Mark 12:27, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.”
Those who have the Father of Jesus as their God cannot truly die. Why? Because death—true death—is not severance from the body or severance from biological function (biological function being only the “shadow of life” just as its cesssation is the “shadow of death”), rather true death is severance from the gracious presence of God. True death—and, I believe, the dark, cold well from which fears of death rise like choking vapors—is to be exiled from God, cut off from any modicum of fellowship with Him. That is the fearful Spector, that is the icy hand, that is the monstrous blackness, the maddening abyss…..that is “Death.”
And yet, this Death has been slain and stripped of his terror for the children of the Father. Death has been broken and muzzled and bound to the believer’s chariot, he has been made a faithful charger who draws them through the stormy river and onto the grassy banks of Immanuel’s Land….onto the banks of True Life.
YHWH is the God of the living because to have YHWH as your God is to be alive (John 17:3). He cannot be “God of the dead,” since to have Him as one’s God and to be His people is the very essence of life and is the deep and full and true reality toward which biological function—and all the blessings it affords to the embodied soul—is only a scattered beam, like a glint of sunlight on the stones of a cave.
And how can He be God of the living? What I mean is, how can any remain in fellowship with Him? How, when we are—as Paul so rigorously argues in Romans 1-3 —when we are all enemies of God, all opposed to Him, all set against Him in our hearts (set against Him who is True Life!), how can any truly live? Of course, the answer is that we live to God only in Christ. Only because “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph.1:4) can we stand in right relation to God, can we know Him as our God and so truly live. But, of course, our death did not simply disappear. We live to God because God—in Christ—died our death to God and rose again.
Yes, our “True Death” was swallowed up on the Holy Mountain (Isaiah 25:6-8), our True Death—that freezing horror, that total abandonment, that bleak, stone-faced, maddening abyss of weeping and torment—our True Death was experienced by Christ, by the One who loved us and gave Himself for us….so that through His death He has vanquished death for all who are in Him.
But to bear our death would not, in itself, bring us into life….no, for that He had to rise again. To rise again from the abyss, to be raised up from nothingness, to return beyond all hope and all expectation, to return, to live, never to die again. This is what Christ has done, and in this death is forever slain, death is turned into a shadow, a wraith, a twisting cloud that will soon be utterly dissolved in the morning sun of Life.
And so, for those in Christ—for those who belong to God—there is no death, no real death. Oh, there is the cessation of biological function, there is the temporary rending of the spiritual self from the corporeal self, there is the temporary severance of family and friendship….but there is NO severance of the supreme bond, of that supreme Life, of fellowship with God in Christ by the Spirit. No…..Ha, Glory to God, no, there is NO severance of that bond. Indeed, by Christ, Death is now the portal into a deeper and fuller and more true experience of that fellowship—of that Life—than we have ever yet conceived.
