The 2015 Clearnote Pastors Conference, titled The Last Enemy, was held at Clearnote Church in Bloomington, Indiana from February 18-20, 2015. The following is a transcript of session 1, “The Last Enemy: A biblical understanding of death,” preached by Pastor David Bayly on February 18, 2015. See also the transcripts of sessions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
If you have your Bibles, turn with me in God’s Word to Genesis 3. We’re talking about death, and the Christian response to it. This is not a new subject for Baylys to speak about, although it’s unusual for my brother Tim and me to be the ones speaking about it. I remember year after year, our father going all over the country and even around other places to speak about death and dying–he did so with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross for a number of years at med schools, and also on his own–and I remember traveling with him and how taxing and wearing it was for him to speak about death–and he always did so on the basis of the death that stalked my three brothers who died, two before I was born, one after. And when Dad would go and speak–I remember the last time he did it, by that time I was in seminary myself, so I went with him to Rockford, probably to that big PCA church in Rockford, and he did a weekend seminar on death and dying, and as always happened, all those who had lost children in the last year–in the last decade it seemed–came out and wanted to talk and talk about death. And it was so taxing. I was exhausted from the stories and the grief of these people who came up to Dad. I couldn’t believe that he could take a full weekend of talking to these people. And that was really what he did. He went there to speak, but his real ministry was in between the sessions and just talking to people.
One of the things that my dad would say about death is that death is horrible. And occasionally he would talk about the death of my brother Danny, who had leukemia and died at age 5. Danny was told that there was no hope for him and was brought home from the hospital to die. Because it was such a sensitive thing I never asked Dad what it meant when he said that Danny was brought home from the hospital to die. Danny was Tim’s older brother who was very dear to Tim, they were inseparable for years, and he was brought home to die, and he bled to death on my parents’ bed, as I understand it. Now I don’t know if that means he bled outwardly or inwardly, I don’t know–was it like a hemophilia bleed? Was it an external–I don’t know, but I know it was horrible. And for Dad to revisit those memories time after time was horrible. Death is an enemy. Death is a foe. Now that seems obvious, because Scripture says the last enemy to be destroyed is death, but this evening I think we have to make certain points about death that are essential to proving that death is a foe, and what it means that it’s a foe.
So I have three basic points that I’d like to make this evening. One is that death is not natural; second that death is a foe, not a tool or a toy; third, that death is all the foregoing because it is inextricably linked to judgment. Death is not natural–that’s an argument–then the corollaries that flow from the argument: death is a foe, not a tool, not a toy, not a good thing; finally, death is the foregoing because it’s inextricably linked by the Word of God to judgment.
So Genesis 3,
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.'”
The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Then the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”
He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”
And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Genesis 3:1-13
This is in particular the part I want you to listen to…
The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
Cursed are you more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you will go,
And dust you will eat
All the days of your life;And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you.”Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil you will eat of it
All the days of your life.“Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
And you will eat the plants of the field;
By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.”Now the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”– therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.
So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:14-24
The Word of God. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word. And in this chapter which tells us of the fall of man and the rise of death, we pray that we will find both the diagnosis of our condition–the reality of it–and the hope to surpass it. We thank you for Your Word. Speak to us. May my words be faithful. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.
In Genesis 3 the beautiful harmony of Eden and all creation comes to an abrupt end. It’s destroyed by the entrance of sin, by Eve’s temptation at the hands of the serpent, her eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, followed by Adam doing the same, and the consequent punishment of death.
Now death was not a foreign concept to the residents of the garden, because God had warned Adam in chapter 2 verse 17 that in the day that he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would surely die. So to be a sanction and a warning–a threat with some force–there had to be some understanding of death. Eve clearly understands that it’s a threat, she responds to the serpent’s temptation to eat that fruit by saying in verse 3, “God has said you shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.” (And I honestly have heard it said at times that this is Eve exaggerating what God had threatened–that it was just eating from it, not touching it, that would cause death. I’m sure this is her faithfulness to Adam’s warning, “Don’t touch it!” I don’t see it as anything other than a faithful response.)
