Deaths Grave, Easter (Revelation 1:12-18)

Pastor Josh: the book of Revelation verse one, the revelation of Jesus

Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon.

take place he made it known by sending his angel to servant John.

Who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even

to all that he saw, blesses the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy.

And blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written

in it for the time is near.

So we're blessed just reading this out loud, just FYI, John, to the

seven churches that are in Asia, graced you in peace from him.

Who is and who was, and who is to come.

And from the seven spirits here before is thrown and from Jesus Christ, the faithful

witness, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings on earth, to him

who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us a kingdom

priest to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

Amen.

Behold, he is coming with the cloud.

And every eye will see him.

Even those who pierced him and all tribes of the earth will

wail on account of him even so.

Amen.

I am the alpha and the omega says the Lord God.

Who is and who was, and who is to come.

The Almighty.

Verse nine I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the

kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus was on the island

called Patmos, on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

I was in the spirit on the Lord's day and I heard behind me a loud voice

like a trumpet saying, write what you see in a book and send it to the seven

churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and Perma, and to thi Tyra and to Sardis

and to Philadelphia and tole de.

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.

And on turning I saw seven golden lampstand.

And in the midst of the lamp stands, one like the son of man

clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest.

The hairs of his head were white, like wool, like snow.

His eyes were like a flame of fire.

His feet were like burnished, bronze, refined in the furnace, and his voice

was like the roar of many waters.

And his right hand, he held seven stars and from his mouth came a sharp

two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in its full strength.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead, but he laid his

right hand on me saying, fear not.

I am the first and the last and the living one.

I died.

And behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades.

This is the word of the Lord, right?

Father, we thank you so much for this text.

We thank you so much for what we celebrate, that we're not celebrating

a good moral teacher who gave us good things to do, to be better, in our

city and to our neighbors, and to be more moral, to become a better person.

But that Lord, you conquered Satan sin and death.

You conquered the grape itself.

Our great foe, a foe that we still man, our knees knock and we tremble

before, as we even get close to it.

Our hearts melt within us like wax.

And yet you went into the grave and you came out on the other side conquering

that death, holding those keys.

I pray, God, just for such a boldness in the resurrection this morning.

Such a confidence, such a living hope in us that Lord, you have

already defanged to death, that you've already taken the steam.

I pray that you'd make us aware, Lord, that if that great foe has been conquered,

then these little foes are no problem.

Lord, we pray that you bless the other churches that gather in the city.

Thank you that your church is beautiful and diverse, that it speaks different

languages, that it is different cultures, but we all gather around you, king Jesus.

So be honored in this time.

We love you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Amen.

When you become a Christian, you're like, wow, if God before

us, who could be against us?

And when you first start out, you're kind of thinking on small terms, right?

You're thinking of the little things that he helps you out with.

I remember driving and my Toyota.

I called it the blue bullet.

It was a hatchback that was ugly as sin.

It did, you know, zero to 60 in about 20 minutes.

it took forever.

but I was driving down to Southern California, and, uh, my wife was with me.

I borrowed a surfboard, strapped to the top of it,

which made it look even goofier.

you know, this blue little tanklike thing, uh, just cruising down the highway.

Well, I was going to pass a semi-truck and, you know, started rocking back and

forth to get the speed up in the vehicle, just to get it to move a little faster.

And then I could see off in the distance in my rear view mirror, this black SUV

tinted window slammed to the ground.

'cause that was cool.

Big tires, I could see 'em from back there and it's weaving in and out of traffic.

And I was like, oh no.

And I put the, floored it as hard as I could.

This car is not gonna cut in front of me, no way.

Not today.

I'm going to pass.

You know, I'm gonna pass this semi.

I'm in the fast lane.

It's a two lane highway, and he's cutting.

He's getting closer and closer and closer and closer.

Finally, he cuts right in front of me.

I mean, I had to slam on my brakes.

And as soon as I did, there was this giant gust of wind that ripped this huge

metal sign off the side of the semi.

And this metal sign flew.

And because he cut in front of me, it slammed into the hood of the black SUV,

hit the top and flew right over me.

Perfectly safe.

And my response was.

Our God isn't an awesome God.

He reigns with that, kind of a thing when you think about that.

I'm like, yes, God is for me.

You know, he's for my road rage, right?

He is for me.

But Easter resurrection Sunday is a time to remember that God's power was brought

to bear on something that actually matters to every human being on the planet.

That every human being will face.

robert Bull , said, death comes for us all.

Even at our birth.

Even at our birth death does, but stand aside a little.

Someone else said death is the last enemy.

Once we got past it, I think everything will be all right.

I think of my first brushes with death.

You're immature.

You're growing up.

You're a kid, you don't know what to, you know, think about this is all new.

I remember going, my baseball coach died and going to his funerals.

The first funeral I remember ever going to, and me and my friend laughed

the whole time and we were actually asked to leave, kicked outta the

funeral because we just didn't get it.

it was goofy.

Everybody was acting weird and strange.

I remember my mom's estranged dad coming to live with us in the

last couple months of his life.

I remember he passed away as my mom was trying to take him to the hospital.

I remember how torn apart my mom was for this man.

We hardly knew.

Just etched into my soul, talking to people who had tried to self delete and

their struggle going up to the line.

Uh, my wife's grandpa passing away when we just started dating.

You know, not understanding how devastating that was, but I began circling

the drain, getting closer to death.

Gravitational force.

Then two things, shook me to my core.

That changed me forever.

There was a girl that, I knew and, uh, was friends with.

she was friends with my wife when she was in high school, and they

went to the same youth group.

Well, she ended up becoming a firefighter and she died in a

fire, that she was fighting.

And so we went to her funeral and it was a funeral, like every other funeral

that I'd been to, except as everybody started to slowly file out of the room.

This girl's mom fell on her knees and started screaming at the top of

her lungs, clawing at the coffin, shouting, no, no, my girl, no.

