The Death of God and the Death of Man

“How should we explain Jesus’ belief in the necessity of his death? How should we account for the fact that what drove him on throughout his public ministry, as all four Gospels testify, was the conviction that he had to be killed? And how should we explain the fact that, whereas martyrs like Stephen faced death with joy, and even Socrates, the pagan philosopher, drank his hemlock and died without a tremor, Jesus, the perfect servant of God, who had never before showed the least fear of man or pain or loss, manifested in Gethsemane what looked like blue funk, and on the cross declared himself God-forsaken? “Never man feared death like this man,” commented Luther. Why?”

J.I. Packer

In America in the present age, I suspect that most of us fear death more than at any other time in history. This is not because we’re weaker than people have been in all other centuries, but rather because we’ve lost an understanding of death that most people used to have.

Before the age of modern medicine, death was expected. Most families cared for their dead at home and even installed a death door out of which they respectfully carried dead family members for burial. Many families lost around half of their children before they reached puberty.

Death today is a very different affair. Most of us are quite used to taking our loved ones into the hospital and seeing them come out alive and relatively well–or, at least, prescribed with medications that should make them well soon enough. Such progress is far from a bad thing–indeed, it is a great blessing from God for those of us alive today.

However, with such a limited experience of death for so many of us, understanding how to deal with death is much more challenging than it might have been for our ancestors. How are we to deal with the fact that some people aren’t cured in the hospital, that some people will die for unknown or unexpected reasons and we won’t be able to stop it?

I don’t pretend to know the answer to this question. But I hope that I can offer some measure of comfort, both for myself and anyone else who might read this, by exploring death as it relates to God.

Death in the Beginning

If you have ever read through the book of Genesis in the Bible, you will discover pretty quickly where death came from. Indeed, you can’t get past the second chapter of the book without being hit with it.

The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.”

Genesis 2:16-17

Doubtless, Adam didn’t fully understand what death meant when God gave him this command, and he likely didn’t explain it well to Eve when relaying this information to her. Regardless, he must have had a basic understanding that he would lose something if he disobeyed God in this manner.

Unfortunately, as we all know, Adam and Eve did disobey. They were thrown out of the garden for their sin, and while they didn’t drop dead on the spot, they endured around 900 more years of pain and separation from God before they eventually did die (Genesis 3; 5:3-5).

What is very clear from the beginning passages of the Bible is that God didn’t intend for His creatures to die. However, He established this as a punishment for rebellion. When Adam and Eve decided to establish themselves as “gods” and do things the way they wanted to rather than how God had commanded them, they were sentenced to death.

Death Throughout Time

There’s no need to dig very deep into death throughout history. I expect we all know a bit about it, since most of us have experienced the death of someone very close to us at some point. We’ve also likely all had a history lesson or two about the deaths of great men and women or the millions of deaths that accompany any war.

It is safe to say that we all understand death in its place in history: it is, as the dictionary defines it: “a permanent cessation of all vital functions: the end of life.” Of late, though, I have found myself wondering if we truly understand death’s place in God’s story–or indeed, if we are even able to do so.

Death, Love, and Holiness

Now, most of us in America today who claim to be Christians would wholeheartedly agree with the statement found in 1 John:

The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. By this the love of God was revealed in us, that God has sent His only Son into the world so that we may live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

1 John 4:8-10

In fact, I think it is safe to say that we focus on this aspect of God to the exclusion of many of His other attributes. God is love, therefore we are free from sin and more or less permitted to do as we like as long as we believe in that death and resurrection of Jesus. While this is true at the root, I think such a view misses something vital.

When Jesus came to earth to “show God’s love,” as we are quite fond of saying, He did so on account of death. The sin that each of us daily commits, often whether we realize it or not, is in direct defiance of God’s holy character and is serious enough that God could never be near us if that sin was to remain untouched.

God is, within Himself, because of Himself, entirely pure and holy. There can be nothing impure within Him or around Him, not because He is unable to handle it, but simply because it would so completely deny His character that He would, if in sin, cease to be God.¹

For those of us who have been forgiven, this should be a comforting thought. God cannot treat us wrongly or harm us in unloving ways because it is not possible for Him to do so. However, rather than finding comfort in this, most of us are put off by it.

It’s not that we want God to be a sinner, per se. We simply don’t understand a God without sin (only consider the gods imagined by the Greeks and Romans, full of fickleness and evil desires, simply because those who imagined them knew no one without such sins). And because we don’t understand it, we ascribe to God motives of impurity and evil in an effort to explain His unexplainable actions…such as allowing the people we love to die.

