All Their Lives

"The church has spent a lot of energy telling people not to be afraid of death. Hebrews tells the truth first."

Years ago, a professor put an essay in my hands that changed the way I think about death. It was Oscar Cullmann's 1955 Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? — and the heart of it was a single contrast.

Socrates, facing execution, sits with his disciples in sublime composure and discourses on the immortality of the soul. He drinks the hemlock calmly. Death, for him, is a friend. The body is a prison, and death is the door out. Why would you fear that?

Jesus, facing the cross, trembles. He sweats. He begs his Father to take the cup. The writer of Hebrews goes even further than the Gospels — he says Jesus offered prayers with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him. There is nothing composed about it.

The difference is not courage versus cowardice. The difference is theology. Socrates welcomed death because he believed the body was evil and the soul needed to escape it. Jesus wept because he knew that life is God's first gift — and death is the contradiction of everything God made and called good.

Naming the fact of death is one thing. Naming what it does to us while we're still living is another.

The church has spent a lot of energy telling people not to be afraid of death. Hebrews tells the truth first:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14–15)

Look at what this passage does. It begins with the incarnation — and not as an abstraction. Christ shared in flesh and blood deliberately. He entered mortality on purpose, specifically so that he could die. The incarnation and the crucifixion are connected here. He took on a body so he could break death from the inside.

And notice whose domain death belongs to. The devil holds the power of death. Not God. Death is not part of God's design. It is the enemy's answer to God's gift of life. The reason death feels so wrong is because it is wrong. It was never God's.

Then the passage names what the fear of death does to us, and the word it chooses is not discomfort. Not anxiety. The word is slavery. Something that owns us, that we live inside of, that shapes what we do and don't do — all their lives. Through the whole of living.

And we see it everywhere. We have built an entire vocabulary of avoidance — "passed away," "lost," "no longer with us" — because we cannot bring ourselves to say the word dead. We have constructed entire industries around softening the reality. We avoid the doctor when we probably shouldn't. The will never gets written. We change the subject when someone brings it up at the dinner table. We spend enormous amounts of money trying to look younger than we are.

We have built an entire culture designed to help us not think about death. And it isn't working.

But here is where I want to be careful, because the fear itself is not the problem. Fear of death is natural. It is human. God made us with an instinct to survive, to protect ourselves, to flinch when the danger is real. Jesus himself feared death — and if the Son of God trembled in the garden, we should stop pretending that fear is faithlessness.

A man in my congregation named Steven recently climbed a thirty-foot ladder, leaned it against the pitched ceiling of our sanctuary, and changed the fuses on our speakers while the rest of us stood below trying not to watch. I positioned myself directly underneath him on the theory that if he fell, he'd take me with him — because I could not bear the thought of losing a church member in my own sanctuary.

Steven didn't seem afraid. But he was careful, deliberate, aware that he was in a dangerous position. He was also assured. He'd done this kind of work before. He trusted his experience, his hands, his ability to manage the risk. The fear made him careful. The assurance kept him climbing. Both were working at the same time. If he didn't have the fear, he'd have been reckless.

That's the Christian posture toward death. Not the absence of fear. Fear and assurance, held together.

And this is where the church has done itself a disservice. We have so heavily emphasized Christ's victory over sin that we have quietly forgotten the other half of the New Testament's proclamation. Christ defeated sin and death. Paul pairs them as a single regime — Romans 5–6 links sin and death, Romans 6:23 makes death the wages of sin, 1 Corinthians 15:54–56 connects the sting of death to sin. The writer of Hebrews holds them together here. The resurrection is not a footnote to the atonement — it is the completion of it.

But because we dropped the death half, we are ill-prepared when death arrives. We have a robust theology for guilt and almost no theology for mortality. We know what to do with "I have sinned." We do not know what to do with "I am going to die."

We have been preaching half a victory.

But the full victory is there, and it has always been there. Christ took on flesh, entered the domain of death, and broke its power — not just the power of sin, but the power of death itself. And for those who are in Christ, death is real. It is terrible. The fear of it is natural and human. But death does not get the last word. All who have died in Christ will be raised. We have the assurance of the resurrection and life with God in eternity.

The devil's answer to God's gift of life was death. But the devil does not get the final say.