I just saw the news yesterday that Dikembe Mutombo has died. If you’ve never heard of him, he was a 7ft 2in Congolese basketball player who not only made it to the NBA, but was an eight-time All-Star and four-time defensive player of the year. He is second in the list of NBA all-time shot blockers and is regarded as one of the best defensive players to play. He was became particularly famous for the Mutombo finger-wag, which came out when he pulled off a block. He was, in every respect, a big character.

Mutombo played basketball during what I consider to be the golden era. It is a golden era because it is, in effect, the era I followed most closely. It is the era in which, for me, basketball essentially stopped. I have only recently picked it up again, but the Mutombo era is the one I most fondly remember. And he was in no small way a part of it.

What more people don’t know about him is that he was also a significant humanitarian off the court. He setup the Dikembe Mutombo foundation in his home country of Congo for the purpose of improving the health and quality of life in the country. However, he was also a naturalised US citizen and served on the boards of Special Olympics International, the CDC Foundation and the National Board for the US Fund for Unicef where (the Guardian report) he was able to make use of his seven different languages. He was a real ambassador for both his home country and for the NBA.

But whenever a great man (or even a not-so-great one) dies, we are confronted with the stark reality of the human condition. Everybody dies. And there isn’t any way to block that reality, not for you, not for me and not even for great shot blockers like Dikembe Mutombo. When we face that stark reality, we run into another difficult question: if everyone dies, what happens after that? If anything at all, can anything be done about it?

The Bible answers that stark question, well, pretty starkly: it is appointed for man to die once, and after that the judgement (Heb 9:27). The Bible says there is an ‘after this’. And what happens after death is judgement. But the writer also offers some hope in the judgement: ‘Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him’ (Heb 9:28).

The stark reality is that one-in-one die. The other brute reality is that death is not the end, but after it comes judgement. But Jesus came into the world to die for those who would believe in him so that the judgement holds no fear for those who have repented of their sin but may be judged as clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Sin takes it greatest shot in death but those who abide in Christ, those who have faith in him, find Jesus blocks sin’s best shot.

It is always a great sadness to hear of a person’s death. All the sadder when that person seemed such a big part of your childhood, a hero on the court. A hero who is now gone. But the hope offered by Jesus is that, though death is not the end, and it doesn’t have to be our final word. We can have a glorious future beyond death if only we might find ourselves safe in the Lord Jesus, sin and death blocked on our behalf, its penalty applied to him and not us, and his righteousness applied to our account in its place.