“Never See Death” — Part One

John 8:48:

“The Jews answered [Jesus], ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’ Jesus answered, ‘I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it, and he[’s] the judge. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.’ The Jews said to him, ‘Now we know that you have a demon! Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, “If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.” Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you make yourself out to be?’ Jesus answered, ‘If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, “He is our God.” But you have not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’ So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.”

Amen.

Our Father, what we know not, teach us. What we have not, give us. What we are not, make us. For your Son’s sake. Amen.

Well, you will have detected, I think, I hope, in the passage that I read two more “Truly, truly” statements. We began some time ago to work our way through the Gospel of John, not verse by verse—although it would have been good to do—but by means of finding and dealing with each of the “Truly, truly” statements of Jesus. And we’ve done a number of them, and there are two. The second of them, in order, is in verse 58: “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’” We will come to that later. And the first of these, to which we will come now, is in the fifty-first verse: “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.” “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.”

I wonder: Was there ever a promise more bold than that? Was there ever a claim quite as extravagant as this? There in the temple context, in the company of these individuals, Jesus says, “I’m telling you the truth.”

Now, in many ways, what he says here in chapter 8 is another way of saying what we already saw back in chapter 6. You needn’t turn to it, but in 6:47, Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.” So it’s the same. To have eternal life is not to see death. And I found myself, as I’ve been working on the text this week, trying to stand back far enough from it so as not to miss the big picture, if you like; to remind myself of what I’m trying to remind us all about—namely, that the express purpose of John in writing his Gospel is given to us in 20:31, where he acknowledges that there were many more signs that Jesus performed, many more things that Jesus said than are actually contained in his Gospel;[1] but then he goes on to say, “These are written,” purposefully, “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you [might] have life in his name.”

Now, we’re at the end of chapter 8, but the discourse that we have been following has actually begun back in chapter 7. And we read in chapter 7 and in verse 10 that the brothers of Jesus “had gone up to the feast.” They’d gone up without him. He had come up “not publicly but in private.” And the buzz of conversation concerning Jesus is quite remarkable. John actually tells us that even his own brothers did not believe in him.[2] It’s quite fascinating, isn’t it, how close people can be to Jesus—how they can be exposed to the things that he’s said and to consider the works that he has done—and yet remain in unbelief? Some of the people were saying, “He is a good man.” Others were saying, “No, he’s not. He’s just trying to lead everybody astray.”[3]

In actual fact, the response of people to Jesus is usually quite extreme. The words of Jesus demand a response. It’s virtually impossible to simply ignore Jesus. It is too unsettling to pass it off in that way. We’ve seen this, because in chapter 6, after the feeding of the five thousand, some of them said, “Why don’t we make him a king?”[4] And then, within very short order, others are saying, “No, don’t let’s make him a king. Let’s kill him.”[5]

Now, as I say, I want to make sure that I don’t lose sight of the big picture. When you study something like the fifty-first verse here and the statement of Jesus—the “Truly, truly” statement of Jesus—we have to remember that it comes in a context: not simply the context of the surrounding verses but the context of, entirely, that which is going on. And I don’t want to miss the drama of the Gospel of John, and I don’t want you to miss it either. I found myself this week saying, “You know, maybe I shouldn’t have done it this way,” because it’s possible to see these statements as they’re presented and yet not to keep in view the vastness of what is happening as John provides us with this. So, maybe this will be a stimulus for some of us to read the Gospel of John for ourselves.

The words of Jesus demand a response. It’s virtually impossible to simply ignore Jesus.

The prologue sets it out. By chapter 2, you have the wedding—the first sign that Jesus did, where water is turned into wine. What a drama that must have been! Then immediately he goes into the temple, and he begins to rearrange the furniture. He drives out these people who are making his Father’s house not a house of prayer but a den of thieves. We then very quickly find Jesus at a well, and at that well, an encounter takes place with a lady who has had five husbands, and she’s living with a guy. And as a result of the conversation, her life is absolutely transformed, and she goes back into the town from which she’s come, and she sets the place alight. “Come,” she says, “and see somebody who told me everything that I ever did.”[6] It’s drama.

