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Edited Burkitt Analogy
Let us imagine life as a journey by train to an airport at which all passengers disembark. No luggage can be taken any farther, and passengers with airline tickets proceed to the departure lounge to await their flight to a delightful destination. Arrival at the airport is a junction on the journey, not a terminus, and it represents biological death.
The coaches composing the train are of various classes, representing the outward circumstances, financial and otherwise, that surround the passengers during their earthly lives. They are subdivided into compartments, some luxuriously furnished and others sparsely equipped. The quality of a compartment represents the physical health or illness experienced by the passenger.
Airline tickets are very expensive, but already paid for. They are being offered free of charge, but on certain conditions, to each passenger on the train. These tickets represent God's gracious invitation into his eternal kingdom. They are paid for through the death of his Son Jesus Christ, and available to all who accept Jesus' offer of forgiveness.
Many wealthier passengers and those sound in body lightheartedly reject the offered airline ticket. Their spiritual well-being has been bartered for some tangible thought temporal material gain. Other passengers, many of whom live in austere compartments, receive the airline tickets with gratitude. In fact, it becomes their most treasured possession.
Those possessing airline tickets study the itinerary of their upcoming journey with joyful anticipation, while their companions are utterly preoccupied with the day's menus and the lists of amusements and amenities provided to satisfy their daily interests.
Mingling with the passengers are a few people equipped with simple tools and oil cans, whose duty it is to ensure the maintenance of the compartments in order to forestall the breakdown of equipment. They represent those engaged in preventative medicine, forestalling disease rather than rescuing casualties. In addition there are those with much more costly and elaborate equipment who try (with varying measures of success) to repair breakdowns of equipment, furniture, heating and lighting. They represent those engaged in therapeutic medicine. Both are obviously necessary and they complement one another. Some maintainers and repairers carry airline tickets in addition to their own, which they try to persuade passengers to accept. They realize that all their repair efforts, however efficient, only improve circumstances for the first part of the journey.
One of the strangest things of all is that many of those in less favorable portions of the train, even though they possess airline tickets, are jealous of those in better classes or compartments who have no airline tickets!
After disembarkment from the train at the airport, all luggage is left behind and all passengers with airline tickets are admitted to the departure lounge, joyful and confident in delighted anticipation. By then the circumstances experienced on the train are a past irrelevance, and the thought of harboring jealousy toward even the most comfortable passengers without airline tickets seems ridiculous.
Those who had been totally preoccupied with the pleasures and interests of their train journey to the exclusion of what lay beyond the junction are despondent, because they have deliberately rejected what they now recognize to far exceed in value all that they previously prized.
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