And they had to grab her because she was trying to get into the coffin.

And I just was like, oh, this is something else.

This is something.

That I've been immature to, that my eyes had been blinded to.

I think it's someone who's the most courageous person I know who's talks

about death, like it's that he mucks it,

but as a very real illness suddenly outta nowhere caused

him to be rushed to the hospital.

This could be the end.

This courageous, powerful man of God even melted and trembled in the face of that

dark doorway, and it shook me to my core

death.

I wanna.

Not just to have warm, fuzzy feelings about the empty tomb

in Christ's victory over death.

I don't want us to think, yeah, maybe there's something

that comes after this life.

But I want to present to you on this Easter morning, an anchor of hope

for your so, so solid, so weighty, a hope with its own gravitational pole.

This John who wrote Revelation writes in one John five 13.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God, that you may

know that you have eternal life, that you might know it, that you don't doubt that

you know, that you know, that you know.

A hope not just for the day of the valley of shadow of death, but

a hope that affects us now today and changes everything around us.

That's the promise and the hope of the gospel.

In verse John three, two to three.

It says, beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be

has not yet appear, but we know that what he appears, we shall be like him

because we shall see him as he is.

And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure amazing.

hope nowadays is like, I hope so.

Are you gonna go to the movie?

I hope that means no, you're not.

That means you're gonna do something else.

You're gonna watch Jeopardy, right?

We just hired Marcos.

He's running Smurf.

Uh, it's this tubing that's plastic.

It's, and it's not a fun job, you know?

But I could give two guys if I told Hudson, you guys are gonna run Smurf

together, Hudson, I'm gonna pay you $50 at the end of the day to run this Smurf.

And I pull Marcos aside and I say, Marcos, I'm gonna give you a million dollars.

Same job, different attitudes.

Hudson's over there, you know, having a hard time, you know, the

drills slipping and everything.

And, and 50 bucks is this.

Mark is just like whistling a tune.

He's just like, oh, thinking about what I'm gonna get.

You know, the car or, you know why?

Because a confident expectation of future good shapes you in the present.

That is what biblical hope is.

A confident expectation of future good.

That shapes us.

Now, this morning we'll look at from the passage, uh, the revelation

and the keys and little bit of the hope, the revelation, verse nine.

Then I turn to see the voice that was speaking to me.

And on turning I saw seven golden lamps.

And so there's a voice that's speaking revelation.

What is revelation?

I want two things to point out briefly.

It is a letter written at a certain time to a certain people dealing

with a certain set of circumstances.

We like to read ourselves into the story, uh, as if we are the main audience.

This is written to, it's written for us, but it's not written to us.

So often it gets co-opted by bad theology.

I grew up watching these movies where woo, it'll scare you a thief in the night.

You remember that low budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff where

people are like getting beheaded by guillotines, because they like had a

cross necklace and you're like, what the heck is this movie I'm watching?

It was insane.

I was, I'm scarred by that a little bit.

but it's written for us, but not written to us, and it so often

gets co-opted by bad theology.

I can confidently say the locusts are not Apache helicopters written

in about 96 AD in the midst of three decades of insane persecution.

Guys three decades of the most insane persecution the church has ever faced.

some of the emperors would dip Christians in tar and light them on

fire to use them as human torches.

They would drill their brain in the top and they would pour

more molten metal into it.

Kids would be thrown to lions to be torn apart for spectacle.

This was the everyday existence.

In those 30 years, Christians would be quartered, where they'd be pulled apart

by horses going in opposite directions.

One of the worst years was in 70 ad Jerusalem was destroyed.

And in the same year, Paul, Peter and Timothy were all executed publicly in 92.

Ad DEMA, Dian Made everyone in Rome.

Travel to his temple and throw some incense in the fire and

declare that Caesar is Lord.

That's why the early church is always saying Jesus is Lord.

And that if you did not say Caesar is Lord, you could

not buy, you could not sell.

If any Christian had any charge against them at all, they all, uh,

all they had to do to clear the charges was to say, Caesar as Lord.

And if they didn't, they suffered the full extent of Rome's violent punishment.

30 years of being brutalized in ways we can't even imagine.

I mean, we freak out 'cause we wore masks for a while.

We can't imagine this even for a month, 30 years.

Most of the younger Christians didn't know anything different.

Think about growing up in that persecution.

To be a Christian was to put your life on the line, to follow Jesus as to

remain poor forever, to be locked outta the economic system, to be hounded and

marginalized and misrepresented, and lied about and beaten with no justice

for those who beat you and mistreated you and maybe ultimately killed you.

This is who Revelation is written to.

And for some reason in the midst of that Christianity spread like wildfire.

You guys.

Guys, do you realize like at Jesus's ascension, he's risen and he

showed himself for 50 days, right?

And at his ascension it's 500 people.

And even there it says some worshiped and some doubted.

Who are you?

Who are, you know?

Oh wow, you rose from the dead.

That's crazy.

You conquered death.

Oh wow.

You just ascended, you know?

Uh uh.

That's, nah, I don't know.

I'm gonna need more than that.

Why put that in the Bible?

Because it's true.

'cause it's true to the human condition that we still struggle in

the face of everything that we see.

It's true.

It's true.

It's true.

I think of the first witness to the resurrection morning, right?

Is Mary Magdalene.

And it was a demonized woman.

And women weren't in that day and age, used as reliable eyewitnesses.

They couldn't testify in a court.

Here's how they thought about 'em back then.

Uh, uh, women, the, the rabbis, they tell this story.

They said, you know, when God was making Adam, God came to Adam and said, it's

not good, Adam, that you're alone.

Adam said, I agree, yes.

And so God said to Adam, Adam, I'm gonna make a helpmate.

I'm gonna make a woman for you, and I am gonna make her the

best helpmate you can imagine.

She's gonna inspire your dreams.

She's gonna fuel your destiny.

She's gonna encourage you every moment of every day, the

hottest and best meals gourmet.

