Death

John Donne, a poet, soldier, scholar, secretary, and eventually cleric in the Church of England once said “Death comes equally to us all and makes us all equal when it comes”

Death is something that has plagued mankind since Adam

We’ve come to accept it as a natural part of life

One thing all peoples trust in, regardless of religious beliefs and worldviews, is that death is inevitable

Death has become a common part of life, we all face it and have to deal with it around us

In reality it is an unnatural part of this world

So today we are gonna talk about death

next Sunday we are going to talk about life

Body

The origin of death

Death stems as far back as Adam and Eve

While in the garden of Eden they ate of the tree of life that was planted in the garden (Gen 2:9)

There was no death in the garden

There was one rule in the garden

Gen 2:16-17 - The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

Whilst obeying this rule things are pretty good for Adam and Eve

In fact it was better than the life we live now, it was a life without evil, without suffering, without pain

There was no back breaking labor, work was light and easy

Childbirth was just as comfortable as it is with other animals, there is no excruciating pain

There are no thorns or thistles

There was a close relationship with God

A little bit later God comes looking for them like a friend showing up to hang out

In Gen 3 we see all of this come crashing down

They had one rule, but they broke it

Through Adam and Eve sin entered the world

If you remember the tagline of the one rule “the day that you eat from it you will surely die”

death has now entered the scene

God didn’t mean immediate death, but what we would call natural death

Paul emphasizes this in Rom 5:12 - 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

Death entered the world through sin, the origin of death is the same as the origin of sin

The two are inherently linked

Natural death is the consequence of our sin

If a man managed to be completely clean of sin all his life, then its quite possible he would never die of natural causes

This is hard to test because this man has only existed once in history, and he wasn’t just a man, and he was killed by unnatural causes

his name is Jesus btw

Unnatural death

While we are on the topic of unnatural death, let’s continue our journey today in talking about the origins of that

We are continuing on to Gen 4 with the children of Adam and Eve, The story of Cain and Abel

God favored Abel and Cain grew jealous

God came and warned Cain that sin was crouching at his door

the Hebrew used here would refer to a predator waiting for their prey

Sin is preparing to overcome Cain, but Cain must overcome it

We all know how this story goes, Cain doesn’t overcome the sin

Cain commits the first murder

This is the first unnatural death

What follows after this is a long history of humanity causing unnatural death upon itself

murder

war

mass extermination of human life

like genocide or killing of entire populations

Modern examples

The Holocaust

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

9-11

Unnatural death is something we force upon one another

note that natural death is a consequence of sin

we have separated ourselves from the source of life, God

But unnatural death is directly caused by humans

One man kills another

Death as judgement

Death often does serve as a form of punishment throughout the bible as well

The Egyptians killed Hebrew newborns, and in turn God killed their firstborns

Ananias and Sapphira try to cheat God and are killed on the spot

The flood

The conquest of Canaan

It’s undeniable that sin and death are inherently linked

God is the source of life, so naturally a disconnect from that results in death

There are numerous occasions where unnatural death is the punishment for sin

Jesus’ Death

Death has reigned in this world since Adam introduced it

very few men have been able to escape death

that list includes only two names, Enoch and Elijah

So we near the climax of this journey

There is one more death that I want to talk about, the death of Jesus

For millennia Death has ruled over all mankind

Sin infected every individual, no man was able to escape sin, and only 2 escaped death in all of human history

Then God decided to do something about this epidemic of sin

God sent Jesus, the promised messiah, to come and fix the problem plaguing all of humanity

Jesus was nailed to a cross and all the sin of humanity was placed upon him, and he died

Jesus, literal God incarnate, suffered death, and through His death, He established his reign on earth

Conclusion

Jesus conquered death, and now we as Christians have been given eternal life

The sin problem was dealt with by Jesus, so now the symptom of death can be eradicated

I know what you’re thinking

Death is still here, our loved ones die and we will die unless we witness the return of Jesus

But what is promised to us is not eternal life here in this corrupted world, but we will be reborn, resurrected new, with clean bodies free of sin, and will live in a clean world, free of sin