So how does Eve understand death? Let’s be clear, the death of plants, which in a sense was envisioned by God, because man and animal were to eat plants, is not death. Plants don’t live, they don’t have spirit, ruach; they don’t have pneuma–that’s essential to life in Scripture; nor do they have blood, and life is in the blood. And so there’s no death with plants. There is death with animals, and I believe that we see the first animal death in the clothing of Adam and Eve.
So the decay in the blossoming pattern of plants–the cycle of life, growth, then return to the soil–could not have provided the basis for Eve’s understanding of the punishment for sin. And so there are those who claim that death did occur before Adam’s sin in the garden, and there are others that deny it. Some say, “Well Eve couldn’t have understood it if there hadn’t been death.” And there are others who say that there could not have been death. Those who deny death point to a number of things. First, they say God declared His creation “very good.” And how could a creation that admitted catastrophe and disease and that kind of thing be very good. Even if it was just among the animals, it couldn’t be seen as good.
They also argue that the plants of the garden were the food of the animals and man prior to the Fall. In fact not only prior to the fall but prior to the Flood, and so man and animals being herbivorous is an indication that the death of animals was not in view–that death as we understand it, the absence of breath, the shedding of blood–was foreign to the garden of Eden.
Perhaps the strongest argument is found in Paul’s writings in Romans. Romans 5:12, it says,
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned–
They say, “Well now, death spread to the world–” But the other side, the ones that say, well death wasn’t foreign to the garden, there was death in the garden, say, “Yes, but it spread to all men–it doesn’t mean that there couldn’t have been animal death.”
But just a few verses later, Paul writes that death reigned through the transgression of the one, and that seems to describe all creation. “Death reigned,” it says. It seems to describe all creation, not just human beings, though in this passage you could see it as potentially limited to humans. Yet just a few chapters later, going from Romans 5 to Romans 8 we have this strong statement that I think is fairly conclusive evidence of the nature of things prior to the Fall. Paul writes,
For the anxious longing of the creation…
And that is obviously more than just man,
…waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.
And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.
Romans 8:19-23
So creation and mankind groan and await some kind of redemption. And creation is subjected to futility. We see that the curse is on creation–all of creation is blighted, all of creation is brought under the judgment. The bringing forth of fruit is suddenly a taxing and painful thing, not just for the woman, but for creation itself.
It will take the sweat of the man’s brow, there will be thorns and thistles, and it will be a struggle to be fruitful. Even the plants suffer from that, I believe, and I think and hope you will understand that the idea of animal death before human death, that animals died all along but man only after the fall, this idea that perhaps animals were dying but man only died because of the Fall, is an idea that arises from one source, and that source is the influence of the scientific outlook in our culture, the influence of it on our church and on our approach to Scripture. The empirical method, the “I can replicate it” idea, the idea that there are laws that are natural that exist on their own, extrinsic from God, is the idea that has caused us to toy with the possibility of death being part of creation before the Fall.
Evolution requires death, doesn’t it? The price of progress in evolution is death. Death is the means of growth in evolutionary theory. Evolution posits the survival of the fittest and the culling of the herd; the eradication of the weaker elements of the species is accomplished by death. Death is essential to evolution. It reduces the misfits and so through natural selection, death accomplishes growth. Death brings longer life. Those who survive pass on better genes, but the culling is always going on. Each generation improves on the last, and the price of this progress is death.
Now the first Christians who accepted this evolutionary theory tried at times to forge a hybrid. They came up with a compromise between evolution and traditional views of creation and having evolution for animals but creation whole and distinct for Adam, so they said animals may have evolved over the eons, but man was made by the hand of God–and very few attempt this hybrid today. I don’t know any Christian scientists who accept natural selection who try and carve out an exception for man anymore.
It doesn’t do justice to the Bible in which we see that God’s method of creating man is no different than His method of creating the animals. And so it’s no good from that perspective. It doesn’t do justice to evolutionary theory, which requires man to be just one link in the chain of beings with a better and higher link still to come; and so today almost all advocates of theistic evolution simply accept that God created man through a process of evolution, just as He created animals, which of course requires physical death before the Fall, because evolution requires death to cull the herd–it’s the engine of evolution.