Everything will be there for you.

You can't imagine how good it is.

And I says, that sounds great.

And God says it'll cost you.

He says, okay, what will it cost me?

He says, it'll cost you your left eye and your left arm and your left leg.

I hadn't thought about it for a while.

And he said, what can I get for a rib?

Thank you.

I'll be performing here all night.

No.

the point though is that's how they thought about women.

They were like second class citizens and who does Jesus, God incarnate, appear

to and say, you are my first witness.

You're gonna take the gospel to the men,

women.

Mary, I think of the shepherds, who also were of such low social status.

Their testimony was not allowed in the court of law.

Who were the first witnesses at the birth of Christ?

It was shepherds.

The upside down nature, the inside out that says male and female,

Jew and Greek and Gentile are all one in Christ, other worldly.

But this Christianity, it spreads guys, 500 people.

Some doubted, some worshiped.

Do you realize by 350 ad that it, it had grown to 350 million, Romans

declaring Christ as their savior, 350 million, uh, sociologist writing.

And it stark says 51% of the Roman Empire was Christian, 500 to 350 million,

51% of the entire Roman population.

Why the early church loved their enemies in the face of persecution.

They had this anchor, this gravitational thing that made them

face death and persecution like it.

Sting was removed.

They could go into the fire, they could get up on the cross.

Peter famously, when he was crucified, when he was executed, he said, man, I'm

not worthy to be executed like my Lord.

And he said, crucify me upside down during a plague that was sweeping through

Rome, when someone started to show signs of the disease, the family would just

throw them into the streets to die.

Even if it was your child.

It was the Christians who took these diseased, riddled people

off the streets into their homes.

Many dying in this process of helping.

Absolutely amazing.

And one of the main reasons that they could have this buoyancy, that they

had this anchor of their souls was because of the Book of Revelation.

Notice I didn't say revelations.

It's one revelation.

And what is the revelation?

Revelation one.

One.

We read it.

The revelation of Jesus Christ.

It's the revelation of him.

Just like so many other places in scripture, I de Isaiah think about him.

He doesn't know what's gonna happen in the kingdom now that

the godly king Siah has died.

so he goes to the temple and he gets a vision of the Lord high and lifted up

the train of his robe, filling the temple with glory, and he's undone and remade.

One in the same job, asked chapter after chapter about the point of

suffering and death and the end.

And he doesn't get an answer to his questions.

He gets an answer that he needed a person, a revelation of God

showing up in glory and majesty.

And he says, I heard you with the hearing of my ear, but now my I

see you and I repent and dust and ashes the three Hebrews facing the

fiery furnace because they won't bow down to the Babylonian image.

They're thrown into the furnace that's been heated seven times hotter.

And what do they get?

They not only get the freedom as their bonds are burnt off, but they get

one who stands in the fire with him.

And the fire doesn't burn them.

It doesn't touch them.

One, it says, who is like the son of God?

So John the beloved, the writer, this one who is exiled, part of persecution

to the island of Patmos, gets this vision, and this is John the beloved.

This isn't John the Baptizer who eats locust and wild honey and wears camel.

For this is John who would, when they're, he's eating dinner with

Jesus would lay his head on his chest.

Hey Jesus, how's it going?

What do you think about Peter?

What he said?

He's crazy.

Right?

Again, verse 12, then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.

And on turning I saw seven golden lamps hands.

Because even what John needed in this moment, in the midst of this

three decades of persecution, was not an escape from the circumstances,

but a revelation of Jesus Christ.

He had eaten with Jesus.

He had broken bread.

He had, seen Jesus walk on the sea in calm storms.

He was at the foot of the cross when Jesus said, into your hands, I commit my spirit.

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

He was there.

He saw all this.

But there was a night of nights before Jesus went to the cross where

Jesus unzipped his humanity a little bit and let the divinity come out.

It was called the Mount of Transfiguration.

And here he gets this vision, this glorified Christ.

And I kind of wanna read it from our, from John's perspective.

So go with me.

Mind you, you know, style.

I'm still working it out.

I heard the voice before.

I saw him.

Heard of like the echo of a choir on a mountain, a mighty rolling

sound that shook the walls of reason and made the bones in my chest.

Trem.

It was a voice that did not seek to persuade or plead, but rather insisted

on being heard as though the very heir had been awaiting its arrival.

The words themselves were strange and unearthly shimmering

at the edge of comprehension.

Behold, was it a command and invitation, a warning?

I turned reluctant at first for I knew that to turn was

to confront the unbearable.

I was not prepared for the site that met me.

A temple corridor stretched away into dustless infinity lined

with seven golden lampstands.

They seemed to float above the floor, untethered to gravity or

logic or the rules of matter.

Each lamp stand gave off a fire that was neither hot nor cold.

A fire that illuminated everything, yet cast no shadow.

The gold itself was not dull.

Brassy gold of coins and jewelry, but a living, breathing gold molten.

A gold that had never known corruption.

Their light was an illumination alone, but an active revelation.

The lamps exposed the secret architecture of the world, the

scaffolding behind all that is seen.

But it was not the lampstands that held my gaze.

It was the one who walked among them.

He was a man, and yet he was not merely a man.

He was the sum of all human long longing.

The answer to every unspoken prayer and every wordless groan, his

presence possessed the gravity of a supernova, the attraction of something

that bends reality around itself.

He was clothed in a robe that seemed to be woven from the night sky itself, a fabric

so pure that it drank in all in truth and radiated only the essence of light.

A gold sash crossed his chest, but even the gold seemed to pale in

comparison to the radiance of his being.

His head and hair were white, absolutely unyielding white, as though every sorrow,

every regret, every burden of time had been bleached away by the eons of mercy.

Leaving only this pure unblemished snow, his eyes, when I dare to meet

them, burn with such intensity that I felt myself peeled, open, inspected,

and found both wanting and beloved.

His eyes were not fire in the way of destruction, but fire in the way of

refinement a kind of fire that draws the impurity to the surface and makes clean.

