MAKING DEATH HARMLESS

Through Jesus Christ the Christian receives the certainty of eternal life. Jesus Christ is the Savior from death, and faith in Him is already the beginning, the dawn of Eternal Life. Even Christians must die. But through Christ this death has lost its sting, for indeed the sting of death is sin, and this has been removed by Jesus Christ; it stands no longer between me and God. The power of this sting was the law; but the law has been removed by grace. Man’s relation to God is now no longer a legalistic one; but in faith man lives again on the generous love of God; the self-giving love which God Himself pours out upon us, out of His fullness. Hence the fear of death is removed.

‘This terrible death, which the Scripture calls the second death, is now taken away from believers by Christ, and is swallowed up in His life, and there is left behind a little death, indeed a sweet death, when a Christian dies according to the flesh. Such a death is sweeter and better than any life upon earth. For all the life, the good, the pleasures and joys of this world cannot make us so happy as to die with a good conscience, in in certain faith and comfort of eternal life.’ (Martin Luther)

‘O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ (1 Cor.15:55)

‘Having the desire to depart and to be with Christ.’ (Phil.1:23)

Thus understood, death becomes the happy event, the stepping over the threshold which lies between this transitory suffering world, which is full of death, and that world of eternal life. It is not in virtue of something which is in the human soul, but in virtue of the Christ, in virtue of the divine saving act that man gains eternal life. There is a fight, and indeed a fight in which it is not the spirit of man who conquers, but God.

‘It was a wondrous battle,

When death and life did strive,

But life has been victorious,

It swallowed death alive.’

In any case, both for the believer and for the unbeliever, whether one knows it or not, recognizes it or not, death is the decisive sign of human life – either my own death, as the final stage, the sign of nothingness, or the death of Christ as the sign of positive fulfillment. Without faith man cannot come to terms with death. He cannot look it in the face. Either man must forget that he is any more than a beast, or he must forget that he is something other than a god, in order to be able to endure death. It is not merely difficult actually to die as man; but it is literally, in the exact sense of the word, impossible. There are human beings who die bravely, who refuse even in death to have any illusions. But they do not really ‘pull it off’; they all die in an illusion which makes death harmless. For the only possibility of not making death harmless, but of seeing it as it is, and yet of not going mad with terror, is faith in Him who in His death has revealed the whole horror of death, and at the same time the still greater glory and power of the divine love.

(Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt)