What are the most important priorities in your life?

QUESTION: Has Christ’s resurrection made death our “friend”?

RESPONSE: I have reservations about calling death a friend. But I think it’s worth doing an autopsy on death to explore the way Christ’s work changed not only our relationship to death, but changed the nature of death itself.

I want to ask first, how is death not our friend, then how it might now be our friend and finally, how might we talk about death.

So first, and easiest, why is the statement “death is our friend” not true? Most obviously, in 1 Cor. 15—dubbed “the resurrection chapter”—Paul calls death an enemy, and in fact, the last enemy to be destroyed, which is to say, death remains an enemy until the final day.

Second, the New Testament solution to death is not described as befriending it, but rather, the death of death in the resurrection of Christ. Paul’s perspective seems unequivocal on both these points.

Third, we might imagine death as falling asleep and passing through the victorious doorway into the joy of Mt. Zion (cf. Heb. 12, which I’ll visit later), the reality of dying is almost always an unnatural experience and clearly a curse. See the following table on percentages re: the top 10 causes of death globally:

Which of these ways of dying could I ever call my friend!? Heaven itself is my friend, but if these chief causes of death are the doorway, what shall we say? Is death attached to cause of death, or is death a release from cause of death?

Perhaps it is not so simple. What in fact is “death”?And how does the nature of fundamentally change as a result of Christ’s work?

I’m not ready to embrace death as a friend yet, but how might the statement “death is a friend” be partly true? Three points bear considering.

1. How has my relationship to death been altered because of Resurrection Sunday?

I need not move from enmity to friendship with death to make the basis NT assertion that death has lost its sting. This is not to say death causes no grief or that grief doesn’t sting … that’s a different issue. The sting, in Jewish context, was in the belief that death entailed either non-being or worse, a gloomy afterlife in sheol or hades—the place of the dead. More broadly, death’s sting is the fear or “death-anxiety” common to humanity. According to Heb. 2:14-15, the devil held us in bondage through our fear of death. But Christ has freed us from death and the fear of death (see also Jn. 14:1-6).

Though death remains an enemy, it is no longer an enemy I need to fear. This suggests to me that perhaps death in the NT is not synonymous with the (1) cause of death, (2) the experience of dying, (3) the moment of death or (4) the grieving process for survivors. All these realities remain grievous and most unwelcome, in need of God’s compassion, comfort and/or healing.

Rather, in the NT, death per se relates to the destiny of those who are dead. That is, death and “the grave” were synonymous. Thus, Christ has not only changed my relationship to death (freedom from fear) but fundamentally changed the nature of death itself.

In Part 2 of “Is Death our Friend?” we will examine how Christ and the NT as a whole treat this radical shift in the nature of death in two essential ways. Stay tuned!

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