And so we find Christian advocates of evolution. Biologos–you’ve heard of it–on their website you’ll find a paper on death, and I’m going to quote at length from this paper. Biologos is a group of Christians who are strongly influencing my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, right now. Tim Keller in New York City, the most prominent pastor in our denomination and one of the most prominent in America, is heavily involved with this group, and this is what they say about death. (http://biologos.org/common-questions/human-origins/death-before-the-fall):
“The Garden of Eden has a reputation as a perfect place, with no death, pain, or even danger for humans or animals. Yet Genesis only teaches that the original creation is “good”, not “perfect.” Some verses in Genesis 1-2 suggest that God’s creation was not safe or pain-free. D. C. Spanner points out that God charged humanity to “subdue” (Gen. 1:28), a word that implies danger.7 Also, Genesis 2 places Adam and Eve in a garden; in the ancient near east, this was a walled enclosure, protecting the inhabitants from the wilderness and dangerous animals beyond. The Bible is clear that the culmination of God’s plan in the new creation is a place without tears, pain, or death (Rev. 21:4), but is less clear whether the first creation shared these traits.”
And of course you wonder, well then how, in a picture right out of Dürer–you know, St Jerome and his study with the lion and the lamb lying down–is it that Noah was able to lead these animals in harmony with him and with each other onto the ark outside the gates of the garden? These views’ rejection of the Bible is staggering. It’s not ignorance.
“The death of plants and animals is actually an essential feature in a healthy ecosystem. Plants provide food for animals, and animals return nutrients to the soil upon their deaths. Without predators, populations of some species would explode and crowd out others, maybe even pushing those species to extinction. Predators tend to pick the most populous species to eat, limiting its growth so that other species can compete successfully.
It is more difficult to see human death in a positive light. For those who have lost a loved one, death can feel like the ultimate evil. Jesus mourned the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11), after all. Paul writes of death as the paycheck for sin (Rom. 6:23) and as the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Cor. 15:26). The New Testament seems to emphasize death as an evil because it is incompatible with the kind of life promised in the fulfilled kingdom of God. Jesus’ earthly ministry signified the arrival of that future kingdom of God into the present age, but we still live in a world in which the kingdom has not been fully realized. Thus the continuing reality of physical death clashes with the promise of the redeemed future. Only when believers are clothed with their new resurrection bodies will death be finally conquered.
Yet death also appears in the Bible as the utmost expression of love—part of God’s plan for ushering in that new kingdom. Jesus said that the greatest love one can show is to lay down one’s life for another (John 15:13).”
Notice the switching in terms, that death is good because a man who willingly dies for another is good. Suddenly the death is good? Like he’s stealing a favor? Like he’s stealing a march on his friend–“I get to die first”? Death is good? The man who dies is selfish because he gets to die. “Death is good.”
He then proceeded to lay down his own life for us while we were still sinners (Rom. 5:6-8).
He got to do it and we didn’t!
Christianity holds up the cross as the supreme demonstration of sacrificial love. Jesus said, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:23-25). Jesus thus pointed to the role of death in a healthy ecosystem as a parable for the importance of His own death. Just as the death of an organism allows for the rebirth and flourishing of life, so the death of Jesus leads to a rebirth and new life for Jesus’ followers. Perhaps the biological death in the evolutionary epic was not a purposeless waste, but a hint at the way God redeems the negativity of death for the sake of new life.
And so death is actually a good. It is a way that God points to Jesus. It leads man onward and upward.
Now several further observations about death. First, though it would seem you could separate animal death from human death physically and so perhaps uphold a basically literal reading of Genesis with belief in evolution taking the days as ages, evolution demands death for all. The biblical account of creation and the Fall, I think by any real reading of God’s words, says death came to all only through the Fall. Evolution says man died before Adam. I think by any fair reading, the Bible ascribes death to sin and judgment. And there’s no way to split the difference. You can hold the two together in your mind in the same way that you can think that you’re the smartest person in this room even if you flunked kindergarten. But logically, in any fair reading of the thing, it doesn’t hold water, does it? You can’t hold these two things in your mind.
Second, there is no way to hold to a literal Adam, a literal tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a literal first sin, in theistic evolution. To do so you would need man to rise to the level of a conscious, divine-image-bearing Adam, the process of millions of years of evolution finally attaining the image of God, all of his previous ancestors dying like cattle, you understand? The pre-hominids and the hominids that preceded Adam are like the cattle, because they can’t die eternally, but what actually makes Adam in the image of God is that he dies! The previous ones couldn’t die the way Adam died, Adam died in a spiritual sense, and so his death renders him in the nature, in the image, of God. Do you understand? I don’t know if the logic, but finally he has to rise to this level where he can die. And the only proof that he’s in the image of God is that he dies.
The sin of Adam is thus essential to his growth. By this view, in the end Satan is right, he does become like God, by this view, when he sins–his sin leads him to become eternal, leads him to know that he has a soul, that he’s in the image of God–
Of course this is nonsense. Sin is not progression, it is regression. It is not evolution to a higher state, it is devolution. This idea is incompatible with Scripture, it just can’t be. So theistic evolution really can’t have a real Adam and a real first sin, and so Genesis 1-3 becomes allegory and metaphor.
Then third you have so much else that becomes metaphor and allegory as well. So you have, for instance, the Bible’s accounts of human lifespans and generations. But if man lived routinely 700, 800, 900 years when he was at a lesser evolutionary level, and now that he has progressed he lives 70 years, well that looks like devolution rather than evolution–the survival of the less fit. We’re going down–it’s retrograde, you understand? And you go, well, then those hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, we don’t know, Methuselah, 969 but it could have been–those are metaphor. You can’t have them! They can’t be real. And so you start marching through Scripture and you start whacking with the stick of metaphor and allegory at whole chunks of Scripture, because it does not fit your view of science; and the master of Scripture, the hermeneutic that we must bow to, is science-a divine law and truth that is even greater than God in its power.
Finally let me say this: the idea of physical death taking place before Adam’s Fall is increasingly held by Christians. Tim was recently at a conference where it was assumed by several of the speakers that man and animals would have died physically even if Adam hadn’t sinned. According to one speaker at the conference, if there had not been death, human beings would have bred like rabbits. They would have filled the earth–and it sounds like the pope, doesn’t it? They’d have filled the earth to overflowing. “Have sense! Die already! You can’t be copulating and populating like rabbits! It’s not fitting, it’s not seemly, it’s not sustainable!”
Now what we need to understand is this: if God couldn’t handle a world without death, if God needs death to keep the world healthy, free form overpopulation, if man can’t be created without death, if death is the engine that created man through evolution, then death must be a good thing. Physical death must be good because God needs death and uses death. And this is nonsense, it’s a lie. It’s contrary to everything we believe about God and man and about the death of Jesus.
If we are going to empower science at the very beginning of creation to become the bar by which Scripture is judged, there’s really no stopping it, is there? you can’t stop at the end of creation and say ok, now God is allowed to be sovereign, now God can be omnipotent, now God can do as He pleases–now that we’ve gotten past the fossils and everything, let God be God. Before that point, God, it couldn’t be as you said in your Word, because we have the fossil record, we have this, we have that. For those of a scientific bent, the story of creation presents many problems. If your goal is to be empirical and to take what is seen and known in the world today as factual truth that supersedes any other truth, even that of Scripture, then you have problems with creation and you have many more. You have the fossil record of hominids and pre-hominids. You have the problem of Eve coming from Adam–for those of a scientific bent, the idea that Eve was taken out of Adam is just ludicrous.
You have the question of where did Cain get his wife. And how could death not have existed. Of course the question of where Cain got his wife is only transferred millions of years up the chain by evolution. It’s a problem there as well.
But let’s be honest. The Bible’s problems with empirical science don’t end with the barring of Eden’s gate. How could Cain have feared for his life without other men? How could the daughters of men have slept with the sons of the gods? And if you’re a scientific empiricist, these things become metaphor, myth. How could Noah gather multiples of every animal and fit them all in the ark? And how could the whole earth have been covered by rain? How could Moses part the Red Sea? How could he bring water from the rock? How could people have fed on manna from heaven for 40 years? These are problems of physical science, but the problems of historical science are huge as well–the fact that we haven’t yet found any records in ancient Egypt of the Israelites being in Egypt, that there is no external evidence beyond Scripture that we know of, of the existence of King David, or of Esther with Ahasuerus, whose reign was documented, or of Daniel with Nebuchadnezzar.
