Is Death Past, Present, or Future?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:02.000 | We have an intriguing Bible question today from a listener named Brandy. "Hello Pastor John, and thank you for your ministry.
00:00:09.900 | I have a question regarding death and the types of death Paul refers to in his epistles.
00:00:15.460 | I know we all face a physical death and for non-believers, there's a second spiritual death, an eternal death as well.
00:00:23.180 | However, when Paul is speaking in Romans 8 to believers, he says, "If you live according to the flesh, you will die."
00:00:30.040 | Romans 8 13, "Does Paul mean that our sins somehow shorten our earthly lives or are believers subject to eternal death?"
00:00:38.400 | And what does Paul mean when he says that the man in Corinth who has his father's wife
00:00:42.800 | is to be handed over to Satan "for the destruction of his flesh."
00:00:47.060 | 1 Corinthians 5 5, "What kind of death is this? I feel like I am missing an integral piece to the puzzle.
00:00:54.720 | Thank you for your help, Pastor John."
00:00:57.200 | I love this question, partly because it pushes me to do something I've never done before, namely,
00:01:03.040 | see how many different ways the New Testament speaks of a Christian dying. I've never done that.
00:01:09.280 | So instead of just addressing two of the examples that Brandy raises, Romans 8 13 and 1 Corinthians 5 5,
00:01:17.540 | let me mention six ways I see the New Testament speaking of a Christian dying and
00:01:25.220 | take up those two where they turn up in the sequence. Number one,
00:01:29.360 | paradoxically, the Christian life begins at conversion with a death.
00:01:34.740 | Galatians 2 20, looking back on his conversion, Paul said, "I have been
00:01:40.300 | crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life
00:01:46.740 | I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."
00:01:53.100 | When we are converted to Christ, our old, rebellious,
00:01:57.260 | unbelieving, spiritually dead self dies.
00:02:01.940 | Dies with Christ, and a new, believing, submissive,
00:02:06.700 | spiritually sensitive life comes into being—a new creation. That's number one. Number two,
00:02:13.460 | following from that experience of
00:02:16.620 | death to our old sinful nature,
00:02:21.060 | Paul calls us now in view of that reality to
00:02:24.300 | "reckon ourselves to be dead," Romans 6 1. So you also must consider or reckon yourselves
00:02:32.900 | dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
00:02:37.340 | So this is an act of faith by which we repeatedly preach to ourselves the
00:02:44.100 | reality that what happened to us at our conversion
00:02:48.940 | is true. We really died with Christ. We died to sin.
00:02:53.620 | We died to rebellion and unbelief, and now by faith we repeatedly
00:02:59.460 | reckon it to be so. I'm dead, sin. You don't rule. We preach to ourselves.
00:03:05.220 | Number three, this is one that Brandy asked about in particular, Romans 8 13.
00:03:11.740 | We turn
00:03:14.420 | against every
00:03:16.540 | arising of our old sinful nature and put it to death
00:03:20.500 | by the Spirit.
00:03:22.860 | The sword of the Spirit is for killing, after all. That's what swords are for
00:03:26.260 | every day. So Paul says in Romans 8 13, "If you live
00:03:31.820 | according to the flesh, you will die.
00:03:34.580 | But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body,
00:03:39.460 | you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God."
00:03:44.460 | So we take one step beyond
00:03:46.900 | reckoning
00:03:49.060 | ourselves dead and actually target
00:03:52.340 | specific uprisings of the old nature and kill them. We kill them.
00:03:56.940 | We kill them by the Spirit. That is, we trust the promise of the Holy Spirit's power
00:04:03.700 | to help us defeat sin, and we say to the temptation, "In the name of Jesus,
00:04:09.300 | you don't own me," and we stick it with the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, a better promise
00:04:16.060 | than what sin is offering. And Brandy asks whether the death Paul threatens,
00:04:22.900 | if we don't do this, is
00:04:25.420 | early physical death. That's one option she
00:04:28.220 | holds out. Or, she asks, are believers subject to eternal death?
00:04:33.700 | Well,
00:04:35.540 | eternal death is what Paul has in mind here, not just some kind of
00:04:40.060 | disciplinary suffering or physical death. And we know that because the argument he gives to support it in
00:04:47.980 | verse 14 is, "For all who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God."
00:04:55.340 | In other words,
00:04:57.140 | when we put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, we are being led by the Spirit into
00:05:04.500 | that kind of warfare against sin, our sin, and thus we prove
00:05:10.180 | by that warfare that we are the sons of God. If we don't make war on our
00:05:16.900 | sin, but rather make peace with it,
00:05:20.300 | we show that we are not led by the Spirit of God and therefore not the children of God.
