Live momento mori - remembering that you'll die - but also view death as victory.
1 Corinthians 15:50-57 (NIV)
50 I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54 When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
55 “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Listen to passage & devotional:
Belgic Confession of Faith, Article 37: The Last Judgment (Part 1)
Finally we believe,
according to God’s Word,
that when the time appointed by the Lord is come
(which is unknown to all creatures)
and the number of the elect is complete,
our Lord Jesus Christ will come from heaven,
bodily and visibly,
as he ascended,
with great glory and majesty,
to declare himself the judge
of the living and the dead.
He will burn this old world,
in fire and flame,
in order to cleanse it.
Then all human creatures will appear in person
before that great judge—
men, women, and children,
who have lived from the beginning until the end
of the world.
They will be summoned there
by the voice of the archangel
and by the sound of the divine trumpet.
For all those who died before that time
will be raised from the earth,
their spirits being joined and united
with their own bodies
in which they lived.
And as for those who are still alive,
they will not die like the others
but will be changed “in the twinkling of an eye”
from “corruptible to incorruptible.”
Summary
It's like oil and water, Paul writes. Just as the two liquids are wholly incompatible with one another, so it is between this present reality and the coming Kingdom of God. Perishable flesh and blood cannot inherit that which is imperishable.
In order for you to be made compatible with God's eternal Kingdom, you need to be changed, and here we read that you'll experience that change in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye when the final trumpet sounds (the heavenly trumpet we read about yesterday).
Paul compares this change you'll experience - going from that which is perishable to imperishable - as like changing your clothes, a metaphor he also uses to describe peeling away the stink of sin from our lives. But whereas getting rid of our old filthy sinful rags is a lifelong process, this final wardrobe change will be instantaneous.
It's at that final trumpet that the dead will be raised imperishable. In this way, death is the gateway to eternal life! That's why Paul can echo the prophet Isaiah in exclaiming that death has been swallowed up in victory!
Dig Deeper
Just like it does with nearly every other doctrine, the Bible holds the idea of death in tension. On one hand, death is the ugliest evidence of the curse that resulted from man's fall into sin. For most people, there's nothing more painful or traumatic to experience than the death of someone close to them.
But on the other hand, death is not something for the Christian to fear. There will be some who, as Paul puts it, will not sleep. That is, there will be some Christians who are living and will hear the awesome sound of the trumpet sounding from heaven announcing the end of all things perishable. But as a percentage of the whole, this group of people will be small in number.
Most Christians will have died prior to that loud command coming down from heaven, as Paul described it yesterday in 1 Thessalonians 4. Perhaps we will be the generation that experiences this change in the twinkling of an eye, but it's probably more likely that you and those you love will die, as has everyone who has come before us.
So live momento mori - remembering that you will die. Understanding this reality positively changes your perspective while you still live, especially for those of us in Christ who confess both with Paul and the prophet Hosea, Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?
It's through death that God gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: Our Father, who gives us victory over death;
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that Christ does return soon to change us from perishable to imperishable, but also for the confidence to face death victoriously if the Lord tarries;
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
Read the New Testament in a year! Today: Revelation 12
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