And even if you exclude Scripture, contemporary records of the existence of Christ–all these are issues. So if you start taking a scientific approach to Scripture and you make it jump to the bar of your external criteria, you have problems everywhere, which leads finally, inexorably to the very nature of Christ Himself and the work of Christ and the problems of science with that.
You understand of course that the submission of Scripture to science isn’t divisible; if you establish the laws of nature for creation, why do you suddenly let them go when it comes to the virgin birth or the miracles, the walking on water, the feeding of thousands, or especially the resurrection of Jesus? How come all of a sudden a supernatural God is allowed to act there in ways that He couldn’t at creation?
But of course, the problem isn’t primarily one of science, it is one of morality and morals, because the issues of science, and the reason for the scientific objections, are all found in moral objections. So science is taking a stick to the morality of Scripture, not to the factuality. It hates the morality, it hates federal headship. It hates Eve coming from Adam and Adam ruling. It hates the idea of original sin, that God would damn all men on the basis of one father’s sin. All these things are hated.
It hates Jesus’ vicarious atonement. It says that a father who would put his son to death, well, that’s divine child abuse. How can you worship such a God?
It hates the wrath of God at sin. It hates the idea of death as punishment. It hates the idea that life is destined in men to be fruitful from the origin of man. It hates the idea of fruitfulness. It hates working at fruit. It hates the cost of bearing fruit. It wants to have it easy.
So the central focus of evolution and of science in its empiricism is to undo the terror and the horror of death. It wants to remove the sting of judgment from death. Death becomes good. I’m reminded of the rallies that took place in my college campus and many others throughout the 70s by the feminists, called “Take back the night.”
They never took back the night. You know? The night is still the place where evil men congregate, the time and the place, the conditions–evil men love darkness, Scripture tells us this. You go to a frat house at night and you’re a woman, and you’re not taking back the night, you’re being taken. You can’t take back the night. All your cant, all the things you say, your political theories you express as slogans, can’t undo the truth that the night wasn’t yours to begin with, and you can’t take it back. It’s not theirs to take back, they didn’t have it. And they’re not going to establish their sovereignty over it.
The one empirical fact science can’t get past is the universal nature of death, and the lack of any life or consciousness–any evidence for anything beyond death. The universality of death–think about it, God could have made man like rock. Rock doesn’t die. Evolution could have made man like rock. I don’t know why we’re so concentrated on finding conditions just like earth, it seems to me that evolution says that where there are obstacles they’re overcome by the life principle, and therefore it shouldn’t just be carbon-based, water-covered planets that are hospitable to life, there should be other life forms–iron-based life forms that don’t die!
But science can’t get past the fact that it can’t do anything about death. It’s trying–this whole virtual reality, the idea that we’re going to evolve into machines is an attempt to undo it–but it’s ludicrous, right? It’s like the night. It wasn’t ours to begin with, and we can’t undo it. We can’t reclaim it, we can’t gentrify it, we can’t rehabilitate it. Of course the ultimate goal in this is to undo the curse, not by fulfilling it but by rejecting it, by denying it–not as Christ undid it, but by denying that it’s a curse. So death becomes good, it becomes the source of fruitfulness and life.
I was reading in Deuteronomy this morning, and there’s a series of chapters, 27-30, where God through Moses is expressing the judgments and blessings on His people. From Mount Gerazim, the blessings; from Mount Ebal, the curses. And in Deuteronomy 30:15, God speaking through Moses says to the people, it’s sort of a summary, I place before you life and good, and death and evil. That is the view of Scripture. Death and evil, life and good.
Now, I want to conclude by saying two things about death. First, death is evil, an evil enemy, it’s a foe. It’s not a tool for us to use, it’s not a means to Christian ends. The Bible is absolutely clear on this. Wisdom, which is the voice of God, speaking in Proverbs 8 says,
“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of His way, Before His works of old. “From everlasting I was established, From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth. “When there were no depths I was brought forth, When there were no springs abounding with water. “Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills I was brought forth;
Proverbs 8:22-25
It’s language of Job, and others of the prophets, for God. It’s wisdom speaking, but we know it’s God’s wisdom, it’s a personification of God. It goes on and speaks what God has done, what wisdom has done, and where it was, and then it says,
“Now therefore, O sons, listen to me,
Proverbs 8:32-36
For blessed are they who keep my ways.
