Tim Hall is an elder on session at Community Church and is one of the featured blog writers for Peak Reflections. Tim’s messages help us think theologically about our faith.
The poet John Milton introduces his readers to Death in his masterpiece Paradise Lost as Satan attempts to exit the gates of Hell on his way to tempt the first man and woman. A hideous, formless shadow blocks the way, warning that he possesses power over those gates which none can resist “save he who reigns above.” (Those who have seen the Lord of the Rings may remember in the first film where the balrog from the Mines of Moria attacked Gandalf; Milton’s Death was Tolkien’s inspiration for the balrog.) Satan and the shadow square off, each preparing to strike a single, final blow. Suddenly Sin, an alluring female form from head to waist but a scaly serpent “armed with mortal sting” below, interrupts to caution Satan that he cannot hope to win this conflict. Anyway, she declares, Death is Satan’s own son, the offspring of the Devil’s incest with his daughter Sin herself. Death now guards Hell’s gates, gnawed with insatiable hunger and armed with a dreadful weapon that no created being can withstand.
Once Satan understands the situation, he shifts tactics, promising that if allowed to complete his mission, Death will be “fed and filled immeasurably, all things shall be your prey.” At this promise, Death grins a “horrible a ghastly smile, to hear his famine should be filled.” It is the one promise Satan keeps.
Milton’s potent imagery captures a central truth about death, one we feel every time we encounter it. It is monstrous, unnatural, a horrid scar at the heart of creation. This terrible wrenching away of - those dearest to us – this is not the way it’s supposed to be. We are grieved and enraged to the core of our being.
We are right to be enraged at death. In doing so we imitate Jesus.
When confronted with scenes of death, he grieved with the bereaved; often raising their lost loved ones (e.g. Luke 7:11-17). When his dear friend Lazarus died, the Bible says that Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit” – a phrase that in the original Greek often expresses deep anger – and he wept (John 11:33-35).
Yet Jesus did not simply resign himself to the inevitability of death. He hated death so fiercely that he determined to strike the root of this obscenity against creation. Hebrews 2:14 tells us that Jesus shared our humanity “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the Devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
By “fear of death” the writer means not only physical death – which is fearful enough in itself – but the eternal separation from God, which the apostle Paul tells us is the “wages of sin” (Romans 6:23). Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree,” enduring the punishment and sting of death that was our just desert, “so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed” (I Peter 2:24).
The cure Jesus has accomplished for our sins extends not merely to our spiritual well being, but to the “redemption of our bodies” as well (Romans 8:23).
God demonstrated the utter defeat of death by raising Christ from the dead on the first Easter Sunday as “the firstfruits of all who sleep.
For since death came through man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through man” (I Corinthians 15:20-21). Jesus Christ’s Resurrection gives us hope that one day all who believe will stand in the flesh before God, body and soul once again united into a complete, immortal “living being” as God originally created humans to be (Genesis 2:7).
The hope of final Resurrection is central to our faith, as I Corinthians 15 teaches and as the Church has always confessed. Indeed, the Bible teaches that our salvation itself remains incomplete until the day Christ returns. Even the dead now present with God in heaven recognize this. Revelation 5:9-11, for instance, depicts those “slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained” waiting for Christ to return, when they will be vindicated and all things set right. Creation itself likewise “groans and travails” until that day (Romans 8:22-25).
In the meantime, we grieve as "death" employs his “dreadful dart,” but not without hope. For all who believe, "death’s sting” - the prospect of eternal separation from God and each other because of sin - has been removed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can look forward to a day when our bodies, now subject to injury, disease, death, and decay, will be “clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality; then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (I Corinthians 15:54).
May that day come quickly. Until then, may we remain faithful to share our hope with all those whom God brings into our lives.
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