Chapter 11

The Death of Death

Paul reflected on Abraham’s test of faith saying “he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead… but did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God…”[1] In the tradition of Abraham, the Father of the faithful, Paul beseeches the brethren by the mercies of God to present their bodies living sacrifices,[2] owning boldly that he himself has been crucified with Christ and by faith he reckons himself so daily.[3]

This spirituality of Paul has no affinity with the modern sense of being spiritual. The eclectic nebulae of every man’s private (or corporate) interpretation of who or what God is and man’s relationship to him is not faith at all. New age spirituality is a desperate attempt to justify man, by man. The proud sense of well-being produced by humanism-paganism is impeached by the real life outcomes of pain, death and the general woes of the human condition. The pseudo faith of the New Age thrives in a world of denial, false hope, and historical revisionism. The reality that must be faced is Jesus; a historical person, born in Bethlehem during a census registration decreed by Caesar Augustus, raised in Herod’s Galilee and crucified by the Jews and Romans in Jerusalem under the Roman jurisdiction of Pontius Pilate—all well documented. Paul did not promote “Christ consciousness”, but a personal relationship with a real, living person who claimed Divine sovereignty and redemptive authority over the universe. Paul tells us in Romans 5 that faith through our Lord Jesus Christ justifies as well as introduces us to “This grace in which we stand”. Paul, as a man of the law, understands grace in forensic terms. Sin is a breach of the law which demands justice. Until justice is served every man is alienated from the lawgiver, at large, and hostile to Him. There must be a reckoning; a clearing of the record which can only happen if the sentence for the conviction is served. This, Paul further explains, is what Christ does for us, the enemies of God, through his death on the cross. This is the reconciliation,—his blood, our justification. The law is satisfied, justice is served.

Justice is indeed the basis of the ordered moral universe of God, being of necessity inviolable, but God does not apply justice in a passionless, Emersonian-like system wherein a hopeless (or hopeful) cause and effect dynamic rules the day in a dehumanized system of mathematical balance, similar to the Hindu concept of karma-justice without reconciliation, without Christ. The God of Paul is not passionless; even His wrath is an expression of His love. Evil, in its purest form is cold-blooded and passionless—no feeling; empty, hollow, void. But no longer is eye taken for eye, tooth for tooth. In Christ love prevails. The cross is the passion of God and that passion is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. He loves, therefore we love; we love, therefore we know he loves. The difference between believers and non-believers is the pouring forth of God’s love into believers hearts; the deep calling unto the deep.[4] The term “believer” suggests that one has awakened to realities not readily perceived in the five-sensed world, indeed; it is the striking and poetic song of love to the Corinthians wherein Paul describes love as the deep thing, the foundational, enduring basis of everything. Love believes all things.[5]

The weight of this phrase may be more fully appreciated by musing over an improper form of the English word, faith—Love “faiths” all things. Since the same Greek root is the base of the English words believe and faith we are on firm hermeneutic ground as we meditate on this mystical phrase concerning the deep relationship between Love and faith. Love is the subject, faith is the action. For Paul, faith is more verb than noun as the dynamic expression of love in this world. The pagans being polytheistic do not easily conceive of one God, who is spirit, as dynamic, personally involved and aware of each individual—and who loves each one of them. Paul appealed to the Athenians at the Areopagus concerning the Unknown God whom they worshiped as a sort of default when a named God of the Pantheon was not clearly presiding over a particular issue. He respectfully challenged them to know and name this God who is there when the others don’t show. As for all unbelievers God is not far from each one, but for believers His entrance is dynamic, personal, and very real.…”for in Him we live and move and have our being.” Here Paul acknowledges the retroactive, pre-cross operation of the grace among the Gentiles. But now the God of their spiritual experience may be known and loved for who He is and by His great name. [6] This is precisely why so much is made of the NAME by biblical writers, especially Paul. To know someone is to call them by name. To love someone is to cherish their name. To marry someone is to be one in name. Consider the preeminence of the name of Jesus. [7]  For the Gentiles, sin was not the issue of concern. The philosophers of Athens were not interested in hearing Jewish moral dogma but they were supremely interested in hearing more about the resurrection. Paul explains in Romans that the Gentiles live outside the law, and so were not legally guilty, therefore were unaware that sin reigned over them. The Jews were dying and understood why; the Gentiles were dying in ignorance. Where sin abounds there is death and dying but the good news is proclaimed to both Jews who are under the law and Gentiles who are outside the law—grace much more abounds. [8] The last enemy, death, has been defeated and will be vanquished at the quickening of all enthralled by its grip. By one man all die; by one man all will be given life.[9] Paul’s Roman discourse addresses the Jew’s impasse with God and the pathetic plight of the Gentiles who live in ignorance and darkness in regard to the true identity of God and His ways. To know God as the Jews know God merely enhances and highlights their unholiness before Him. All fall short of the glory of God[10] but there is an aggravation in the spirit of the Jew who knows Yahweh but remains at tension with Him after so many weary generations of pursuing His goodwill through the works of the law. Paul’s great burden for his people was to free them from the hopeless bondage of law-keeping and its schizophrenic, bipolar effects on the Jews who, in struggling to keep the law, sinned in pride or sinned in humiliation. [11] He was happy to bring them the good news of imputed righteousness provided by Yahweh Himself in and through Jesus Christ. [12]

The Gentiles, on the other hand, did not know Yahweh. They were steeped in the superstitious musings of the polytheistic poets, begging, bartering, and otherwise incessantly trying to figure out how to elicit blessings or assuage curses from the false gods of myth and imagination. Death is universal and the uniter of the whole human race, Jew and Gentile. Although the sinful condition, or what might be called the state of sin, is universal, sin as it manifests in human behavior is relative. A careful perusal of Paul’s teaching on sin reveals a clear differentiation between sinful behavior, and the sinful condition or state. It is the state of sin that condemns, not the behavior. Every human being lives and dies in the state of sin if he is not in Christ, [13] but every individual, including the Christian, manifests sin in varying and diverse ways. If we judge ourselves and others by measuring, counting or weighing sins, we miss the critical point Paul is trying to make. No person is more sinful than any other person. Through the sin of one man, sin was passed to all men, and death through sin. [14] We all die because we are all equally sinful, regardless of where we are on the scale of human goodness. Each one has an appointment with death, after that, the judgment. [15] Holiness meets man physically at the resurrection—not before. Even Christian’s who have a foretaste of resurrection life, groan and travail with the rest of creation, waiting for resurrection life in its fullness.[16] For Christians, death remains a reality but its sting and victory have been taken away by Christ. The defeat of the last enemy, death, has been sealed by the resurrection of Jesus. Furthermore, its universal and final destruction is imminent. [17]