“Heed instruction and be wise,
And do not neglect it.
“Blessed is the man who listens to me,
Watching daily at my gates,
Waiting at my doorposts.
“For he who finds me finds life
And obtains favor from the LORD.
“But he who sins against me injures himself;
All those who hate me love death.”
Those who hate wisdom–the wisdom of God–love death. Death is not good. It is never a blessing. It is not the way God intended things to be. Honestly I think these pastors and speakers, maybe even many of the evolutionists, the scientists, at least in the Christian community, who speak of death as being good and accomplishing good things, have not been there when people have died. I don’t think they’ve seen death. When Tim and I went down to watch our younger brother die of cancer about 12 years ago it was awful. There’s nothing noble about death.
A few years ago many of you were praying for me, because I was ill. And I thought for a while I was going to die, and when I thought death was as far away as, you know, Karst Park from me–visible but distant–I felt really noble. You know, “Oh, I may die at the age of 38.” I was told I’d die in my mid-50s, as I approached 50 I thought “Well, maybe just five years, you know,”–and then I got really sick, and I thought well, maybe just a year. You know? You can feel noble; but when I got really sick and started losing blood because of treatment for hepatitis C and everything, my teeth and all that stuff–hemophiliacs bleed from the mouth; and I had a whopper of a bleed from my mouth, I poured big cups of blood down the toilet one after another one day as I bled into it, and at the end of the day my hemoglobin was like at 6 or 5, which is nothing for a woman, but for a guy that’s something. And as I sat there and I thought, you know, I could actually die–there was nothing good about it. It didn’t turn my mind even to God, because I was just too sick to think about anything. Don’t think that death is noble. There’s nothing noble about death. There’s perhaps nobility in the cause of death and the manner of death and the approach to death, but death itself is wicked, terrible, evil, awful. It’s not good, it’s not a blessing, it’s not the way God intended things, it’s a product of the Fall, the fruit of wickedness–death is evil! It’s a foe! But we live in a day that is so frightened of death that we have to domesticate it. It’s like a man who takes a lion and he doesn’t know what to do with it, so he says, “Nice kitty! Nice kitty! Look at my nice kitty!” That’s the lion. It’s like the guy that was living with the grizzlies: “Good grizzly, good grizzly!” Until the grizzly became a bad grizzly and ate him. “Death, O nice death, good death!”
You seldom hear stories like this anymore, but I read the other day of a kid, I think in San Francisco, who with other kids in the room saying, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” picked up his father’s revolver, said, “I’m going to play Russian roulette,” stuck a bullet in one of the chambers, put the gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and shot himself dead right there.
Now we all say that’s terrible, you don’t play with death like that. But we live in the GoPro generation, don’t we? How many of us have watched the videos that these Russian kids take as they climb the 3000-foot buildings, the construction sites, and they walk and they climb and they do one-handed handstands on the edge of a 3000-foot fall? The other day I was looking at one, it was the newest one I’ve seen, it was of a kid who climbed a 9300-some meter abandoned smokestack in Romania. They’re huge, you can drive a semi truck in a circle underneath within the circumference of those big tall smokestacks and make the turn. The kid climbs on this rickety old rusty ladder up to the top at 1000 feet, and then he’s walking around and prancing up on the–and you go, Aaaah! It’s Russian roulette!
We’re saying, nice kitty, good kitty! Look at my kitty cat here, look at my grizzly. Death is something that I’m all over it. GoPro culture. The deeds that our kids do is a statement. “I’m not afraid of death, death has no power over me.” Look at GoPro sometime, look at their sites, see how many of the things that gain popularity there are popular precisely because they’re risking death. The guys in the body suits who jump off the mountains and then go down so close that they can do a high five to someone on the side of the mountain or a bridge, literally, and they’re traveling 150 miles an hour in a body suit, swooping down, before they reach an area where they’ll pull the chute and drop.
