End and Beginning (SA)

I shall not die, but live . . . 

 - From Psalm 118

There's a crashing finality to Christ's emergence from the grave. The death of death is an event to dwarf all others in history.

There's nothing quite so final as the end of death. Death had always represented the ending of life. The ending of anything. Ecclesiastes 9:5 says "The Living know that they will live, but the dead know nothing more."

Ecclesiastes 9:10 "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."

The characterization of death as a sleep, especially in the Old Testament, brings home, perhaps more eloquently than we would care to think about, the utter hopelessness of being dead. When it comes to our fear of death, the thing we seem to dread the most, is not the prospect of punishments and never-ending agony (otherwise, why is it such fodder for comedians?), but rather, the sad prospect that we will miss something. 

And sleep is the same thing. We hate to sleep through a good movie, because we might miss the good part! 

And it makes us sad, that we might not be here to see our kids grow up, to see what their kids are like. If the process of dying were not so painful, we would never want it all to just end. Because no matter how bad life gets - - - if you're alive, there is always a chance that things will get better.

Death was always the end of it all. But Christ's resurrection put an end, to the end. "O Death, where is thy sting?" When He spent those six or seven weeks with His friends, after dying, it gave them so much confidence to move forward that that handful of men and women changed the world forever. 

Eternal life will do that to you. 

"I shall not die" is a double negative. Death died. And we will live.