We go from there, and now he’s at a pool—the pool of Bethesda. And there an invalid of thirty-eight years is unable to get down into the water in the hope that the stirring of the waters will be a means of healing. And Jesus says to him, “What I’d like you to do is just take up your bed. Get up, get out, and take your bed, and keep walking.”[7] Wouldn’t you like to have been around, not only to see the man but to see the response of the people? You see him walking down the road. He’s either got it under his arm, or perhaps he rolled it up like he was on a trip to Patagonia, and he had it wrapped up like this, on his head, and went walking down the street. People said, “That can’t possibly be. The guy…” “Oh, yes,” they said. “Thirty-eight years he was an invalid.” And they asked him, “Who was it?” The man says, “I don’t know who it was,” because Jesus had actually disappeared. They finally hooked up later on. But it’s a drama!

What about the drama when they get to the feeding of the five thousand? It’s estimated to be between fifteen and twenty thousand people there: five thousand men, wives, children—and some people had a lot of children, and still do. And the disciples had been confronted with the challenge. And they said, “We’ve got nothing here. There’s no way that we can provide food. If we had a ton of money, it wouldn’t be enough to justify it, and we couldn’t spend it, and we couldn’t get it. But for what it’s worth, there’s a boy here. He’s got five loaves and two fish. But what are you going to do with that, Jesus?”[8] Under his breath he said, “Wait and see.” And then you have the transformation.

And then you have the embarrassment. I always think this must be embarrassing for the disciples, when he says to them, “Hey, guys, remember when you thought we wouldn’t be able to do anything with this and that there wouldn’t be enough?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what: take twelve baskets, and pick up all the excess stuff that is left over.”[9]

What a drama! Can you imagine those disciples talking to one another? “Whose idea was this? Why did you even mention it,” and so on.

And then you find yourself here in chapter 7, at the feast. “Why are you doing this?” you’re saying to yourself. “Why this panoramic view?” Well, some of you are visiting, and you haven’t read John’s Gospel. You don’t know what’s going on. You come to this verse, you say, “Where does this come from?” Well, he’s at the feast—the Feast of Tabernacles. It was compulsory for a Jewish man over the age of twenty to show up at that feast as long as he was within twenty miles. And so Jesus goes up as well.

And there are two particular aspects to that feast. One has to do with water and the bringing of the pitchers and the pouring of the water as a symbol of cleansing—the cleansing that would come through the Messiah when he came. And the other had to do with light: four great candelabras that illuminated not only the precinct there but spanned out and could be seen from a distance. And it is in that context that Jesus makes these two statements: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink”;[10] and, perhaps when they had extinguished the lights, perhaps when the feast was over, Jesus stands there, and he says, “[By the way,] I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness.”[11] The Jewish people knew. The Jewish people were moving by a pillar of light. The Jewish people knew the words of the prophet: that there was one who would come who would be a light for the gentiles and would be a hope for his people, Israel.[12]

And yet Jesus stands and makes these claims, and still the reaction is negative. The Pharisees are not pleased at all. And as a result—you will read this in the text if you do your homework, in chapter 7—they decide to dispatch officers to arrest Jesus: “Go and arrest this man. We’ve heard enough of this stuff.”[13] The officers return, but without Jesus. And the Pharisees say, “Why didn’t you bring him?”[14] And they say, “No one ever spoke like this man!”[15] “No one ever spoke like this man!” Out of the mouth of Jesus came the very words of God. Jesus elsewhere says, “The words that I speak are the words that my Father has given me to speak. The will that I do is the will of my Father for me. I do what my Father is asking me to do.”[16] And that’s what makes this so complex, isn’t it? Because they want to say, “Oh, no, God is our Father.” And Jesus says, “Well, God is my Father. If I were to say that God is not my Father, then I’d be telling lies,” he says, “just in the way that you folks continue to do.” Remember: “These [things] are written … that you [might] believe that Jesus is the Christ … and that by believing you [might] have life in his name.” They’re opposing him.

The well-worn statement of C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity I have alluded to from time to time. I only get to quote it once every few months, and so today is the day. In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, and he says, “In this section of my book, I’m writing, I’m trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people say about Jesus”: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” Writes Lewis,

That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things [that] Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level [of a] man who says he[’s] a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.[17]

And here Jesus stands and makes this amazing statement: “If”—if, he says—“anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.”

Now, he has rattled the cage of his listeners previously, as we saw last time—and some of us might even remember—by saying to them, “Your notion of being free because you are the offspring of Abraham just doesn’t cut it.”[18] And he points out to them, in a very clever way but in a very sincere way and necessary way, that freedom—which they need, which we all need—is found only in Jesus. Remember, he says to them, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”[19] Freedom! Everybody longs for freedom in one way or another. And Jesus is speaking about a freedom that only he can provide—a freedom from meaninglessness.

