The 4 deaths

I don’t remember my father picking me up from school that often. When he did, he looked like most dads would. He wore a t-shirt, baggy jeans, and the most authentic looking fake smile I ever had the pleasure of seeing; he did not care for the chit chat with other waiting parents but he had to pretend to get along because that’s what they taught us to do. His smile would transform though, as he walked with his children back home. It would be real and full of life. You saw the delight and love on his face as he would joke around and play with me and my sisters on our way back. One day, he picked me up wearing a black suit, stripped of his sickeningly wide grin. As we journeyed to our house, the genuine smile wouldn’t appear either. We walked home in silence. It was our neigbour’s funeral that day. My mother would be the one to explain everything to me. He was going to heaven.

Death has been as close as next door ever since. Relatives, school mates, teachers and even more neighbours have left us since then. More will be on the way. And with times being the way they are right now, death is on our screens everyday. It follows that this is the topic I want to write about today. I am not afraid of death so I shouldn’t be uncomfortable talking about it. Death will come for us all no matter how hard or how long people try to ignore it. In more ways than one it is coming and it is here.

There are 4 types of death to follow. One is more well known as the others are. As such, that is the one I will begin with. So there’s no better place to look for it than in the beginning – Genesis.

The death of spirit and body

Death was introduced through the Lord’s warning in Genesis 2:17. And death entered in the following chapter. How easily are we convinced to skirt the regulations because we thought to ourselves “surely I won’t die from this”. The attitude of Adam still lingers to this day. If you encounter people who refuse to wear a mask or disregard the lockdown regulations, you have my sympathy because they are very difficult to reason with. 

Not only did  Adam and Eve become vulnerable to death, so too was this curse inflicted on their children; their children’s children; on us. Disease, suffering, and the degradation of our bodies and minds until our eventual return to the dust. That’s what entered in Genesis 3.  Yes I’m sure this is a familiar concept for all of you. What is also clear in Genesis is not just the death of our bodies but the death of our spirits. Genesis 2:7 tells us that when the Lord made Adam from the dust, he was not alive. Adam had form but he had not yet had the breath of life breathed into him by the Father. Much like the valley of the dry bones in Ezekiel, Adam had no life in him until a spiritual breath was breathed into him. I feel this is a safe connection to make as the words for breath in Ezekiel 3 (haruach) and here in Genesis 2 (nishmat) aren’t the same word in Hebrew but when they are used they are used to mean spirit or as an indicator of God’s presence. This is opposed to another word for breath (hevel) which implies a meaningless breath like a mist or vapour that holds no weight. I go into more detail about hevel in a previous blogpost on Ecclesiastes. What I mean to illustrate here is that Adam, before God’s intervention, was spiritually dead. He was just dust or a bunch of particles put together in a very intelligent way but not spiritually alive. Then in Genesis 3 when sin entered the world, death followed. In Genesis 3:19 when the Lord lists the consequences of sin, he ends by saying Adam will return to the dust. This illustrates the eventual physical death of Adam but before the Lord says this He says “you are dust…” to Adam (italics added by me). Could this allude to Adam’s spiritual corruption of his disobedience? Returning the state of his soul to that before he had life breathed into him? I believe so. When sin entered, Adam’s relationship with God changed; The harmony he had with God was warped into an inward looking selfishness and his spirit was dead to sin. This corruption of God’s creation is what led to the corruption of the body. Because he was dead in spirit, he died in body. 

Many call the physical death the first death. I’d like to consider the spiritual death of Adam and his eventual demise to be one and the same. They are intrinsically connected. The mortal part of us deteriorates because the immortal was a slave to sin, chained to it. And since the wages of sin is death, you can expect death to follow. But this spiritual deadness leads not only to the first death; it is also a path to the second.

The second death

“But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

• Revelation 21:8 

When sin is the thing we are enslaved to (John 8:34), it is like an arrowhead. We were drawn in the womb and let loose into the world with sin leading the way of the fletching (the feathers at the end). No matter how far this arrow is drawn, no matter which direction this arrow is let loose, its destination will always be the same – the second death. All people sin. We were born as imperfect creatures and there is no merit from ourselves great enough to change the course. And this is again a result of Adam’s and our corruption of the perfect relationship with the creator. A divergence of Eden.

I first started thinking of Hell when my mother asked me where I was headed. I was 11 years old and my grandfather had just passed. We were sitting in a hospital canteen and while we were wordlessly eating chips and gravy, she asked me if I was saved. I’m sure I told my mother that I was going to heaven with our neighbour Gwyn. Before my mother asked this question, I think I would’ve believed in the answer I went on to give her. I was a good boy. I didn’t cheat in school. Rarely did I tell a fib. I ate all my vegetables. So of course I was going to see Gwyn. But in the days following, that question lingered in my mind. It sat down and made itself comfortable with the  images illustrated in revelation 21:8. Academically, I knew that all people were sinful and all deserved to go to hell. It’s what I was taught in Sunday school. All those stories from the old testament was about a bunch of people given a law from God and never being able to fulfill it. They would stray away and God would punish them. In my life that’s how I thought it would always be; I stray from the right way of doing things and then I’ll be punished for it. Eventually I would find myself facing the long punishment – the second death. Because I realised that the sins I was capable of, the sins I had committed, in thought or in action was enough to send me there. I was going the same way as the murderer. My arrow was flying the same wind. And I wasn’t good enough to stop any of it from happening. 