And these people know they’re going to die. There’s an article on the free climbers in the New York Times, how many of them know they’re going to die–if they keep doing it they’re going to die. The free divers who go deeper and deeper. Death is not defied, it’s embraced. It becomes a toy. There’s no ultimate goal that makes these risks worthwhile–it’s simply putting God to the test by toying with death. There’s no sense, as with King David, that the risk of death is great and the cost of death is obscene almost, and that flirting with it casually is vanity.
Remember David longing for the water of Bethlehem, and he asked two of his mighty men, who say to themselves, we’re going to go and get you the water. And they sneak through the lines of Saul at night and they go to the well of Bethlehem, they draw water, and they bring it back to David–now David’s a real man, he’s a warrior, he knows death, and he takes that water, you know what he does with it–he pours it out on the ground and he says, this water is blood. I will not drink it. Now you know that they were not allowed to drink blood in Israel, they were to pour it on the ground. What he said is, the cost of this was too great. I will not encourage this. I will honor it, but I will not encourage it. I will not drink it. And he pours it out on there, because he knows the terror of death.
The Bible says that life is in the blood, and then it tells us not to fool with blood–don’t drink it, don’t eat meat with the blood undrained, respect it, pour it on the ground, and after you’ve poured it on the ground what are you to do? If you catch an animal and you eat it, after you pour the blood on the ground you’re to take earth and cover the blood.
This is true of all blood, even of birds. Not only blood, but the mother’s milk. Israel was not to boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. Three times in the Law, Israel is warned not to boil a young goat, a baby goat, in the milk of its mother. It is obscene to God to mix life and death.
In Deuteronomy, Moses says,
If you happen to come upon a bird’s nest along the way in any tree or on the ground with young ones or eggs, and the mother’s sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. You shall certainly let the mother go, but the young you may take for yourself, that you may prolong your days.
Deuteronomy 22:6-7
In other words, God says if you take that mother, the source of life, along with the eggs or the young, I will deal with you.
I’m reminded also of the passage where God speaks of a number of things that He hates, the hypocrisy, I think it’s in Isaiah–he’s condemning the hypocrisy of the Israelites in their sacrifices, and he says, “He who sacrifices a lamb is like the one who breaks a dog’s neck. He who offers a grain offering is like one who offers swines’ blood.” So the parallel is between breaking a dog’s neck and taking swine’s blood to the altar of the Lord. God hates death.
God doesn’t like you putting the mother to death with her children, or boiling the young in their mothers’ milk. He doesn’t like you breaking a dog’s neck–you’re like one who offers a swine on the altar if you break a dog’s neck. Death is not a toy for a Christian, it’s not a diversion, it’s not entertainment, it should not be something we delight ourselves in watching or playing with. We should not delight in American Sniper. We should not delight in video games, X-box, playstation games that delight in death. My mother I think was very wise, and I know I’m speaking to a concealed carry crowd, but very wise in not letting us–she let us have all the swords we wanted, but we could not even have a squirt gun of a gun. There was not to be a gun. Now, I’d suggest to you that guns differ from swords, because guns are instant and remote death, and swords are not. I’m not–I’m fighting to have you think.
Death is not a toy, and neither is death a tool. If death can be good, if it can be a diversion, an entertainment, it also comes to serve as a tool–or perhaps we first make it a tool and then make it a diversion, I’m not sure of the order. Aborted babies serve as the lines of cells for vaccines even to this day. Babies aborted, several children aborted in the 60s, are the cell lines. Now, we may take those vaccines, but the logic behind it is terrible! If we are not to boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk, how much more should we not take a baby and put it to death so that others can live on its cells!
Abortion itself is seen as a good. “It’s good for the health of the mother.” We only accept abortion when it’s death opposing death, when it’s a question between the life of the mother and the baby. Honestly I’ve watched videos, and they’ve been on Yahoo and other, MSN news recently, of police shootings, and my son is married to the whole Toledo police force through his wife, and so we have a lot of cops that are now friends, and I respect them immensely. But if you watch the videos that come out, the most recent one from up in the Pacific northwest of a guy throwing some rocks and the cops chasing him and shooting him, it’s clear that to the police death is just another tool.
