In our previous article in this series, we observed that our culture is not one that likes to think about death. Culturally, as others have pointed out, we have done away with the traditional churchyard. No longer are we forced to walk past the graves of our family, friends, and neighbors on the way in and out of Lord’s Day worship and, thus, forced to confront our own mortality. We have sanitized death and sent it to the suburbs. While previous generations were familiar with various deathbed rituals, now cemeteries have been relegated to the neighborhood outskirts—out of sight and out of mind.
Undoubtedly, our culture is confused about death, tangled in conflicting worldviews. If one embraces a purely (or mostly) naturalistic or nihilistic worldview and believes that life is just a random chain of events—no God, no purpose—then death is meaningless, an empty end.
Denial is also a common coping mechanism. One of my former pastors told a group of us a story about a family in his church that was gutted by the sudden death of a father, and the family considered hiding it from their kids to “protect” them. He pushed honest, gentle truth—knowing that denial only breeds fear and, frankly, long-term (if not permanent) emotionally damaging confusion.
Escapism is no better. That same pastor recounted the fact that Louis XV famously banned talk of death within his earshot. But he could not outrun it. He eventually died, no matter how hard he tried to avoid giving any thought to the matter. Despite mankind’s best efforts, cemeteries all over the world keep filling up.
I would submit to you that Scripture rejects denial, escapism, or stoic detachment. It does not endorse those hollow platitudes people often use to sugarcoat real, heartbreaking loss. Dodging death’s weight with a kind of artificial, manufactured positivity is not the way either.
Historically, death was a more visible part of life, but (and perhaps this has always been true of human habit) the morbid nature of death is something which frightens and repels us; it is not something with which we want to deal or grapple. On the one hand, this is a right and appropriate response. Death is a foul intruder on God’s good creation and on his intended order—death is something which ought not to be. Though under God’s sovereign providence, it is nevertheless a kind of foul intruder. Death is wrong, and we should want to avoid it. As we will go on to discuss in this little series, death is not natural. Yes, as a consequence of sin and the fall, it has become the horrid and ordinary course of human experience, but it did not and ought not to have been this way.
Yet, on the other hand, given the reality that death has become, God in Holy Scriptures offers us a remarkably different—indeed, tender—perspective. It is my hope that this little series will contribute something of both a theological grounding for Christians to better grapple with the reality of death, and something by way of biblical hope and pastoral comfort as Christians face the last enemy (1 Cor 15:26).
In today’s article, we will address what death is. In subsequent articles, we will explore various questions about what happens after death, about heaven, the Second Coming of Christ, the New Heavens and Earth, etc.. In all of these discussions, we will give repeated attention to the immense comfort that Scripture affords the Christian. We will be reminded, again and again, that our Good Shepherd is one who once was dead, is risen again, and is alive forevermore. He knows what it is to suffer and to have died. He holds in his hands the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18). And he is the Good Shepherd who guides his flock, walking right with them through the valley of the shadow of death (Ps 23:4). As Christians, we need give no quarter or fear to death, this foul intruder.
Scripture’s Teaching on Death
Before death even existed in the world or in the human experience, the Bible makes mention of it. In Genesis 2:17, God warned Adam about death, saying, “From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.”
From the very outset of human history, of redemptive history, and of Holy Scripture, death is presented as the consequence of sin. Death is God’s judgment on sin. And it is no unfairly foisted consequence either. As the apostle Paul put it in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.” The point there being that wages are something earned. Some action or effort was committed by one party in order to earn a fair and just recompense from another party—that is what wages are. An employee does not consider his paycheck a thoughtful gift from his employer, but rather the due compensation that he has earned—he worked; therefore, he has earned his wages. Adam sinned; therefore, he earned his wages—namely, death.
Contrary to popular sentiment, we understand that, theologically speaking, death is not “just a [natural] part of life.” It is a part of fallen life and fallen reality. But it was not an automatic part of life in God’s original, created setting. Life in paradise included a warning to Adam that if he sinned, if he went his own way and rebelled against God’s good command, then the judgment and consequence of death would await him. But it was not already a part of life; it was threatened in the instance of Adam’s sin.