Who gives freedom? Jesus gives freedom. Freedom! Freedom to know liberation from pain and from decay and from death itself. Freedom from guilt and freedom from a guilty conscience.

If people are gut-wrenchingly honest about things, every so often they find themselves saying, either on a pleasant afternoon or on a rainy Tuesday, “What am I doing? Why am I doing what I am doing? Where am I going? And what happens when this breath of life finally leaves me?” I mean, Janice Joplin, she sings,

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Freedom ain’t worth nothing but it’s free.
Feeling good was easy, Lord, When Bobby sang the blues.
Good enough for me, good enough for me and Bobby McGee.[20]

Do you think she longed for freedom, trapped in her drugged-up life, abused by men, extinguished at such a young age? Who gives freedom? Jesus gives freedom. Freedom! Freedom to know liberation from pain and from decay and from death itself. Freedom from guilt and freedom from a guilty conscience.

But instead of those amazing pleas on Jesus’ part, instead of it arousing the curiosity of the people to whom he spoke, they decide, “We’ll have nothing of it.” And so it descends into name-calling: “Ah, you’re just a Samaritan. You’re a crazy person. You have a demon.” I mean, think about this for just a moment. They don’t realize who they’re talking to. They don’t realize this—that the one to whom they speak is the one who created them. The prologue: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. There was nothing made but that which was made and that was made by the Word.”[21] And so they’re looking this fellow in the face, and they’re saying, “You know what? You’re just a Samaritan. You’re not even a full, proper Jew. You are crazy.” I wish I could have been there to hear this conversation!

Every so often, do you ever listen to other people’s conversations? I mean, you’re not supposed to. But sometimes you can’t help it. You can’t help it! I don’t know where I was yesterday… Oh, I know where I was! And a lady was talking on the phone. And she was just as close as the microphone. And she might as well have been sitting right beside me, because—I only heard half the conversation; I filled in the other half for myself. But it was… And then at one point she said, “Well, why are you crying?” And I thought she was talking to me. And I said… And I realized, “No, I don’t know.” And then I felt bad. I wonder who it is, I wonder why they’re crying, and so on.

But if you’d heard this conversation—imagine that you’d been on the bus, and you heard a conversation like this. And it started because you just heard somebody saying, “You know, if you would keep my word, you would never see death.” That’d make you turn around on the bus, wouldn’t it? You’d turn around and say, “Who said that?” “It’s that guy over there.” And then the response of the people: “You know what? You are a crazy person. You’re a Samaritan,” and so on. And then the response of the one who said, “You will never see death,” and he says, “I’m not crazy. I’m simply honoring my Father. What I’m doing is not about me. And if you do what I’m telling you, if you listen to what I’m saying, you will never have to look death in the face.” That’s actually what he’s saying.

Now, remember that the tone, if you like, of Jesus’ declarations is the tone of one who has come from the glory of heaven, has left the freedom of the reality of that eternal relationship with the Father and the Spirit, and has stepped down into time. I don’t think that we ought to imagine that if we could hear him speak, that he would have a kind of posh London accent, you know: “Yet I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks it, and he’s the judge. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.” People are like, “Oh give me a break!”

I don’t think… No, no. No, I think, you see… “He came to his own.” These are his own. He’s not talking down to them. Jesus doesn’t talk down to people. He gets down to where we are, and then he speaks to us. “His own … did not receive him.”[22] That’s obvious. He is looking these characters in the eye and saying, “You know, if you would pay attention to what I’m saying, you will never see death.” He’s come on a mission from the Father so that men and women would not perish but have eternal life. We saw it in chapter 6: “This is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes [on] him…” What are we to do? Look on him, consider his identity, and believe in him. “Everyone who looks … and believes … should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”[23]

Now, before we consider the reaction to this statement, we need to understand not only what is meant by Jesus’ words, but also, we need to pause and say something about the nature of death itself. So I have, really, three points. If we go the way the first service went, there will only be one point, for your encouragement. Two and three can come later.

Let us first of all acknowledge what the Bible says, enables us to understand, about death. All of us know certain things about death. We know, for example, that death is inevitable. Death is unavoidable. It is actually inescapable. To deny that is to deny the reality that is before us. Our world is full of cemeteries. One out of one dies.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge—especially in light of the Bible—that death itself is unnatural, it is unpleasant, and it is undignified. Unnatural, unpleasant, undignified. No matter what the funeral home tries to do with your body, it’s still not really good.

