There are no two things more starkly contrasted than “death” and “life”. They are black and white, with no middle ground, complete opposites that cannot exist at the same time or place. Yet when it comes to the Gospel, they are intertwined in the person of Jesus Christ. He fought against the power of death, and He won! Actually, He brought life through death.
In this way, He went against everything we have come to know and experience in this life. We see life as short, and death as the end. Its finality is what breaks our hearts the most. Our natural minds can only conceive of death as an unavoidable enemy that comes far too soon and causes far too much pain.
God knows that. And that’s why He graciously provided a way for us to have victory over this enemy.
Death is not an enemy that He ever wanted us to learn about. But when He created humans, He made them uniquely with the capability of making a choice. They could choose to follow Him and live for Him – which is what He created them to do, or, they could choose to disobey Him and live for themselves – which was contrary to the very image of God in which they were made!
Unfortunately, the first humans, Adam and Eve, chose the latter. They were deceived into thinking that somehow by becoming knowledgeable of not only the “good” that God made, but also this mysterious existence of “evil”, that they would be on par with God, knowing everything and having power over it all. Instead, forgetting that they were the creation and not the Creator, that decision led to evil invading their hearts and corrupting their very nature. This decision to rebel against God is called “sin” – a three-letter word that has led to all the struggles we face in this life as the natural descendants of Adam and Eve. The natural result of sin is death, because it is all about going in the opposite way of God, the source of life. Because of their choice to walk away from God’s protection and go their own way, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, where there was a tree called the Tree of Life. The fruit of this tree was meant to give humans eternal life. Now that they were infected with sin, however, they were able only to taste of death.
But God planned to bring them back into right relationship. This would necessarily involve ridding them of the sin, first. Sin needed to die, once and for all – and so the humans would not have to die with it, they had to somehow be separated from its power over and in them. But how could such a feat be accomplished?
“…BUT the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23b).
God offered eternal life as a gift. It cost us nothing, but it cost Jesus everything. Jesus came to earth as the Son of God, born of the virgin Mary. This means that He was both fully God and fully man. In a masterful plan of redemption, God provided Him as the only One who could take all of the sin of mankind upon Himself, take the punishment of death that it deserves, and be powerful enough to defeat death by rising from the grave.
In this way, Jesus Christ became the Way, Truth, and Life, the only way back to relationship with God (John 14:6), for all who would put their faith and trust in Him as their Savior from the power of sin. When we turn our lives over the Christ, He gives us His righteousness; His Holy Spirit comes to live in us, making us acceptable and able to stand before God, the source of life, free from the condemnation of sin and death.
We can understand this as going from death to life, just as Christ did. When we trust Him as our Savior, we die to our old selves and rise to new spiritual life (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). In this new life, we are guaranteed to one day have eternal life in Heaven.
If you physically die, not having been forgiven and set free from your sin nature through Christ, however, you will be separated from God in Hell for eternity. In that case, death is the enemy, and all hope will be lost.
If you’re reading this, though, there is still time to change your future. In one moment, one blink of an eye, you can call out to Jesus for His salvation, and your eternal destiny will be changed to life forever with God in paradise.
Don’t miss this opportunity to pass from death to life (John 5:24).