Jesus: The Death KillerSýnishorn

Is your heart breaking over the current situation of the world? Mine is. That’s because for us, death is largely an enigma, a mystery. For Jesus, however, death is not an enigma. It’s simply the enemy.

C.S. Lewis wrote about his wife's death in "A Grief Observed." He talked about the human experience of turning to God when everything is okay. It feels as if God receives you with open arms. But when you really, really need Him, when you are desperate, as our world is in this moment, sometimes it feels as if the door of heaven is bolted shut. That's the initial enigma of God's perceived delays. And then the eventual enigma is death itself.

Who has not thought about death recently? None of us knows how much time we have. I hate that, and so should you. From a human viewpoint, when we look at death, it is surely an enigma. But Jesus said this too is for the glory of God. 

Think once more about Jesus’ view of death. For Him, death is not a mystery. It is something to be defeated.

Consider His assertion before He raised Lazarus from the dead: "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me will live, even though they die.”

What an incredible statement. It is the hinge of the climactic miracle in the Gospel of John. He had already shown His authority over nature and demonic powers. Here He declared He would show the ultimate enemy it would be subjected to Him. Death would be vanquished, broken, crushed, killed forever.

Jesus was essentially saying, “I, this person standing in front of you, the one you're looking at, whose flesh and blood is the center point of all life and history and destiny, I can bring vitality to creation. I can raise the dead. I am, right now, the resurrection and the life. Not sometime in the future. I'm not just an intellectual concept. I am the resurrection and the life. He who lives and believes in me shall never die, but shall live even if he dies."