When it was filthy, he stopped walking, and now I could see his feet like burnish

bronze, as if they had passed through the hottest part of the furnace and emerge,

gleaming, hardened, and unbreakable.

It was then that I noticed that every time his feet touched the ground, the earth

itself seemed to acknowledge him as if these were the first in true footsteps.

Since the beginning of days, the paradox struck me his every MO movement

was the embodiment of stillness.

His voice was both silence and thunder.

When he spoke, it was as if the ocean had learned the language of men.

The sound rolled through the corridor, cresting and falling,

sometimes gentle sometimes with the violence of the storm surge.

No syllable was wasted, no word left.

Undelivered.

Each sentence reconstructed.

My very molecules rearranging my understanding, filled and

emptied me in the same moment.

He lifted his right hand and in that instant I saw seven

stars cradled in his palm.

They did not struggle or resist, but turned as one obedient to his touch.

Each star sang with its own distinct note.

Yet together they formed harmony that rivaled even the voice of their keeper.

I understood then how thin the membrane between matter and spirit truly was.

How stars themselves could be summoned as easily as breath, but his hand

was not empty of other things.

And the brightness.

I discerned the glint of a sword.

No, not held in hand, but emerging from his mouth.

A double-edged blade, infinitely sharp.

Infinitely merciful, severing.

All that was false from all that was true.

It did not threaten it liberated.

The sword was not for violence, but for dividing darkness from light, deception,

from clarity and death from life.

All this I saw in one eternal second.

My knees failed beneath me.

I fell unmade at the feet of this impossible man.

I was not afraid in the way of a child cowering from thunder, but

afraid in the way of one who has glimpsed the final sum of all things.

Who seen the last page of the last book, and knows that their name is inscribed.

There I felt my self, a vessel emptied of all its contents

waiting to be filled anew.

I pressed my forehead to the ground, unable to move, unable to weep

for the presence of such glory.

Tears are redundant.

My body wanted to die for it could not contain the magnitude of what

I witnessed, but instead of death, I received a hand upon my shoulder.

His touch was not electric or overwhelming, and was simply alive.

It was the hand that had spun the galaxy.

He's now resting on the back of one trembling observer.

His voice came again, not as thunder, but as close and intimate as a whisper.

Do not be afraid.

The words crawled into my morrow reanimating, me, giving

me breath where I'd lost it.

He said, I'm the first and the last.

I'm the living one.

I died, but look, I'm alive forever and ever.

The words were not a boast but pierce truth spoken by one who had traverse the

borderlands of nothingness and returned with the keys to every locked door.

He opened his hand and I saw with in it the keys to death

and the grave, real keys.

Yet not of metal or bone, but of something older, the ancient

authority of life itself.

I understood then that every bolt and barrier, every chain, that ever bound a

soul was nothing to him for he carried the keys and he intended to use them.

I raised my head, not in defiance, but in desperate hope.

I looked into his eyes and in their infinite death, I saw not only the end of

my fear, but the beginning of my purpose.

I understood that the grave would one day yield its captives, that every

loss would be reversed, and even the darkest night would end in dawn,

the Keys, I wanna spend a couple minutes telling you, convincing

you hopefully that death is not a friend, that it is the great enemy.

It's a great enemy that everybody faces, and in our culture,

we don't want to face it.

We don't want to.

We want to pretend we keep ourselves busy and distracted, and you're gonna

miss out on joy unless you see that this great foe has been conquered.

Verse 18, in the living one, I died and behold, on my alive, I

am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades.

His words fell with a way of eternity, and the hush of humility and finality

shattering the silence inside me.

I'm the first and the last, the living one.

I died.

But look, I'm alive forever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and the grave.

The proclamation resounded across the corridors of human history, a clarion

call that echoed from the dawn of time and reverberated in the marrow

of every bone that had ever trembled before the image of a tombstone.

He spoke not as a distant deity reciting ancient dogma, but as one who had

descended into the ravenous maw of oblivion and emerged on the other side.

His voice contained the hush of the grave and the roar of the resurrection.

The authority of one who endured the full curse of mortality, draining its cups to

the dregs, only to invert it and refill it with the dyne wine of new creation.

He had entered the seur as a lamb, innocent, bruised, and exited a lion

terrifying in his gentleness, the scars on his hands, no longer a record of defeat,

but trophies of an impossible conquest.

He is the Lord of the aftermath.

The king of the unthinkable come true.

His words undid the logic of decay and made a mockery of graves greedy mouth.

What he offered was not a denial, but defiance and ous.

Laughter in the face of the final silence.

He made it clear.

Death was not a friend nor a neutral passage, but a thief, a vandal to

be dispossessed, and he alone had stormed the citadel, broken its

locks and seized its authority.

Why does death have to be swallowed up in victory?

Because death is an enemy and you must see death as an enemy.

That's not the way most people see it.

People today are taught either to deny death or befriend death.

If you do either of those things, you'll not have the fierce joy that

anchored that arises from the Christian hope that Christ conquered the grave.

Why must death be swallowed up in victory?

Why that the last Trump is death itself?

That ancient tyrant, that serpent coiled around the roots of our souls itself, cast

into the abyss and made forever powerless.

I want you to see this.

It's not merely a poetic flourish or the bravado of the pious.

It is the only answer that refuses to concede an inch to

that which is the most fundamental that undoes us and un makes us.

The Gospel's logic is not to domesticate death, not to make it a pet or a

partner, but to see it for what it is, an enemy, a thief, a vandal of all

that is good, but this is precisely what our age cannot, and its tender.

Self deceptions dare to utter.

Instead, our culture has become an expert in two contradictory tactics,

denial and becoming sentimental about it.

The first tactic, which is denial, is the more obvious one, and it's

become the very air we breathe.

We're schooled from childhood to think of death as an avoidable inconvenience.

To be managed away by better nutrition, more rigorous exercise, frequent

checkups, and medical promise.