Now, some of you will be able to identify with this. I don’t know whether you do or not. But I remember dealing with the death of my mother. I was twenty years of age. She was taken to a funeral home in the center of Glasgow. My grandfather came to me and said, “You must now come and see your mother.” I said, “I don’t want to go.” He said, “It is a mark of respect.” Well, I didn’t want to disrespect her. She lay dead in one of those places. I remember there was not a door but a curtain. They pulled the curtain back so that I could see her. But I didn’t see her. I saw it. She wasn’t there. That was my immediate, overwhelming thought: “But that’s not my mother. That’s my mother’s body, but my mother isn’t there.”

Death is unavoidable. It is actually inescapable. To deny that is to deny the reality that is before us.

C. S. Lewis—and I only discovered it this week—fascinatingly says the same thing. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to sharing an experience with C. S. Lewis! But he says the same thing in relationship to the loss of his mother and what happened to him in that context. And then he says this: “To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead.”[24]

Now, this is not the time for me to discourse on the viewing and the thing and all the things that are done over here, which are only done by Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom. How in the world we got into it I’ll never know, but it is what it is. It is one of the most strange things—people talking all kind of jibber-jabber, and “Did you park your car?” and “How are you doing?” and in the middle of all that, you’ve got a dead body sitting there. No matter what they do—put his glasses on or take his glasses off—you walk past that, you go “Whoa! He went somewhere, ’cause he sure isn’t there.” And then they give you a little card about “Do not worry about this. He’s in the next room.” Bogus! I’ve been in the next room, and he wasn’t in the next room either. So he’s not here, and he’s not in the next room. So where is he, and how does this work? How does this work?

The journey of life is the journey of life. It’s conception, it’s birth, it’s growth, and then the parabola goes the other way: decline, decay, death, the dissolution of the body. Writing to an American lady, again, C. S. Lewis in his writings says to this lady, to try and help her think about death in the metaphorical sense, he says we’re like old cars: we’re constantly in need of repairs; we need replacement parts.[25] University Hospital, Cleveland Clinic is doing a great job with replacement parts. We could all stand up and explain our parts that have all been replaced, or “I’m going to get it replaced,” or whatever. Why do you got to get it replaced? “Why don’t you talk to Bezos? He’s found a way to live forever. He’s got it.” Has he? No, he hasn’t! Why is he so concerned about it? Because death is inescapable. It is unavoidable. Other things you can try again. You don’t get to try this one again. He says to the lady, we can “look forward to the fine new … Resurrection model[s] … which are waiting for us … in the Divine garage!”[26] Wow, that’s a picture. He was good at that.

But perhaps you’re sitting there, and you’re saying, “But I think you’re wrong on one thing, Alistair: I think you’re wrong to say that death is unnatural.” Why is it that people think it is natural? It’s largely because in the context in which most of us have lived our lives in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, we’ve been fed a diet, from a perspective that is certainly not biblical, to help us somehow navigate the inevitability of things by suggesting that there’s really nothing at all to worry about; it’s just natural! Quote from a palliative care doctor: death is just “a calm fall into a cosmic sleep”[27] (or, as you would say, a “calm,” a “calm fall into a cosmic sleep”). No, it’s not. We weren’t made to die. Death is an intrusion. It’s an alien intrusion into the good world that God has made for the well-being of humanity.

So what does the Bible actually say? Well, to the Bible we can look. You know the end of chapter 6 of Romans, I’m sure. If you know only one verse in Romans 6, it’s probably the twenty-third verse, which reads, “For the wages of sin is death.” Sin pays wages. What does it pay? It pays out in death. “But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Death is the dreadful penalty for sin.

But if you’re going to your local psychiatrist who believes that sin is a Christian neurosis, then it’s no surprise that his attempt to figure out or her attempt to figure out how you navigate this eventuality doesn’t come anywhere close to a consideration of this. How could sin be the cause of death if sin is just a neurosis? Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and condemnation came to us all. Paul writes in chapter 5 of Romans about the way in which this has happened: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…”[28] “As one trespass led to [the] condemnation [of] all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”[29]

The great thing about the Bible is it takes it head-on. It helps us understand that we can think of sin in three ways—and I’ll wrap it up with this.

First of all, obviously: physically. Physical death is when our souls are separated from our bodies. That’s why I’m saying, I go to the thing, and I say, “She’s not there”—soul, spirit, the reality of the person. As we’ll see tonight when we come back to this—six of us—when we come back to this, we’ll discover that we are embodied souls. We’re embodied souls. So, physically, our souls are separated from our bodies.