00:05:28.100 | So, no, no, Brandy. The children of God are not subject
00:05:33.740 | to eternal death. But Paul often addresses the church with the warnings of eternal death
00:05:40.700 | so as to make plain who are the true believers who respond to this warning and who are not.
00:05:48.100 | Number four, the New Testament talks about a Christian dying
00:05:54.380 | in the sense that
00:05:57.380 | Jesus did and
00:05:59.900 | Paul did in different words. Here's what Jesus said,
00:06:03.660 | Luke 9, 23, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross
00:06:09.820 | daily and follow me." To take up the cross is to take up an instrument of execution. It's like wearing a little
00:06:17.900 | electric chair around your neck.
00:06:20.620 | It is in a profound sense to die. Like Bonhoeffer said, when Jesus bids a man to come,
00:06:28.020 | he bids him come and die. Now in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul
00:06:33.380 | was pleading
00:06:35.380 | against those who denied the resurrection and in verse 31 he said, "I
00:06:40.020 | protest, brothers. I die every day.
00:06:44.540 | What do I gain if humanly speaking I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised,
00:06:50.940 | let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die."
00:06:54.220 | I think
00:06:56.180 | this is Paul's way of saying what Jesus said.
00:06:59.460 | Every day
00:07:01.820 | Christians make choices
00:07:03.820 | that to the world look like little deaths,
00:07:06.780 | risking your life in Ephesus,
00:07:09.540 | denying yourself some immediate comfort or security in order to serve someone else. We deny ourselves. We die to ourselves,
00:07:17.700 | our immediate demand for comfort or security or pleasure in order to bring others life and
00:07:25.980 | the greater blessing we find in giving.
00:07:29.100 | Number five,
00:07:31.180 | for some people like Paul, there are marks of these kinds of dying in their own bodies.
00:07:38.780 | He said in 2 Corinthians 4.10 that he was always
00:07:42.700 | carrying in the body
00:07:45.660 | the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our bodies.
00:07:52.500 | And in Galatians 6.17, he said, "I bear in my body the marks of
00:07:58.860 | Jesus." These kinds of scars
00:08:01.340 | mingled with love caused Paul to realize that in a profound sense
00:08:07.380 | he was completing the very death of Jesus by making it tangible or visible
00:08:14.300 | to people for whom Christ died in his own body. He said in Colossians 1.24, "I
00:08:20.420 | rejoice in my sufferings
00:08:22.860 | for your sake and in my
00:08:26.100 | flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church,
00:08:33.180 | which I take to mean that Paul's very bodily
00:08:37.220 | existence as a suffering
00:08:39.980 | apostle was a
00:08:42.180 | presentation in the flesh of the sufferings and death of
00:08:46.500 | Christ so that people could actually see in Paul by his suffering how much they are loved by Christ.
00:08:54.940 | Then finally, number six, there is physical suffering and death. And if Jesus does not come back first,
00:09:01.300 | every one of us will experience this. It's very close for some of us. In answer to Brandy's question,
00:09:08.860 | when Paul handed over to Satan the immoral person in
00:09:14.500 | 1 Corinthians 5.5, who'd been sleeping with his stepmother,
00:09:20.020 | I think Paul was saying that his prayer for this person
00:09:25.740 | was that
00:09:27.700 | suffering and
00:09:29.220 | impending death would shake the
00:09:31.940 | disciplined person out of his spiritual stupor and bring him to faith and life, even if he died.
00:09:39.620 | So now, to get the biblical emphasis right,
00:09:43.900 | we need to end like this. In
00:09:47.900 | every single case of
00:09:49.980 | dying in the Christian life, the biblical emphasis,
00:09:54.420 | amazingly, falls on "for the sake of someone's living." It's always "for the sake of someone's
00:10:01.700 | living" that we talk about dying. We die in order to live. The death at conversion is a
00:10:09.820 | spiritual resurrection of life. We reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God.
00:10:17.100 | We kill sin so that we live in righteousness. We lose our lives to gain them.
00:10:24.100 | We carry the marks of Jesus so that people see life, the life of love.
00:10:29.860 | And we die finally and physically
00:10:33.020 | triumphant over sin,
00:10:35.900 | over death, over Satan, only to rise in the last day and
00:10:40.820 | shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father.
00:10:45.940 | It's always "for the sake of someone's living" that we talk about dying. That is a great word. Thank you, Pastor John, for that.
00:10:52.460 | Thank you for joining us today. Brandy had a great Bible question.
00:10:55.500 | Maybe you have a great Bible question for Pastor John. If so, get it to us through our online home at
00:11:00.340 | DesireWinGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:03.180 | On Wednesday, we return and we are going to look closer at what it means to love Christ above all else.
00:11:09.620 | What does that mean? What does it look like to love Christ above all else?
00:11:13.900 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday for that. See you then.
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