Yeah, we'll get those.

We'll get those shots, those injections going we'll live forever.

Our billboards and social feeds are filled with the success stories of a

hundred year olds with Miracle Cures with glossy magazine covers showing

plasticized immortality With tight abs and smooth jawlines, we do not

use the word death and polite company.

We euphemized that someone passes away or goes to a better place,

or is simply no longer with us.

We invest enormous resources to keep the dying hidden from sight tucked

away at hospices or cordon off behind the sterility of fluorescent

lights in the hospital corridors.

Children no longer play in alleys where Herses Pass, we do not teach

our children the inventory of mourning the black armband the household,

wake the casserole of condolence.

Instead, we're trained to act as if death is merely a bad break and

unfortunate aberration in the otherwise smooth flow of our daily life.

But then curiously and in a manner deeply ironic, our culture also

sentiment sentimentalize his death.

We befriend it, we assign it the role of kindly old usher, who

with a gentle hand, shows us to our seat in the eternal theater.

Modern spirituality is a wash with the language of pre peaceful

transition or natural cycles becoming one with the universe.

Going back into the energy death is presented as a wise teacher, a

necessary step in personal growth, sometimes even a lover awaiting.

Our cold embrace the poetry of Ry and Mary Oliver is invoked to convince us

that what lies at the end of things is not horror, not rupture, but completion.

Funerals are no longer funerals and the air is heavy with helium

balloons and curated playlists.

And worst of all the sense that grief itself is something unseemly to begotten

over to be processed and placed in the compost heap of therapeutic progress.

I've seen both tactics often in the same person within the same conversation, and

even at times in the same sentence, the refusal to name death as the enemy would

puzzle even shock any of our ancestors.

The entire history of human civilization from Mesopotamia epics to the Greek

tragedies from the Book of Job to the kadish is a record of humanity's dread

of death, and our stubborn insistent that it cannot, must not have the last word.

But now in a culture bathed in comfort, insulated by screens and cars, with

an infinitude of distractions and amusements, we have developed to what

can only be called a phobia of death's.

Reality.

Never in history have people been less prepared to die, less willing

to admit that the end will come not as a soft landing, but as a violent

disjunction, a sunding of every tie, a tearing of the fabric itself.

And here is what is most consequential about this.

If you do not see death as the enemy, as the one true foe that must be

vanquished, then you cannot feel the full weight of Christian hope.

If you accept death as natural, as merely a phase, as an inevitability to be

hugged rather than hated, then why should you look forward to the resurrection?

Why should you long for the world to be remade?

Why should you care that Christ is broken?

Open the tomb in making peace with death.

You make a war on hope.

You become, in a sense, spiritually docile content to drift toward

dissolution, tranquilized in the certainty that nothing really is at stake.

What is lost in this denial is not only the theological rigor of the

gospel, but also the fierce joy, the spine tingling anchor that arises from

the knowledge that the worst thing imaginable has already been defeated.

The Christian, if she's true to the core, is not someone who is less afraid

of death because she has reasoned her way past it, or because she

has numbed herself to its presence.

No, the Christian is more afraid of death, more conscious of its

monstrosity, precisely because she has glimpsed what life would be without it.

The echo in the trace of Eden.

Walking with God in the cool of the day.

She knows that death is a negation, a cosmic vandal and outrage.

But she also knows that in Christ's death has been UNM Fang and rendered ridiculous.

The true Christian response to death is not stoicism nor mere acceptance, but

a kind of wild, holy taunt, oh, death.

Paul writes in first Corinthians 15, where is your sting?

Oh grave, where is your victory?

But we haven't gotten there yet.

First, we must face the enemy as he really is in all the subtle ways that he is.

Why is death such an enemy death as he truly is not the side wielding

wrath of cartoon and nightmare?

Not a distant possibility to be joked about or denied, but

insistent as a toothache as patient.

And as inevitable as the sea, his voice is the hush that comes after gunshots.

The crackling silence of the hospital corridor at 3:00 AM His

mighty sting is not a single blow.

It's a slow, methodical, exhaling and un unending invisible breath that

presses down on the world and fills every space, every cell, every moment,

every joy, every hope with a faint but persistent flavor of an ending.

We are mortally wounded from birth.

We gasp and gurgle as we enter the world announcing our mortality With

that first desperate cry from infancy, we swallowed the honey of denial and

learned to lie to ourselves about the true nature of our condition.

We invest our scan hours, our ration days as if the currency of life could

be saved or stockpiled, as if the minutes themselves were not leaking

constantly through the holes in our hands.

And all the while there stands this incredible creature, this un killable, un

pitying force in the corner of every room, behind every curtain, beneath every bed,

watching with benevolent detachment, as we make our anxious, valiant, petty little

efforts to outwit and outweigh death.

Death, he does not confine himself to the melodrama of funerals

or the spectacle of violence.

He manifests himself in ordinary days.

In the world's plaintiff details, sometimes his presence is as subtle

as the ache in your knee or the width of rot in the produce aisle.

Other times, he is a neon sign, impossible to miss the pile up on the interstate.

The shuttering headlines on tv, the empty desk at work that everyone avoids

talking about, his appetite is infinite.

His six foot stomach growls.

A hunger that is both cosmic and terrifying for his meal.

He will not wait.

It is not enough that he feasts on us at the end.

We are required to taste him every day and appetizers of

anxiety and amuse bushes of pain.

We sample him in the headaches that refuse to fade in the heartbreaks

that become mortgages on our souls in the moments of regret that replay

endlessly behind our eyelids at night.

He's a gourmet chef of suffering.

He flavors his meals with anticipation, dread, and premature morning.

We are all dying.

His fingerprints are everywhere.

His reach is unlimited.

I see him at work in the tectonic spasms of the Earth and Haitian

and Japanese earthquakes, entire cities flattened in seconds.

The ground opening its jaws and swallowing lives hole.

Even in the aftermath, he lingers.

