context that we need to understand the story of the raising of the widow's son. And it will help us in our understanding of it to expand it as fully as possible.