There was the time when a a 35-year-old man in our church who was crazy as a loon, out of his mind, was throwing water balloons naked out of his parents’ upstairs windows, saying, “Do you want to be baptized by the pope?” And the SWAT team came in on this house with this chubby little guy naked, and they found him with scissors in his hands, and they said “We had the right! We were gonna shoot him! He could have killed us with those scissors!” And they were just grooming scissors, you know, the kind of things he would have found in his parents’ bathroom.
ISIS uses death. We use death. It’s a tool. We use death to get rid of babies that we don’t want. We use death–we call it good death–to get rid of the elderly and the infirm who are burdening us. “Death is good. It’s a tool. It’s useful.”
No death is good. Not one. Not the death of my mother at 93; not the death of a little baby in the womb; they are all bad, because death is a foe, and physical death is tied to spiritual death.
And I close with this: death is seen as a tool and a toy, as something that can be good, because we have minimized the connection between physical and spiritual death, but they are linked, and they are linked inextricably. Physical death is the tunnel that leads to spiritual death. The Bible says it is appointed to man once to die, and after that the judgment.
Death and judgment walk hand in hand. We die, and we are judged. Death is the entrance to judgment. Jesus says, don’t fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Hell is the second death following the first; the first kills the body; the second sees the body and the soul destroyed together in hell. Paul writes, the sting of death is sin. Death’s sting is the judgment that follows on sin. Death must be fought in every way, at every front, at every time, because death and judgment are linked. Embrace death and you welcome what follows: judgment! There is no time in our lives for welcoming judgment. It doesn’t matter if you’re 93 like my mother. I wanted each day that she lived, each day of cleansing, each day of suffering, each day of being frustrated at the feebleness that had gripped her mind and her body. It was good to suffer. Holiness comes through suffering. Cut it short by death and you don’t accomplish the holiness without which we will not see God.
I remember our brother saying when I prayed for him a couple weeks before he died–I prayed for him to be healed, and he looked up at me and gave me the evil eye, showed me he was fully in the moment, and he said, David, don’t pray that I live, pray that I die!
That’s what death was. He wanted to die.
My mother, “Mud,” saying, “Why am I alive? Why am I alive?” Because God has decreed life, not death. Because God has given you the gift of life, and while we live there is repentance, and while we live there is the hope of holiness. We do not welcome death. Never ever.
Now I want to close by saying death is linked to judgment, but if we are going to fight death we must understand that death is the ultimate form of unfruitfulness, and that every form of unfruitfulness is a type of death. So God’s first judgment is on the serpent, on Satan: the serpent will slither on his belly, there will be enmity between Satan and the seed of the woman, the seed of the man will triumph over Satan.
Second, the woman: she will have pain in childbirth. Her desire will be for her husband, and he’ll rule over her. The meaning of “desire” here is obviously the same as in the next chapter, where God says sin has desire for Cain: it’s an evil desire to conquer. Sin is crouching at his door waiting to catch and master him, so woman will seek to master man. She must seek to overcome this sin. Man will rule over her, there will be tension in submission, there will be tension in the leadership of man, a desire for sinful domination–both sides will sin.
Third, the earth will not yield its fruits easily for man, the ground is cursed. There’ll be thistles in the fields; by the sweat of his brow man will earn his bread.
What we need to see is that each of these curses is a curse on fruitfulness. Land, food, crops, children, life together. Cursed. And each of these curses is a mini-death, because death is the ultimate unfruitfulness. You will struggle, and then you’ll die. And it’s not enough to say that death is a foe–we must embrace fruitfulness. We must understand that it is good to bear fruit for God. We must embrace children. We must embrace the roles of men and women. We must embrace hard work.
How many of you pastors have men in your church who won’t work hard? These are the men who make the GoPro videos. They’re the men who are playing with God, Russian roulette. They’re the men who are embracing death, because they won’t work, they’re unfruitful. God give us fruitful lives. God, give us fruit of our work, the fruit of our love–our love for husband and wife, the fruit of our faith; God, give us fruit. This is the way we fight death.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this evening, I pray that you’ll speak to us through Your Word as this conference goes on. Thank you for these men, Father, bless their churches, bless this church. Father, I pray that You’ll be glorified this weekend. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Today, or That Day 