“Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.” Revelation 20:14
Are you a roller coaster person? Have you spent much time with non-roller coaster people? Despite being deathly afraid of heights, I love a good roller coaster. I guess I just trust the rails, the brakes, the shoulder bars, and the hundreds of folks who have ridden the thing before me. When I’m on one, I let go completely and laugh my tail off for those two and a half minutes of controlled excitement and terror. I don’t judge folks who don’t love them, and I understand that, as with anything else, something could always go wrong. But if you catch me at an amusement park, I’m gonna be coasting!
Admittedly, it’s a strange way to have fun. It’s kind of like taking everything that can possibly happen in ten or fifteen different car crashes, mixing it all together back-to-back into one event, and then, at the end, somehow slowing down and coming to a controlled stop instead of actually getting in a wreck. Whose idea was this, anyway?
Now imagine, for a second, that no one had ever ridden a roller coaster before, and one just showed up out of nowhere and you were encouraged to try it. In this thought experiment, it’s not whatever roller coasters started out as—like some lame little downhill on a wooden track—but one of the huge and intimidating coasters we have these days, like VelociCoaster, Iron Gwazi, or Steel Vengeance. They boast stats like being over 200 feet tall, reaching speeds well over 100 mph, and having 90-degree turns into drops that give riders as much as 27 seconds of airtime, floating out of their seats. Whoa. Would anyone ever volunteer to be the first person to ride one of those? What kind of guarantee would it take for you to willingly be the first person to strap into that situation for a bit of casual fun?
My guess is you would say no to being the guinea pig on this outrageous contraption. And yet, that same lighthearted attitude most people have while riding roller coasters is exactly the way the New Testament encourages us all to feel about death. This week, we looked at Jesus gently raising a twelve-year-old girl from the dead right there in her home. It was a sweet and tender scene in which we see the beautiful heart of the Savior up close. The thing that’s easy to read over if you’ve spent a lot of time in church or read the story many times is something Jesus says right before He raises the girl from the dead. In Mark 5:39, He says, “The child is not dead, but asleep.”
How could Jesus say this? The mother and father of this little girl are right there in the throes of despair and mourning, and Jesus seems to dismiss their pain. Is that the deal? Is Jesus that insensitive? Well, it’s either that, or Jesus knows something we don’t. What if, in some way, Jesus is the builder of the roller coaster, letting everyone know that no matter how scary it seems, it’s perfectly safe and not at all what you think it’s going to feel like? The New Testament teaches some pretty incredible things about death, and I think we who follow Jesus need to stay connected to those words so that we know how we’re supposed to think about, talk about, and feel about death.
If you know Jesus, death ain’t what it used to be. Death has been defeated, humiliated. Death is washed up. Here is a quick rundown of what our faith says about death: The sting of death has been defeated by Jesus’ resurrection. The victory of death has been defeated. Whoever believes in Jesus never really dies. Death is not a final state for anyone, and one day, every single person who has ever died will hear the voice of Jesus and get up out of their graves to answer Him. Death can’t separate us from God’s love. To die is gain for the believer because we are instantly with Him forever. Our apparent mortality will be swallowed up by the new life. Jesus holds the keys to death. The second death has no power over believers at all. Death itself will actually go to court, be sentenced, and be tossed into an eternal lake of fire. In the New Creation, there is no more death at all.
The new life of the believer after what appears to be death is such a real and full life that what we now call death, Jesus calls sleep—like a nap on a perfect afternoon before we get to enjoy the best day ever.