When You Die! (5)

‘He set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.’ Hebrews 2:15 NLT

The Bible says: ‘Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could He die, and only by dying could He break the power… of death… He set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.’ (Hebrews 2:14–15 NLT)

Adolf von Harnack had doubts about the gospels but still admitted: ‘Christ’s grave was the birthplace of an indestructible belief that death is vanquished and there is life eternal. It is useless to cite Plato… useless to point to the Persian religion and the ideas and literature of later Judaism. All that would have perished; but the certainty of the resurrection and of a life eternal which is bound up with the grave in Joseph’s garden has not perished; and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City, which make our earthly life worth living and tolerable. He delivered them “who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage”.’

Good news: you don’t have to be in bondage to the fear of death! Dr Simon Greenleaf, world-renowned authority on legal evidence, shone the searchlight of his immense knowledge on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and revealed every thread of that evidence to the most probing critique. And when he did, he concluded that the evidence was so tremendous that in any unbiased courtroom on earth, it would be proclaimed a historical fact. So what does all this mean for us as believers? Simply this: Christ’s resurrection guarantees ours!

SoulFood: 1 Kings 8–9, Matt 13:24–35, Ps 108, Pro 12:14