I was recently admitted to hospital due to an infection. I was found in my bedroom by my dear housemate (we will call her Louise) in a state of a shivering deluded fever. I had insisted that I was fine and I was able to handle things on my own. Louise stayed by my side and eventually convinced me that I needed to see the doctor. That’s the nice way of putting it. The more accurate depiction would have me mentioning her wrapping myself in her blanket, dragging me to her car and driving a barely cooperative blob slipping in and out of consciousness to A&E. According to Louise, I wouldn’t have lasted that long on my own without her intervention. I needed a doctor. I feel as if the state I was in – shivering in my bed, convinced I was going to be fine, was the state I was in before my mother asked me the question in the canteen. I was confident I was able to fight this problem on my own, I was naturally good enough to overcome it and I did not need anyone’s help. When nonbelievers convince themselves that they’re good enough that even if there were a God then he would accept them into heaven, I see a shivering deluded patient who needs to see the doctor. 

I wrote before about sin being the arrowhead. God has the power to free us from it. But he still has to resolve what he separates us from. The sin cannot enter his kingdom. He despises it. God loves us and wants to be with us so how does he deal with sin? Well what got us chained to sin was a man wanting to be like God and sentencing us all to damnation. What freed 11 year old me was God becoming man and breaking my chains to sin. He snapped the arrow mid flight, freeing the fletching from the arrowhead and lifted the feathers from the unbearable weight driving it towards oblivion. It was the greatest act of love this earth had seen or will ever see. Hell is a place where arrowheads belong – the second death. But the great act of love I write about was a death far worse. 

The life, death, and resurrection of Christ

God was in perfect unity with Himself. For Him and through Him all things were made (Colossians 1:16) yet he came down as a man to serve us created beings. He served us. Purely out of love. He died on that cross to breathe life into us.

The death he suffered, as I mentioned earlier, was far greater and fuller than any death this earth has ever seen or ever will see. It was agony not just to His material body but the immaterial. The way my 11 year old self felt towards the sin in my heart was painless because I had not yet known what it was like to live a life for God. I was blind, deaf, numb to the stinging poison of sin and evil. But for Jesus, who had always known perfect unity with what is good, when our sin was being paid for, he felt everything. Every arrowhead piercing his body. All of sin was being dealt with. He became sin on that cross. The man who was the recipient of the Father’s full love now was receiving His full wrath. The begotten son became the loneliest orphan on a tree. All this He suffered so that He could bring us back.

I cannot separate the act on Cavalry from Jesus’ life. His death was perfect because His life was perfect. With His perfect life and the fulfillment of a law we could never replicate by ourselves, the arrow could be broken and the state of our souls were set on the right path. Because as Jesus says in John 14 “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Only through Him are we able to find the way. The way back to full reconciliation with our creator.

With His death, He purchased us. He paid for our tainted souls with his pristine blood. And with His resurrection and ascension heavenward, He brings us with Him. Amen. 

The daily death

The last death I will consider is one that happens more than once in an average believer’s life. Two things are important to note: “more than once” and “in an average believer’s life”

I say in an average believer’s life because I consider it possible for this type of death to only happen once for me to consider a person a believer. When this occurs, it is not the typical life of the average believer you see today. Paul outlines what I’m alluding to in Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”. For the thief on the cross, this was a literal crucifixion with Christ. He was not your average believer but he was a believer nonetheless and he is with our Lord in paradise as you know. Those of us who are disciples in Christ have died with Him. This was the one time purchase. Our debt was paid in full. We don’t need anything extra outside the cross. A man may have sinned his whole life and one morning the Holy Spirit enters him and his soul is crucified with Christ before breakfast. The man may pass at noon and his soul will be secure with The father. He may pass the next day and his soul will still be heavenbound. His death may come a decade later and the outcome will be the same. This is the power of the conversion. I write this just to illustrate that I believe in full atonement by the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. I do not want to be misunderstood before I reach my next point. 

So what do I mean by “more than once in an average believer’s life”? We are not perfect creatures. As Paul reminds us in Romans 12:2 we need constant renewing of our mind so that we may not conform to the world. As you may know I still sin. We all do. That’s why in Colossians 3:5 Paul tells us to put to death our earthly nature. But how can we do that if we were on our own? We can’t.  It would be impossible without Christ, without the cross. That is why I believe the power of the cross extends itself to those daily moments in our lives. Those moments when sin insidiously creeps into our thoughts and our actions. It is the nature of our old selves. That can not be overcome by our sheer will but by Grace and the cross. We may try to hide these sins from others, from ourselves or even more foolishly we can try to hide it from God Himself. We can try to carry it ourselves but it only gets heavier. The shame we keep flings us deeper into a whirlpool guilt. It’s as if we are still enslaved to sin itself. 

But to paraphrase Ian Parry, why are you still wearing the graveclothes? We are out of the grave? Christ has saved us! We are not dead anymore. Life has been breathed into our dusty bones so that we may walk and talk and live and laugh and love in Christ. 

So put to death this earthly nature. We can’t do it by ourselves. It has to be put forward to Jesus on the cross.