He hates escapees.

He resents the ones who crawl from the level rubble, coughing the dust, and so

he stalks them in their dreams, waiting for the Astor shocks to finish his work.

But he is not content to operating only at the scale of catastrophe.

He's present in the slow motion, tra tragedies of poverty in the way that

absence of money can hollow out a life long before the body gives up.

I see him in the face of children with bellies bloated by hunger,

eyes dull and ancient looking.

Even at the age of eight.

I see him in the elderly, abandoned by families and governments dying of

neglect in silent sun drenched rooms.

I see him in bureau, bureaucracies that calculate the cost of compassion

and decide quietly and behind closed doors that some are not worth saving.

He thrives in disease.

Of course, he's a master of plagues and pestilence, the old friend of

the virus In the parasite, he's not satisfied by the death of one.

He wants to see entire families broken, entire communities hushed in the mourning.

There's a cruelty in the way.

He takes some and leaves others behind.

Forced to stand at the grave and wonder why.

Death's.

Mathematics is precise and pless, and for every cure that science conjures,

he devises a dozen new affliction, a hundred mutations, a thousand slow and

silent ways to rot a body from within.

But death is not merely a biological pH phenomenon.

He's a social construct, a psychological presence of force that pervades even

our deepest thoughts and beliefs.

I see 'em in oppression, both as the hand that presses down on the oppress

and the as the rot inside the oppressor.

For every boot stamping on a face, there's a soul being quietly

crushed beneath its own weight.

The knowledge of complicity, the slow poisoning of our conscience,

he's there in the institutions that perpetuate suffering, and the systems

designed to keep some high and others low in the language of hate and the

silence of those who know better.

I see him in depression.

The gray fog that settles on the mind, the invisible hand that

drags even the strongest to their.

He's in meds that numb and pain pills and the little orange bottles that

line bathroom cabinets lick a warning.

He's in razor blades and bedside wheels and notes left behind for

loved ones who never saw it coming.

He's present in abuse, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional.

He's the echo in the angry voice.

The coldness in the parents' eyes, the slow corrosion of

a child's sense of worth.

He is the shadow behind addiction.

The reason the needle calls the justification for one more drink, one

more pill, one more night of oblivion.

He's both the cause and the effect.

The reason and the excuse he is in the material obsession that grips the

mind, the endless pursuit of things.

The belief that if we could only own one more object, fill one more

hole, we might finally be safe.

He's in marital transgressions, the secret texts sin after midnight and

the Cold War of the shared bedroom.

He's in our slavery to appearances, our desperate sick addiction to the way things

look rather than the way things are.

We spend more time curating our images than tending to our hearts,

caring more about how we're perceived by strangers than the

reality of who we might actually be.

All the wild death laughs Free knows that none of it matters in

the dying villages we ignore and the suffering faces we scroll past.

There he is always watching, always waiting.

We rehearse daily, elaborate rich, uh, rituals of denial.

We conspire with the cogs of commerce and the wheels of politics, with

the algorithms that spoonfeed us the right headlines and the

right hashtags and the right gods.

We conge your comfort by any means available.

All the disguise, the churning relentless certainty of our own

contradiction that we are at once temporary and desperate for eternity.

I even see deaths emergence in our churches, those centuries

meant for the living, but often haunted by ghosts of unspoken pain.

There in hushed auditorium, hope and fear seeing in unison, we pull out

emergency verses as deterrent to religious differences, as if scriptural bandaid

could heal a gangrene of misunderstanding.

We weaponize wisdom deployed doctrine like landmines, all the wild bleeding,

a slow and silent sorrow for the unity.

We cannot bring ourselves to risk in these days.

Death is killing us before we even enter the surface of the earth.

We cannot hide from his wretched curse for death in his grave.

We constantly rehearse each failed attempted connection,

each refusal to forgive each moment when we choose bitterness.

Over compassion is a small practice in dying.

We build mausoleums of memory and barricade our hearts behind them,

believing that to fear the grave is weakness, when in truth it is the

most universal longing we all share.

We're more frightened of death than perhaps any generation before us.

The sociologist Peter Berger said it plainly.

the modern day has created a world without windows.

Me and Andrew used to play this game when we were dating.

We don't do it now that we're responsible adults and parents

where we would drive, be driving on a straight stretch of freeway and we would

challenge each other to see how long we could drive with our eyes closed.

Not recommended at first, four or five seconds.

Cake, easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?

Seven seconds.

You get a little nervous.

Eight seconds, nine seconds, 10 seconds, 11 seconds.

I think one of us had the record for like 14 seconds.

Your palms are sweating.

Your heart is racing.

Can I last one more second?

And then you realize this is the dumbest thing I've ever done.

So you open your eyes.

But you got a record, right?

And what Peter Berger is pointing out is he's saying, we've

blocked out the reality of death.

And so we're living, we're driving a car without windows, somewhere we can't see.

And that same anxiousness lays upon us.

Imagine for a moment, even in a room that your entire

existence unfolds within a room.

The walls are sturdy, the lighting, artificial, and the decor carefully

curated to keep your attention fixed.

On the here and now in this room, you attend your meetings, eat your meals,

watch your screens, and worry about your cholesterol, your step count,

your carbon footprint, your retirement, and the room is sealed perfectly

so that your gaze never even for an instant, falls upon what lies behind.

You know, perhaps by rumor or by vague recollection.

That there's something outside a world, a landscape, maybe even a sky.

If you've ever tried to drive a car without a windshield,

you'd understand the problem.

You sit behind the wheel engine, idling blind, everything beyond the dashboard.

You have no direct experience of the road ahead.

You proceed by inference, by guesswork, by the careful study of

what is immediately in front of you.

But it's impossible to drive for a time with no windshield.

It's terrifying.

Every turn could be a cliff, every intersection, an ambush.

You cannot plan.

You cannot hope.

You can only react.

And so it is with our lives.