Spiritual death is the separation of our soul from God. Our souls are separated from God. Adam and Eve were told, “If you disobey, you will die,”[30] and they died. But people say, “Yeah, but they hung around for a long time. What does it mean, they died?” Well, death came into the world. Physical death came into the world. But it’s preceded by the spiritual death.

In other words, we are the walking dead. By nature, we’re dead men, dead women. It’s not just that we’re weakened. It’s not just that we’re weary. It’s not just that we’re misguided. Paul says we were dead in our trespasses and in our sins—Ephesians 2:1. And no part of us remains unaffected by the reality of sin. It doesn’t mean that we’re as bad as we could possibly be, but it means that there is no part of us that is exempt from the reality of being part of the walking dead.

Now, the Bible speaks in this way not in order to be morbid, not in order to… ’Cause you’re sitting there going, “We’ve got to get out of this. This is the fourteenth of January, and it’s supposed to be a nice day, and the sun’s coming out, and golly, he’s got us here with death coming out of everywhere.” “The heart [of man] is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.”[31] Why is it that these people meet the Messiah of glory, and they don’t go, “Hey, that’s a good deal. You mean if I believe you, I won’t see death? Sign me up for that!” No. No. You can sit here and listen to me saying much along the same lines, say the same thing: “Never heard anything so ridiculous. I’m not interested.”

Physical death, where our souls are separated from our body. Spiritual death, where our souls are separated from God, which is how we are. And eternal death, when both our body and our soul will be separated from God forever.

So what Jesus is doing here: he’s addressing the spiritually dead while they are not yet physically dead so that by keeping, believing, trusting his word, they might never taste or see death. In other words, he’s making a huge appeal.

I ask you: Who else—who else—can make such an appeal? Who else can make such a claim? What’s your response to this? Do you dismiss Jesus as a crazy person, some half-breed religious Samaritan kind of person, a megalomaniac, a guy who’s just out for himself? No, examine him. He’s not out for himself. He dies on a cross ’cause he’s not out for himself. In fact, it’s his death that makes possible our life.

But that’s for later on.

Let’s pray:

Lord, look upon us in your mercy, we pray. This is a lot of material. It’s a lot of words. And we know—we know—there’s not one of us in here has not, either yesterday or last week or whatever day it was, have said, “Wow, what happens when I die? Is it really just ‘a calm fall into a cosmic sleep’? And how attractive does that sound? Has anybody conquered death, and have they made a way for me to do the same?” That’s what Jesus is saying. By chapter 11 he says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me, even though he die—physically dies—will still live, and whosoever lives and believes in me will never die.”[32]

Thank you, Father, for sending Jesus. Thank you, Jesus, that you came. Holy Spirit, come to our lives, and press the claims of Jesus upon us firmly, gently, kindly, unremittingly, until we bow our knees and confess that he is the one who has the words of eternal life, that he is the one in whom freedom is found, that he is the one who has conquered death and made a way for me to do the same. And we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

[1] See John 20:30.

[2] See John 7:5.

[3] John 7:12 (paraphrased).

[4] See John 6:15.

[5] See John 7:1.

[6] John 4:29 (paraphrased).

[7] John 5:8 (paraphrased).

[8] John 6:5–9 (paraphrased).

[9] See John 6:12–13.

[10] John 7:37 (TLB).

[11] John 8:12 (ESV).

[12] See Isaiah 42:6.

[13] See John 7:44.

[14] John 7:45 (paraphrased).

[15] John 7:46 (ESV).

[16] John 12:49; 14:31 (paraphrased).

[17] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), bk. 2, chap. 3.

[18] John 8:37 (paraphrased).

[19] John 8:32 (ESV).

[20] Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee” (1971). Paraphrased.

[21] John 1:3–4 (paraphrased).

[22] John 1:11 (ESV).

[23] John 6:40 (ESV).

[24] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955), chap. 1.

[25] C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 75.

[26] Lewis, 75.

[27] Mark Starmach, “How to Die Well, According to a Palliative Care Doctor,” Forge, January 18, 2019, https://forge.medium.com/what-really-happens-when-we-die-95a34bba8669.

[28] Romans 5:12 (ESV).

[29] Romans 5:18–19 (ESV).

[30] Genesis 2:17 (paraphrased).

[31] Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV).

[32] John 11:25–26 (paraphrased).