Do we deny that death is an enemy because we think that somehow it is more spiritual to pretend that this is not so? I do not know. Try doing that with sin. Sin is not sin. See if that is more spiritual. Just pretend, because you do not want to face harsh facts, that homosexuality is alright, just a disposition. Or, try to pretend that the pornographic films that are infesting our culture are alright. We just will not face that because it is unpleasant. If you do that you lose the cutting edge of Christian social concern and reformation. See, you cannot do it in that or any other area, and you cannot do it in the area of death either because, while in one sense it might satisfy us if we are not facing death (at least it satisfies us to the extent that we are not thinking about it), it hardly satisfies anybody who is face to face with this reality. And so a false optimism does not do any good.
Moreover, if we want to be corrected in this thinking we have the example of the Lord Jesus Christ, who wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Why did He weep? Some have reacted against the thought that Jesus could weep in the face of death. They said, “After all, He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. Why would He weep? He must have been weeping about the unbelief that was round about Him.” Well, maybe that too. But there was certainly unbelief around Him at other times also, and He did not weep then. Here He was identifying with the tragedy of the situation. He was identifying with Mary and with Martha in their grief. And He recognized, I believe, that death was a great enemy, even as Paul confesses here in this fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians. And so is suffering. So is misery, so is sin. We were not made for this. But rather we brought it upon ourselves by our sin, having, however, been warned about it by God in advance. We begin by facing that.
And may I say something else? Death, if you understand it spiritually, is not only an enemy, it is, secondly, also the ultimate enemy, the greatest enemy there is. I think we sense this in our fear of death. We are afraid of death, even though death is transformed for Christians and fear is changed in some sense. Because, you see, death means separation, and if we are talking about a spiritual death this means spiritual separation, separation from God. We talk about departure. That is separation. We talk about expiring. That means the exit of the spirit from the body. And just as in physical death the soul and the spirit are separated from the body, so in spiritual death are the soul and spirit separated from God. And in the unsaved man or woman there is, I believe, the awareness that this is so. If death were just the end and it was simply a matter of lying down and expiring, the death of a man or woman would be no more tragic than the death of an animal.
But men and women sense that there is more than that. They sense that there is a life beyond death. They sense that there is a God to be reckoned with. They know, deep in their hearts, that they have offended against this God, they have sinned against Him, they have rebelled against Him, they have not come to terms with Him. And so it is the anticipation of that reckoning that makes death such a terror for the unsaved. And Christians, unfortunately, are not always so sure of their relationship with their Lord to be beyond death’s fear either.
Paul talks about that, and he talks about it in realistic terms. But then we have to say—and it is at this point that we begin to experience Christian joy—that while Paul speaks of death as the ultimate enemy, he at the same time speaks, thirdly, of an ultimate victory. And the ultimate victory is the victory that is provided for us by the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul speaks about it here in terms of our own resurrection. “When that which is mortal becomes immortal, and that which is corruptible becomes incorruptible…” Then Paul comes out with the expression of praise when he says, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” What a victory that is! What a victory to know that death for the Christian is not a separation of the soul and the spirit from God but rather it is an entrance of the soul and the spirit into the presence of God, to be followed in God’s own time by a resurrection that causes our body to be united with Him as well.