In the absence of any vision of out there, we are forced into

a state of perpetual vigilance.

Perpetual anxiety in this generation is just anxiety as its moncure.

Epicurious, the Greek philosopher, put it rather well with furious logic.

The way he put it was, what men fear is not that death is

annihilation, but that it is not.

And it's not annihilation.

Annihilation is where you just.

Go into the long slumber of sleep.

What we really fear is what if there is something after What if there is

a God who is in charge of things?

Who designed the universe, who made me for a relationship with himself?

If there is a judge, is there any hope for us?

Everybody in this room knows we failed.

We failed our parents as children.

We failed our children as parents.

We failed our space, our spouses, we failed our friends.

We failed as citizens, we failed as people.

We know those shortcomings and we know if there isn't a judge who is going

to someday put everything right and that judge and judges impartially,

there's no hope for the world.

But if there is a judge, is there any hope for us?

The thing we're most afraid of is we know we owe more than we can pay.

If there is a God and if there is a judge, what if payment is due on the day we die?

The wages of sin is death.

as Epicurious put it, we're not afraid because maybe death is annihilation.

We're afraid because maybe death is not annihilation.

Samuel Johnson, the great Lexier, wrote with the graveyard always at his elbow.

He said, no rational man can die without uneasy apprehension.

It is the deep logic of the mind that cannot, will not pretend.

The unknown is easy, softer, gentle.

The mind recoils, the mind struggles.

The mind screams against the dying of.

Rousseau who tried to be so at ease with nature, so reconciled to

the cycle, ultimately confessed.

He who pretends to look upon death without fear lies.

Even Voltaire in all his satin bravado was said to tremble at the last.

We are wired to despise the conclusion of our own narrative.

The idea that there is a judge, a tribunal behind the veil is so terrifying precisely

because we know we would stand condemned.

Yet, if there is no judge, if life and death are only a blind process, then

there is no hope for anyone, not for the righteous, not for the innocent, not

for the crush, not for the voiceless.

History's victims are forgotten the shuffle of genes and dust.

The world does not put the rights in the scenario.

We are abandoned at the end of time, and evil and goodness are

both swallowed in the same silence.

So we drive on without windows, clutching at the wheel with white

knuckles, sick with uncertainty.

We try to distract ourselves with work, with pleasure, with arguments and

entertainments and the endless turn of news, we build museums and playgrounds

and shopping malls over ancient burial grounds, but the dead crowd in mute,

an assistant, their presence felt in the ache of the back and the dullness

behind the eyes and the anxiety dreams that come at 3:00 AM we laugh at the old

superstitions, the haunted houses and the ghosts, but we are haunted all the same.

Christianity does not offer some gentle reconciliation with mortality, nor

does it indulge in the escapist fantasy that death is a myth or a friend.

No Christianity insist upon calling death by its oldest truest name an enemy.

It is the enemy.

It is the one adversary we all share.

No matter where we're born, no matter what we believe it is, the iron

limit that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be seduced, cannot be tricked.

It is unyielding, implacable, and if we're honest, terrifying.

Yet in the strangeness of the gospel, death is not merely the greatest foe.

It is a foe, and he spent a shadow that in the presence

of Christ loses all substance.

This is the only story that permits us to rage against our end without

the guilt of self delusion to grieve, loss as unnatural, to despise it,

to hate it, to see the world itself has been and broken by its presence.

And yearn, like with all of creation, that God will come and make things right again,

that he'll straighten every crooked path.

Christianity is not a religion for the serene or the self-satisfied.

It is a message for those who cannot abide the thought of loved ones, simply

vanishing, who cannot bear the arithmetic of centuries, grinding every name into

dust, who cannot forgive the world for its insatiable appetite for suffering.

And in these, it is for those who refuse to make peace with death,

because somewhere deep inside, they remember there's a rumor of victory.

The poet, Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage.

Rage against the dying of the light.

Modernity by contrast proposes a tranquilized guide into extinction.

It offers no rage, only distraction.

No hope only sedation.

But Christianity listens to this primal cry and names it with what it is.

Not a weakness, not a disease to be cured, but a homing

beacon that points us somewhere.

The horror of death is not a byproduct of ignorance, but a remnant, a trace

memory, a residue of Eden itself walking with God in the cool of the day.

We are meant to live, and we are meant to last.

We are meant to stand before God.

Who remembers every hair, who bottles every tear, who calls every

star by name, and who promises that not one life will be lost.

Not one fragment forgotten.

Not one love wasted To deny death's, monstrosity is to

Deny this promise to befriend.

It is to concede it.

As master Christianity offers something altogether, wilder.

The chance to mock it, to taunt it, to stand at the

edge of the grave and to sing.

In one Corinthians 15, that's what Paul does.

He's not polite in the presence of death.

Not circumspect, not respectful.

He heaps scorn on the grave.

He laughs in its face.

Ow.

Death is your victory.

Where, oh, death is your sting.

It is not a rhetorical question.

It is a dare, a provocation, a spit in the eye.

Paul knows death is still real, still painful, still hated, but he also knows

that it's been defanged, it's victory.

As a joke, it's sting, a mockery.

It's permanence and illusion.

He's inviting us to live.

Even now with that kind of buoyancy, that anchor to be unsinkable, knowing that our

greatest enemy is already defeated, it's teeth shattered, it's threat emptied.

Nothing else could explain

why there were Christians.

Who sang as they burned on crosses,

accept that they had an anchored hope so, sure, so true.

So confident that death had been defeated.

Here's know the story of David and Goliath.

I love this story and I used to teach it as a youth pastor.

I'd be like, there's this Goliath and he gets up and he defies

the armies of the living God.

And he's like, makes a mockery.

And he blasphemes and he's ah, you guys, you know your God is

weak and puny and everything.

And choose a man, a champion from among you and I'll fight him.

And if he wins, we'll become your servants.

And if, if I win, you become our servants.

