Death Where Is Your Sting?: A Teleological Look At Death

Just as recent as a couple hours ago I was informed of a lady I used to serve in the workplace who died at the age of 107. This year I attended a funeral for a 2 year old. Kids at the local high school are dying in car accidents and cancer just won’t seem to stay away from the funeral homes. I have worked in three different Assisted Living Homes and a Hospital which has meant I have often been surrounded by death. I have found that whether the person dies of an accident, a self-created mistake, illness, or whatever cause, it always seems to leave disgust in the bottom of my heart. The sting of death never ceases to shock me. I never could quite understand when I would hear theologians or musicians assert “Death, where is your sting?” because it always seemed apparent to me that the sting is the border-line paralyzing feeling we feel when we see what was once living breathing flesh lie cold and stiff. But this mystery is almost as old as humanity and leaves every culture trying to answer what the purpose of life is if at the end of it we merely return to the dust. As an undergraduate student who is studying philosophy I cannot help but be haunted by the teleological question as it pertains to death.              

Death is something every culture wrestles with. It is often argued by atheistic secular humanists that religion serves functionally like a psychological crutch to appease or calm people’s fears of death. The Christian Scriptures speak a different and antithetical word to that notion that has penetrated much of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. The Christian Scriptures record that God created all that was and is. Furthermore it records that this was good (Genesis 1). God had created in His own image a creature above all the others, a creature that He would forever love and by their obedience to His word He would continually bless them. God had delivered His word to Adam not to eat of the tree in which He had pointed out to him, and Adam was warned that the day that he ate from it he would surely die (Genesis 2:16-17). It doesn’t take long in the sacred text before the wicked Serpent comes slithering into his crafty deceptive ways. When this reptile king deceived Adam and Eve the whole cosmos was burdened with the reality of what death is. Death is a direct result of the sin of our first father Adam, who in falling tainted not only all of humanity with original sin but also brought about the torturous groaning of creation itself. Where does death come from? Death comes from the hand of God because of man’s sin in the fall and now is the reality we live in until the awaited day.  

The teleological answer to the question of death is rooted in the character of God himself. In order to understand teleology at any rate it is typically preceded by an understanding of epistemology. What we know, how we know, if we even can know, once answered lends itself to further speculation into meaning/purpose. God created all things and therefore is the rightful ruler and master over all of creation. God in his ontological nature is holy and when God ushered a warning with a fair punishment he is perfectly right, indeed just to remain consistent to his word. In addition to God’s ontological nature, revealed revelation assuring of the notion that God cannot and will not lie reaffirms that Scriptural epistemology rooted in an authoritative, I’d argue inerrant Word, allows the Christian to answer the teleological question of death that tends to haunt me. I’d argue that the purpose of death, at least in part for where we are at in this moment is that God’s ontology (namely that of holiness) along with Scriptural epistemology (namely that God cannot lie) show us that our sin has separated us from God in a way that we ourselves cannot fix.  

However, I’d argue that the purpose of death is more encompassing than merely showing that sinners are doomed by showing that Jesus himself is reversing the curse by flipping death on its head. Although I think the most clear and explicit teleological evidence in Scripture regarding the purpose of death is the immediate separation from man and God, the Scripture doesn’t leave all sinners doomed in the end. In the great and incomparable Word, it is recorded that Jesus himself comes down into creation and dies the death that sinners deserved, so that in him they can be united to him by his death, and then furthermore united with him in resurrection life. The Scripture is clear that as a result of sin comes death to humanity. But in the great tale of the truest beautiful story death cannot escape death. In his death Jesus cried it was finished, and he meant it. Death was issued its own dreadful and sure death sentence. Death’s days were numbered, and still are. Death where is your sting? In a real sense it still is stinging. I will attend a memorial service in a few days from now where memories and tears and laughter will surely sting. The sting is still present in the inner corridors of our hearts that still long for the day when Jesus will come back and abort death forever. But in a different sense, we can sing, pray, weep, all with closed fists and clinched jaws that are singing “All I Have is Christ” and there, in that comfort, the sting although not suppressed will be accompanied by the Galilean carpenter’s sure promise.
                So often I meet professing Christians who act as though Jesus is an ideal and not a person. Jesus is alive. The fact that Jesus is alive, reigning over his people, and not worried a bit ought to remind believers that their victory is already won. Even though death’s curse is unbearable our elder brother came and conquered it for us. I’m reminded of Revelation 5 where there is weeping because no one is found worthy to open the scroll save one. The one who alone comes to rescue is he. In Ephesians 2 the apostle Paul speaks to the condition we have talked about that all humanity is in as being dead. Any time at the graveyard of your loved ones will remind you that all the tears you could cry or the wishful memories you could speak could not raise those corpses to life again. But the believer in Christ can rest assured that Jesus’ corpse is not rotting in a tomb in current geo-political Israel. Jesus is alive and his resurrection guarantees the resurrection of his followers because he has promised he would one day raise them again to new life, and he is the only one to go through death and come out alive.