Because of God’s holy character, sin had to result in death. This death is both spiritual and physical. First, our souls are separated from God as they would not have been had Adam and Eve obeyed His commands. Second, our souls are eventually separated from our own bodies and from the people we love. Ultimately, death is a descent into complete and utter loneliness and separation, however that manifests itself.

Death and Christ

If death is so horrifying, so completely a rejection of God’s initial plan, so terrible to experience, why then did Christ have to suffer through the experience of death? If you’re familiar with the Scriptures, you’ll know that it is because He was given the task of suffering punishment in our place (Romans 5:6-11). Therefore, where we should have died and suffered that separation, it was actually Christ who did so on our behalf.

A true understanding of why He did so is a bit harder to come by. In fact, it’s unfathomable to most of us who see ourselves as “relatively good.” We can’t imagine the fact that our sins were such a burden upon the Son of God that He “feared death” or “declared Himself God-forsaken.”

To most of us, our sins are a light thing, actions that can easily be overlooked when God only considers how worthy we are of His love. But this is far from the truth. God does love us, of course, but He loves us because HE IS LOVE. It has nothing to do with us at all.

However, the sin within us makes us disgusting to His holiness and wholly unacceptable in His sight. Knowing this, God decided to do the only thing He could to make it right, since we would never be able to make it right on our own.

He sent His heavenly Son to live the perfect life we were created to live and failed to live. Then, just when Jesus had done everything exactly right, God allowed Him to be crucified and descend into hell in punishment for the sins that we have been all our lives committing.

This is hard to understand, coming from a God who loves His Son so much. But we must believe that His holy character reaches beyond our understanding and that there was no other punishment that could pay the price.

Indeed, if God had not placed Christ under such a sentence, He would hardly have been just. And if His character is just, we have established that He cannot go against that justice because it is not in His nature to do so. Such a death was the only option, and if it was not to be ours, then it must be Christ’s.

Perhaps that is difficult to grasp. I think that most of us believe we have a greater sense of justice than God does. We think that He should offer more mercy because, really, our sins aren’t THAT bad. But we do not have His holy character and cannot grasp the depths to which our sin rejects His character.

This is why, then, Christ feared death. He did not fear it for its own sake, but for the sake of His soul. He who had lived as the only Holy, Just, and Merciful God through all eternity was to be split from His Father, rejected and thrown out, for sins that He had not committed but would suffer the penalty for. He was to be rejected by men and by His Father. He was to be, for the first time, completely and utterly alone.

I don’t mean to suggest that Christ was afraid of loneliness and that is why He suffered so. No, but it is evident that He suffered a great deal more than we can imagine in His separation and punishment. We can hardly be anything but eternally grateful to think that He suffered what hurt Him so much for our sakes when we had done nothing to justify such a sacrifice.

But the Lord desired to crush Him, causing Him grief…As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied; by His knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, for He will bear their wrongdoings. Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the plunder with the strong, because He poured out His life unto death, and was counted with wrongdoers; yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the wrongdoers.

Isaiah 53: 10-12

There is little more to be said here. The Lord desired to crush His Son because He knew that doing so would save the rest of the world from the eternal separation and damnation that He had established as sin’s punishment. Christ willingly poured Himself out to death and intercedes for transgressors, even today, out of love of those for whom He suffered such a death.

Death and Life

In the last few years as COVID has wracked our land, many of us have begun to think of death a little more. We may not understand it entirely; it is doubtful we consider the punishment it was made to be, but we fear it all the same.

That is, most of us fear it. But for those of us who believe that Jesus died in our place, for our sake, and took the punishment we deserve, we don’t need to fear it. We know that our death is different. Yes, it’s a separation from our bodies here, but it’s not an eternal separation. We will join the God we trust and love and one day in the future we will help Him judge the world.

Death is something to fear if you are living without faith in Christ’s saving work. But if you believe it, then you have nothing to fear. Death is a new beginning, just as it would be for Jesus when He rose from the dead the third day and returned to the people and the Father He loved.

For those of us who choose to believe, Jesus’ final words (John 19:30) apply to death and all the terror that it brings with it: “It is finished.”

¹ Refer to Jackie Hill Perry’s book “Holier Than Thou” for a further discussion of God’s holiness.