And so, Never a man of Israel would stand up to this giant, I think there

were times where, you know, they thought in the middle of the night

they had one of those good dreams you have after you eat healthy for a while,

and, uh, you have this amazing dream and you're like, man, I can do this.

Yes, I can face this giant.

I can beat this.

And and he get gets up in the morning and he sees the giant standing almost 10 feet

tall with the armor and spear and the sword, and it says that all of Israel's

heart melted in them like wax did.

We we're afraid they were trembling, their knees were knocking.

It sounded like chattering teeth through the camp, but it was

just everybody's knees trembling.

They were so afraid to face this one.

And then David comes along, David's like, who's this guy talking all this junk?

And so David, goes and he finds five smooth stones.

And then you say, as a youth pastor, why five?

Because Goliath had four brothers.

David was like, I'm gonna take 'em all out.

I don't know.

But he chooses five smooth stones.

He goes, you defy the armies of the living God.

it's you who are gonna lose your head.

And he slings his sling and it goes right into the forehead of the,

of the giant, knocks him mountain.

And David takes the sword and chops Goliath his head off.

And all of a sudden all of Israel rallies behind David because David's

victory became all of Israel's victory.

And everybody's like, we won, right?

And so, you know, it's a good youth pastor and I'm like, so go out and

face your giants, you guys, whether it's the bullies at school or,

whatever it is, or, or death itself.

You guys have courage.

You really find that great.

You be like those young Davids.

But here's the thing that I missed, is that we are not David in that story.

We're not David.

We are the guys in the tents who are too afraid to face because the

giant in this giant, the giants of Satan sin and death are overwhelming

and they will slaughter us.

Our hearts should melt within us like wax.

But there was one who came, the son of David.

Who came and he said, I will face off against the giants that you cannot defeat.

And he went up against that giant, not at the risk of his life,

but at the cost of his life.

And in dying, he defeated death.

And in dying, he absorbed death into himself.

And as he comes out on the other side of the grave, he defangs death.

He removes the sting from it, and he comes up in victory.

And just as David's victory was a victory for all of Israel, so,

and alone is Christ's victory over Satan, sin and death are victory.

We can face Satan sin and death as defeated foes because Christus,

Victor, Christ, our Victor Christ, the champion, has gone into death.

He suffered the wrath that I deserve.

Yes, I stood condemned.

Guys.

Have you ever thought I, I tried doing this.

I have done at least one wrong thing a day for the past two weeks I've been

thinking about it and keeping track and I.

I started making a mental note, and guess what?

I don't really wanna share 'em with you.

That's too transparent.

But think about that 8 billion people on the planet.

If it's just one wrong thing, and my wrong thing isn't just

something that I do to myself.

It affects my kids, it affects my marriage, it affects my community,

and the impact of sin is so global, so massive, so messy, and Christ, it says

its second Corinthians five became sin.

Is he was treated as the lamb and my sin was put on him, and he took the judgment,

the condemnation that I deserved.

And then he didn't just wipe the slate clean, he gave me the victory.

He treated me, he adopted me.

He gives me his inheritance, he gives me his righteousness.

So as the father looks at me today, in my messiest, in, in my worst, he sees

the beauty and the perfection of Christ.

That is the gospel of grace and it changes everything.

It's not a religion of doing and trying and being better.

It is those who can't do, who have tried and are burnt out and spent

and weak and desperate, finding that the Savior did it all for them.

And we cast ourselves on his mercy.

We lean into him.

But why defeat death?

Why is it so important to conquer this foe, not just to give us an

anchor, but do you notice that verse where it says that he, Jesus walks

up and puts his hand on John's back?

That's the whole point.

The touch, guys, you were made for God.

You were made to walk with God in the cool of the day, face to face,

but sin destroyed that.

It made a barrier.

We were thrust outta Eden and we couldn't get back to the tree of life.

You know, Moses said, show me your glory.

And God said, I can't show you my glory.

You'll die.

I can't show you my face.

I'll show you the backside of my glory.

And even at that, Moses glowed, people couldn't get near to the presence of God.

Until the presence of God came and got near to us and he lived the life

that we never could have lived, and he died, the death that we deserve to die.

Why?

Why defeat death?

Why defeat death so that he could come to you today and put his hand

on you and say, be not afraid.

Be not afraid.

I've conquered.

And why did I conquer so that I could have you back in right relationship with me?

I finally close with this, and guys, this blew me away.

I had, I have preached for a long time and I've never known this.

Do you know the thief on the cross when he says, remember me

when you come into, your kingdom?

And Jesus says, truly, truly, I say to you today, you'll be with me in paradise.

Well, that is just a Greek word.

It's cio.

And when the people who are translating.

The Old Testament into Greek, they just took that Greek word, and

every time the Hebrew word came up, they would just translate it.

Cio.

Paradise.

paradise.

Do you know what that word means?

Actually in Hebrew?

Every time it's translated paradise.

Today you'll be with me in paradise.

That's translated as garden.

that's the Hebrew word.

And so when the thief says, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus says, truly, truly, I say to you today, we're gonna walk in the garden.

Mommy.

It all comes back, guys.

That's what you were built for.

It all comes back.

That's he loves you.

He wants you, and he's removed any barrier sin that would keep you barred from

his presence, death that would keep you barred from his presence for eternity.

He's removed and defanged it all.

He's conquered our enemy.

Why?

So that he can have that relationship that you were built for.

You have been made for God, and we are restless until we find our hope in him.

You were made for him.

He loves you and he's made every way.

We're gonna worship.

We're gonna close.

Please see, death is the enemy that Jesus has conquered.

Hate it.

Rage against the dying of the light.

Things are not the way they're supposed to be, but Christ is

coming back to put things right to wipe away every tear from the eye.

Nothing is wasted to God.

It literally says that every tear you've ever cried, whether privately

or publicly, he keeps in his bottle and he's gonna make it right.

He's gonna make it right, he's gonna make it right.

As he adjusts the universe, it puts things back to the way they're supposed to be.