An enemy defeated: death and resurrection

Seventh-day Adventist Statement of Faith #25. The wages of sin is death. But God, who alone is immortal, will grant eternal life to His redeemed. Until that day death is an unconscious state for all people. When Christ, who is our life, appears, the resurrected righteous and the living righteous will be glorified and caught up to meet their Lord. The second resurrection, the resurrection of the unrighteous, will take place a thousand years later. (Rom. 6:23; 1 Tim. 6:15, 16; fee/. 9:5, 6; Ps. 146:3, 4; John 11:11-14; Col. 3:4; 1 Cor. 15:51-54; 1 Thess. 4:13- 17; John 5:28, 29; Rev. 20:1-10.)

Death haunts human life in every age and every place. The oldest buildings in the world, the colossal pyramids of Gaza, are monuments to its poignant power in human consciousness.

The ancient Egyptians were preoccupied with death. It was the central theme in their religion. As soon as a Pharaoh ascended the throne, he started planning his tomb. And the elaborate paintings and exquisite artifacts that filled the royal burial chambers were designed to assist their occupants as they journeyed in the afterlife.

The Pharaohs tried to face death bravely, but the art of other ancient people reveals the sorrow and suffering it always brings. A large room in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is filled with funerary monuments from ancient Greece. The faces on those stone reliefs are etched with grief. In one scene after another, a figure reaches out to someone dear a mother, father, brother, child, or friend but there is no contact. The dead are unresponsive, withdrawn, for ever beyond their grasp.

The sad profiles of those ancient mourners, frozen in time, illustrate perfectly the apostle Paul's reference to those who grieve and have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13).

Until the advent of modern medicine, death was something everybody knew about firsthand. There wasn't a family of any size who hadn't lost a child and often a parent as well. In nineteenth-century America, someone once told me, a bride and groom who promised to love, honor, and cherish each other "until death do us part," had, on the average, 12 years together until that happened.

Nowadays, of course, things are drastically different, at least in the developed countries of the world. It is not unusual for children to reach adulthood without having lost a single close relative. We may hear about death and read about death, but for many of us it's a vague possibility, not a present reality.

Or is it? The truth is that death is all around us. In the past several months, thousands have perished in Iraq. In the United States last year, more than 43,000 died in traffic accidents. In Africa, the number of AIDS victims reaches into the millions. And all this on the heels of the twentieth century, "the century of death," as many call it, in which up to 120 million people died at the hands of their fellow humans.

In spite of its gruesome visage, people often try to paint a positive picture of death. Some respond with "sentimental acquiescence." Death comes to all of us, they purr, but there is no reason to fear it. The end of our existence is as natural as the beginning, and we should approach it with complete peace of mind.

The ancient Stoics looked on death with resignation. If something is bound to happen, don't stress over it, they argued. Accept it with equanimity. "I was not. I was. I am not. I care not," an ancient tombstone read.

In sharp contrast, the poems of William Ernest Henley and Dylan Thomas approach death with some thing like "desperate defiance." This life may be all we have, they concede, but we should hang on to it tenaciously. Resist death to the bitter end that's their advice. "Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade," exclaimed Henley, "And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid." In a similar vein Thomas cried out, "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The Christian view of death

None of these attitudes or their variations, ancient or modern, expresses the Christian response to humanity's deep est fear. The Christian perspective on death is more complicated than any of them. On the one hand, there is nothing sentimental in the way Christian faith views death. It looks death square ly in the face and sees exactly what it is. Death is a destroyer, an intruder, an enemy. It was not meant to be, and it is horrifying.

On the other hand, Christian faith looks past death. Death is undeniably powerful, but it is not supremely powerful. There is something, some-one, who is even more powerful. Furthermore, that power has confronted death and gained the victory over it. So, not only is death defeasible, death has been defeated: its power is broken, and its reign will end. So, even though death is still a part of things in this world, it is on its way out. The last word on human existence belongs not to death but to life. Let's look at each element in this perspective.

Death and sin in the Bible

In its first description of death, the Bible makes a crucial connection between death and sin. There is nothing natural about death. Death is a consequence of sin; it is the fruit of rebelling against God.

As described in the early chapters of Genesis, our first parents were meant to live forever, in perfect harmony with their environment and perfectly loyal to God. As long as they accepted God's sovereignty and faithfully served Him, their joy would know no end. Their obedience, however, was voluntary. Instead of forcing them to do His will, God invited them to do it. He gave them the freedom to accept or reject His love.

Since God was the source of life, they would live as long as they remained connected with Him. If they rejected God, they would lose their connection to life, and eventually they would die.

As the book of Genesis describes it, "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die'" (Gen. 2:16, 17, RSV).¹ As these words suggest, death was a natural consequence of sin. It wasn't an arbitrary penalty that God imposed. God wasn't telling Adam what He would do to punish him if he sinned. He was warning him what would happen; in other words, what he was in effect doing to himself.

