Most of us will never be trapped underground like those nine coal miners or have to face death in a catastrophe. Still, we all need to be rescued, for we cannot escape the ravages of sickness and old age and finally death. “Man, born of woman, is short-lived and glutted with agitation,” observed the faithful patriarch Job. “Like a blossom he has come forth and is cut off, and he runs away like the shadow and does not keep existing.” (Job 14:1, 2) Today, some 3,500 years later, those words continue to prove true, for who of us can escape life’s fatal outcome​—death? Regardless of where we live or how well we guard our health, we need to be rescued from the clutches of suffering, old age, and death.

Whether you share Job’s feelings about life and death or not, it is inevitable that as the years move along, you too will ‘run away like the shadow,’ far away from your friends, your family, your home, and all that you have accomplished​—off into death. “The living are conscious that they will die,” wrote wise King Solomon of ancient Israel. “As for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all, neither do they anymore have wages, because the remembrance of them has been forgotten.”​—Ecclesiastes 9:5.