Wednesday
Wednesday
The Conquest of Death
Christ Jesus … has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
2 Timothy 1:10
The most fantastic of all Christian claims is that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. It strains our credulity to the limit. Human beings have tried with all possible ingenuity both to defy and to deny death. But only Christ has claimed to conquer it, that is, to defeat it in his own experience and to deprive it of its power over others.
In our day, at least in the West, nobody exemplifies the widespread angst, and especially the fear of death, more dramatically than the tragi-comedian Woody Allen. He regards death and dissolution with terror. It has become an obsession with him. True, he is still able to joke about it. “It’s not that I’m afraid to die,” he famously quips. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” He calls death “absolutely stupefying.”
Jesus Christ, however, rescues his disciples from this horror. Consider one of his great “I am” sayings: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25–26). These verses contain a double promise of Jesus to his followers. The believer who lives will never die, because Christ is his life, and death will seem to him only a trivial episode. The believer who dies, however, will live again, because Christ is his resurrection. Thus Christ is both the life of those who live and the resurrection of those who die. Christ transforms both life and death.
It is said of Henry Venn, the eighteenth-century evangelical Anglican vicar, that when he was told he was dying, his joy at dying kept him alive another fortnight! Such a fearless, joyful attitude to the onset of death is possible only because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his conquest of death.
For further reading: John 11:17–44