In Genesis 3:19, we read of the result of Adam’s sin, the curse that God pronounced after Adam’s rebellion in fulfillment of the warning of Genesis 2:17:
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,
Till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken;
For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
And in Genesis 3:23–24, we read that Adam and Eve were driven out from the Garden of Eden, away from the presence of God.
Two Separations
In this judgment against sin and its consequent fallouts, we observe at least two separations: separation of man from God, and separation within man himself, body and soul. Adam and Eve are sent away from the presence of God. Mankind’s first couple, who had only known the blessed nearness of communion with God (cf. Gen 3:8), who knew what it was to have life in sinless, unspoiled paradise are banished from his presence. They had lost that life with God and were now separated from life as God had intended. God intended his image-bearing creatures to enjoy life. In this we find a tragic, seemingly intangible, and yet all-too-real spiritual death.
Moreover, there is a separation that man experiences in his own self at the point of his physical death: the sundering of body and soul. This was not how it was meant to be (as the reunification of body and soul and the Second Coming indicates; more on that later).
The Westminster Confession of Faith 32.1–2 summarizes this phenomenon, saying, in part:
The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies. And the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day. . . .
At the last day . . . all the dead shall be raised up, with the selfsame bodies . . . which shall be united again to their souls forever.
There is a strange and foreign rupturing that happens to a man or woman at their death: the separation of their body from their soul. Death, like an intrusive chisel, forces a horrific, metaphysical splicing of the subsisting fabric that unites body and soul, such that the body and soul are held in this incomplete, unresolved status—in an unnatural divorce from each other—until Christ returns at the Last Day.
There is a physical death that results on account of sin as well as a spiritual death. Both senses of death, rightly understood, result in incredibly unnatural consequences: 1) separation of man from God, the One with whom he was meant to enjoy constant and blessed communion, and 2) separation from himself, the chief of God’s created order, the creature that bears the very image of his holy Maker.
What a foul, utterly heinous thing death truly is. No wonder Paul refers to death as “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor 15:26.) If man is ever to get back into that estate of blessed fellowship with the God who created him, death must be abolished and undone (Westminster Shorter Catechism 12–20).
Life Abundant and Life Restored
It is all the more wondrous, then, that Jesus says what he does in John 10:10, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” The thief—the hellish trifecta of sin, Satan, and death, we might say—came in to steal, kill, and destroy that life that Adam had and that all his posterity were meant to have with the Lord. Christ Jesus came to win and regain what Adam lost: life! What is more, in noting how Jesus came to restore life abundant to all God’s people, we are reminded that he came not merely to get us life in the sense of mere unending existence, but to get us back—secured forever!—into fellowship with the Lord. For it is not just the misery of physical death and the curse that needs undoing, it is the spiritual death—the rupture of intimate communion between God and his creatures—that needs healing. Life abundant means life rightly lived: in the nearer presence of and communion with the Lord, as it was created to be (cf. Rev 21:3, 21:4; John 14:2; Ps 16:11). For the believer, the thing we treasure more than anything else is God, and the undoing of death must mean being restored to God and communion with him (cf. 1 John 3:2; 1 Cor 13:12; Ps 23:6; 1 Thess 4:17).
But when we look further at the Scripture, we find that it both pictures death as an enemy and speaks of death in comforting terms to believers. We will consider that in more detail when we return next time to our ongoing series on the Christian’s comfort, even in death.
©Sean Morris. All Rights Reserved.
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Sean Morris
Sean was educated at Grove City College, Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS), Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and the University of Glasgow (Scotland). He earned his PhD from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. He is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, and serves as a minister at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, TN. He also serves as the Academic Dean of the Blue Ridge Institute for Theological Education and has published numerous theological and devotional articles. Sean lives in Oak Ridge with his wife, Sarah, and their children.
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