Lent - THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH
John 8:51
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.”
One of the most beautiful chapters of the Bible is the very first one, the chapter of beginnings. Listen to what Moses wrote about the 6th creation-day, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good… Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” Genesis 2:1 Within six days, almighty God had made a perfect world; perfect sun, moon and stars in their orbits, perfect animals and plants and fish and fowl with a perfect man and woman to take care of it. Do you know what really made this perfect? There was no death. Living in a world without death staggers the imagination. Who of us would not want to live there; no fear, no hate, no envy no murder and no funerals. Just life and happiness!
Death didn’t enter the picture until our first parents grew unhappy with this magnificent creation. Often the question has been asked, “Why did God allow this to happen? If Adam and Eve were perfect, why did God allow them to sin?” The answer is simple. They weren’t robots. God didn’t want to program them to behave as He wished. They were independent creatures with a free will. God wanted them to enjoy His creation and, with willing and thankful hearts, to worship and love Him as their bountiful Creator. That is why God put a tree in the center of the Garden of Eden with the words, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” They weren’t afraid of dying. They didn’t know what death was. These words were not a threat but a wonderful opportunity to show God how much they loved Him.
The devil destroyed Adam and Eve’s happiness in their new home when he deceived them into questioning the goodness of their Creator. God said, “If you eat of this tree, you “shall surely die,” and the devil said, “If you eat of this tree “Ye shall not surely die.” Genesis 3:4 The devil was talking like God Himself and lying through his teeth. The devil implied, “If you are happy now, just wait until you eat of the tree. Your eyes will be opened and you will become as wise as gods, knowing good and evil. You will be in complete control of your lives with no more accountability to God.” How often haven’t you heard that before! Well, we know the sad truth. They believed the devil. The moment they ate the fruit they started to die. Now lust and envy and hate and fear corrupted hearts that once only knew love and kindness and joy. They were terrified even to speak to God because His words rang in their ears, “thou shalt surely die.”
They didn’t want to die, but they couldn’t see any way out. They had sinned and they knew they had to die. We need to note something about sin. Adam and Eve did not merely make a slip by eating the fruit. They defied their almighty Creator. Once they fell into sin, it was like cancer. It depraved their hearts and placed them under the power of the devil, and they, in turn, passed this depravity on to all the world, as St. Paul exclaims, for as “by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Romans 5:12. We hear much about how children can inherit certain diseases from their parents. Any disease in this life is nothing compared to sin. Sin is the spiritual disease that corrupts our very souls and that all parents pass on to their children. You and I have a human spirit inherited from our parents that can do no good, as the Scriptures describe our natural estate, “they are corrupt, they have done abominable works. There is none that doeth good, no not one.” Psalm 14:1.
Had not our loving Lord put into effect a plan to rescue us, His highest creation, from the sentence of everlasting death, man would have been hopelessly lost. Man had to die. God could not go back on His word. To satisfy divine justice and with incomprehensible mercy, He laid the sentence of death, which each of us deserves, on the head of His only-begotten Son. God so loved the world that He sent His Son to suffer hell itself and to carry our sins to the cross so that we would never see death.
This is the promise of our text, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.” The sentence of pain and suffering and eternal death that we inherited from our parents is, by the promise of our Savior, as far removed from us as heaven is from earth. This is no idle promise. People speak a lot of nonsense in our world, and men make many promises that they can’t keep. You and I, however, can stake our eternal future on this promise of our Savior, for it is backed by a double oath, “Verily, verily, I say unto you.”
Christ, through His great sacrifice, writes the Apostle Paul, has delivered [creation] from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Romans 8:21. Sin is dreadful because it makes us slaves to our own lusts and passions. Every time God says, “Don’t lie, don’t neglect My word, don’t curse or swear, don’t hate, don’t trust the wisdom of men,” for without Christ, “you shall surely die,” the devil counters, “That’s not true. God is simply trying to make your life miserable and to spoil the things that make you happy. “You shall not surely die.” The sad truth is that it is so easy to believe the sayings of the devil. Jesus clearly says, “If a man keep my saying.” Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Bible, despite the Old Testament history of the broken hearts and lives of saints who found their only hope in the sayings of the Savior, men and women everywhere, from all corners of the earth and from every denomination, have chosen to follow, not the sayings of Jesus, but the sayings of Mohammed or of Confucius or of Baker Eddy or of Joseph Smith or of their own sinful heart. How many young people or old people, for that matter, once rooted in the Word of God, have chosen to believe the lie of Satan in precedence to the truth of the word of our God!
What about you and me? The prince of this world and the father of lies does everything in his power to deceive Christians into believing his lies. He does it through false doctrine or by appealing to the lusts and pleasures of our flesh. The last thing the devil wants is for us to give heed to the word of our text, “If a man keep my saying,” - hope against the old evil foe is the sayings of our Savior. We need those sayings on our lips every day of our lives. We need to pray, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our Guest.” We need to read and talk about His sayings in our homes, and we need to join one another in church to hear and learn His sayings because that is our only source of strength against the devil. “If you continue in my word,” says our Savior, “you are my disciples indeed; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Those who remain faithful to the sayings of our Savior have the promise of freedom from the power of the devil in this life and the sure hope of everlasting life in heaven.
Finally, aren’t Jesus’ words a kind of contradiction? He promises we shall never see death and yet we know that our earthly bodies have to die, “for dust [we were], and unto dust shall [we] return.” One of the things that makes people so afraid to die is the uncertainty of it all. No one has come back from the grave to tell them about it. Well, someone has, but the world won’t listen to Him. Jesus came back from the grave on Easter morning to assure us that we have nothing to be afraid of because we know where we are going. When this body dies, our souls go on. Temporal death can’t stop that. Suicide won’t do it. The death of this body is merely the step between life in this vale of tears and everlasting life in heaven. While we, because of our sinful nature, don’t like to think about death and tend to worry about when or how the Lord might take us, the truth, that Jesus promises to see each of us safely to our eternal home, makes all the difference. The promise of Jesus to give us new bodies in heaven that will never die takes the bitterness out of death here on earth and leads us to look forward with joy to that moment when our Savior will say, “Come, ye blessed of the Father, inherit the kingdom prepared [just] for you.” Matthew 25:34
This sermon was preached by Pastor Robert Dommer on March 9, 2008.