Centuries later, the apostle Paul makes a similar connection between death and sin. "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12).

If death is a consequence of sin, and sin doesn't belong, then death doesn't belong either. It was not part of God's original plan for humanity. According to the Bible, then, death is not our destiny. We are susceptible to death; we are mortal. But we are not meant for death. We were meant to live forever.²

This view of death goes hand in hand with a certain view of life. It means that physical experience is an essential aspect of all our experience. We are fundamentally physical organisms in a physical world. We are not just bodies, of course.

But the Bible knows nothing of human experience without a body.

This contradicts some popular views of the future. Many people believe that each person has a physical body and an immortal "soul" or "spirit." The two are connected during our lives, but when death comes, the body dies and the soul or spirit goes on to future experiences.

How the Bible looks at death

The Bible does not support this view, however. It uses the words "soul" and "spirit" quite differently. Consider this important verse in Genesis, as it appears in the most popular English version of the Bible: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Gen. 2:7).

The word for "breath" here could also be translated "spirit," and the expression "living soul" could also be translated "living being." According to this text, then, the first human life began when God placed breath in a body he had formed from the earth.

When someone dies, according to the Bible, the opposite happens: "the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it" (Eccl. 12:7). At death, then, the person as such ceases to exist. Physical, mental, social, spiritual experience everything that makes us what we are comes to an end. "The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun" (Eccl. 9:5, 6).

As the Bible uses the words, then, neither "soul" nor "spirit" refers to something that could exist apart from the body. The "soul" is the person as a whole, the entire being, body included. And the "spirit" is simply the animating influence that comes from Cod. It does not exist apart from the body; it is what makes the body alive. So, the body is essential to human life.

As the Bible describes it, a human being is not an incarcerated soul but an animated body. A person is a complex, highly integrated being, but not a combination of a material physical form and an immaterial substance. Because we are inherently physical beings, any future beyond death must include physical existence. And that is exactly what the Bible claims. Life after death begins with the resurrection of the body.

The earliest book in the New Testament describes this event in these words: "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with Him those who have died." "For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first" (1 Thess. 4:13, 14, 16).

These verses tell us three important things about the life to come.

First of all, it is "eschatological." That is, it begins at the end of time. Until Christ calls them to life, God's people wait in the grave, a condition the Bible sometimes refers to as "sleep" (1 Thess. 4:13). Second, the future life is inherently social. It begins for everyone at the same time. We do not enter heaven one by one as our lives end. The dead along with the living meet Christ together in one glorious reunion. And forevermore their lives are linked to another and to him. Third, the power that raises the dead to live forever is the same power that brought Jesus back to life. Christian hope for the future is thus anchored in the past. It directly depends on our confidence that Jesus came to life from the dead.

Jesus and death

While it is true of everything that Christians believe, the centrality of Christ is nowhere more important than in the hope for life after death.

The apostle Paul puts it this way: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain" (1 Cor. 15:13, 14).

To paraphrase, if Christ came to life from the dead, then we have every thing to hope for, and if he didn't, we have nothing to hope for. Everything depends on the resurrection of Jesus. Not only is this true of the life to come, it is true of life here and now.

And this brings us to a fourth element in the future life. Although life after death does not begin until the return of Christ, the resurrection life begins as soon as we experience the saving power of Christ. For the apostle Paul, our solidarity with Christ in death and resurrection begins with baptism. Our old life comes to an end, and a new life begins.

We see this idea in passages such as Colossians 2:12, 13: "When you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses."

"So if you have been raised with Christ," Paul continues, "seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory" (3:1-4).

The resurrection has both future and present dimensions.

The resurrection of Christ thus provides us a basis for living with confidence here and now. When Christ came to life from the dead, He broke the power of death for all of us. Even though death is still a fearful enemy, it has suffered a mortal blow, and its reign will soon come to an end. As John Donne wrote, "Death, thou shalt die."

Death, a defeated enemy

The notion that death is a "conquered enemy" justifies the complex feelings we have in its presence.

First of all, it honors our revulsion as we look death in the eye. In spite of everything that people have said in recent years to demystify death and treat it as a perfectly normal, natural process with nothing for us to fear, our hearts know better.

Death is horrible. It is the antithesis of life. It brings physical, mental, social, and spiritual existence to an end. It violates everything that God wants for us. It is an intruder and an enemy. Death is the ultimate fear.

But death does not have the last word. We can face it with confidence and hope, because Jesus fought it and defeated it. He died on the cross and rose from the tomb, and in doing so, he broke the power of death.

So, the great enemy has been conquered. Jesus' resurrection gives us the hope of life everlasting, and it gives us the power to live victoriously here and now. We can experience its death-conquering, life-transforming effects day by day as we await the day when death will be expelled from God's good world once and for all.