The Meaning of Life and Death in the Bible

Themes of life and death dominate the pages of the Old and New Testaments.  Threads of these concepts, as well as wholly woven sheets of these threads, are commonplace throughout the entire bible. Unfortunately, we may not be thinking as deeply about these opposing terms as we ought. We tend to think of death as the cessation of biology. We tend to think of life as a heart beat, brain waves, and body temperature. These ways of thinking about those notions are true, but they are not complete. 

There are people in hospitals right now who are kept “alive” by machines, but who are not really alive. There are men and women who walk our streets in stupors so abysmal that they are more like undead zombies than living human beings. They are separated from true love because they have abandoned their families, their friends, and truth. They have traded those things for ashes and pain because they have mistaken them for fire and bliss. They are altogether alone, and what quality of life they have comes in the briefest pleasures of their next deadening dose. Many of them will be every bit as biologically dead as they are undead before you finish reading this piece. Then, there are people on their death beds in hospitals at this very moment who are surrounded by loving friends and family. Both they and their loved ones are anticipating death with a strange mixture of joy and sadness, excitement, wonder, sorrow, and peace. Those waiting “to die” are more alive than they have ever been, and soon will be more alive than any of us can comprehend. There are yet others right now walking the streets of cities hostile and foreign to them. They are dead men walking and they know it. They are taking a message of life to those who have been deafened to it by the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:3-6). Yet the men carrying that message are brimming with life, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control and supernatural courage. They are light in a dark world and they are dead to sin because they have been made alive to the highest possible good (Ephesians 2:1-10). Some of them, too, will be biologically dead before you finish reading this piece, but they are already more eternally alive than most people living only in the world.

Life does not end because biology stops. It ends because the person who holds even the smallest spark of it becomes separated from the goodness of God. The disobedience of Adam brought sin into the world, and sin brought death (Romans 5:12). The sin of Adam’s disobedience robbed all men of the life that flows from a relationship with God. No longer right with God, men pursued things that were not good, so powers that were not good flowed to them, flowed through them, and flowed from them. But unlike Adam, the obedience of one man, Jesus Christ, made many right with God. Then the goodness of God, like a powerful first magnitude spring flowed to them, through them, and from them, giving them and those around them, a quality of life marked by love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, and self-control. No longer were they undead zombies in a blind stupor, but living men alive to goodness and standing in the light (Romans 5:21, John 4:14). Real life begins when you know the true life-giver.