Seasons (The Seventh Day of Christmas)

For an adult, an average of 50-70 billion cells die per day.
One million red blood cells are removed and replaced each second.
It's estimated that in the whole observable universe, 275 million stars die and are born each year.

On both the macro and micro levels, things are dying and things are coming alive every moment of every second of every minute or every hour of every day.

One of the most common forms of literary expression we find in the scriptures is the symbolism of death and rebirth. It's found in the rituals of animal sacrifice, where a goat or a calf is offered to a priest for slaughter.

It's found in the gospels in the death and rebirth of Jesus.

It's found in Revelation in the death and rebirth of the heavens and the earth. 

I'm not sure that Revelation was so much a hoped for reality for the first Christians as it was a warning against the coming assault by the Roman empire, but needless to say the symbolism is there.

So, why does death and rebirth constitute so much content in the Bible as well as every other religion on the planet?

For the original audience, they believed that everything and everyone would eventually be reborn through the God of Israel. For the first reformed Jews (or Christians), that rebirth would happen through believing in Jesus, who they claimed was the son of God. Regardless of the theological peculiarities, there's something behind all this death and rebirth. 

For the Buddhist, everything starts with energy and ends in energy. It's a circle of life.
For the Hindu, death is the last gift in life. 
For the Christian, spiritual death and rebirth are accessible in this life. 

One of the most fundamental displays of the death and rebirth process happens in gardening. 

You start with a pot, which is made of clay, which is made of dirt, which is made of humus?

And what is humus?

Glad you asked.

Humus is decomposed materials (feces, leaves, wood, animal stuff, etc.)

And you take the pot, and fill it with the same thing the pot is essentially made of, right?

And then you plant seeds, which are what came out of something that died, right?

And then the seeds open up and sprout little plants.

And then the plants bear fruit.

And then the plants die.

And then where do they go? 

That's right, they become humus, which, eventually turns into another clay pot that someone down the line's gonna use to start the process all over again.

And so the process is evident all around us, from the cells in our bodies to the stars in the universe.

For the writers of the scriptures, this natural component of death and life was woven into the fabric of their belief systems. And so, it only made sense that death and life had just as much a part to play in the heavens as it did on earth. In the natural world, the authors were convinced that just as the grass died and grew back season after season and year after year, it was just as plausible that the human spirit went through constant seasons of death and rebirth. And for them, in the end, it would end in life and this life would be eternal.

For Aristotle, nature abhorred a vacuum.  Nature required every space to be filled with something, even if that something was colorless and odorless air.

For the first followers of Jesus, the concepts of death and life are what separated this king from all the other kings that kept dying off. All the caesars of Rome (even though they thought themselves to be sons of God and chosen to sit at the right hand) would die and be replaced by another. But, for some reason, for the first followers, Jesus never really died off. If anything, his death essentially created something. It spurred a movement that only gained momentum as time went by. And as they found themselves caught up in this evolving, growing movement, they realized that what Jesus had taught them was something more than they had originally thought. The momentum was gaining so much speed that they felt invincible, and they started placing royal names on Jesus. And they started worshiping Jesus and saying things like "he's the son of God." 

Something was created through the death of Jesus.
Just as new cells are created as old ones pass away.
Just as new stars are born as old stars die.
Just as new plants grow out of the death of old ones.