Never See Death

John 8:48-59

Main Idea: Jesus promises his disciples that if they hold to his word they will never experience death.

1. What Does This Promise Mean?
2. Who Is This Promise For?
3. Why Should I Believe This Promise?

A fascinating story appeared in Time magazine a few years ago.

By day, Randolfe Wicker, 63, runs a lighting shop in New York City. But in his spare time, as spokesman for the Human Cloning Foundation, he is the face of cloning fervor in the U.S. “I took one step in this adventure, and it took over me like quicksand,” says Wicker. He is planning to have some of his skin cells stored for future cloning. “If I’m not cloned before I die, my estate will be set up so that I can be cloned after,” he says, admitting, however, that he hasn’t found a lawyer willing to help. “It’s hard to write a will with all these uncertainties,” he concedes. “A lot of lawyers will look at me crazy.”

As a gay man, Wicker has long been frustrated that he cannot readily have children of his own; as he gets older, his desire to reproduce grows stronger. He knows that a clone would not be a photocopy of him but talks about the traits the boy might possess: “He will like the color blue, Middle Eastern food and romantic Spanish music that’s out of fashion.” And then he hints at the heart of his motive. “I can thumb my nose at Mr. Death and say, ‘You might get me, but you’re not going to get all of me,’” he says. “The special formula that is me will live on into another lifetime. It’s a partial triumph over death. I would leave my imprint not in sand but in cement.” (Gibbs, “Baby, It’s You!”)

Because of death’s certainty, it’s natural to fear death. English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote, “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark” (The Essays, 343). Because of the fear of death, we hope for victory over death. We hope something will happen to keep the cold, dark clutches of death from overtaking us. Is there hope for immortality? Is there any way to triumph over death? Jesus makes a promise in verse 51 that anyone who keeps his word will never see death. To understand this promise made by Jesus, we need to answer a few questions.

What Does This Promise Mean?

Death is fundamentally separation. As I noted before, at death the spiritual part of man—his soul—is separated from the physical part of man—his body. We feel this separation when we attend a funeral. We walk into the room, greet the family who are mourning over the separation that has taken place between them and the one they love, and then we walk to the front of the room and look into the coffin. In that coffin we see a shell. Though the body is still with us, the person—the part of that person that really makes her who she is—is no longer there. It’s gone. Her soul has been separated from her body, and all that remains is an empty shell.

Where does that immaterial part of a person—the soul—go at death? If we’re being honest, we hope that it goes somewhere in some form, and something inside us says this life isn’t all there is. We know deep down that we’ll live on somewhere, somehow after this life. God has placed eternity in our hearts (Eccl 3:11). He has implanted the knowledge that there’s more than this life.

If physical death is the separation of the soul from the body, then spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God. Jesus talks a lot about spiritual life and death. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus told Nicodemus that every single man and woman needs to be born again (John 3:3). Nicodemus was understandably confused. “How can I be born when I’m old?” he asked. “Am I supposed to crawl back into my mother’s womb?” Of course not. Jesus was referring to spiritual birth. Nicodemus, like every other individual, needed to be given spiritual life. In other words, each one of us is spiritually dead. Because of our sin, we’ve been separated from God. We need something to happen so that we can be reunited or reconciled to God, so that we can have spiritual life.

Immediately after that conversation with Nicodemus, we find one of the most famous verses in the entire Bible: “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (3:16). The promise Jesus makes—“he will never see death” (8:51)—goes beyond physical death to spiritual death. Physical death pictures the far more terrifying reality of spiritual death. Our sin separates us from the sinless God of the universe. That separation is made permanent after physical death, when God, the just Judge, punishes that sin with eternal separation from him in the horrors of hell.

Understanding that reality makes the promise of Jesus even sweeter. We don’t have to remain spiritually dead, awaiting that day of judgment. Instead, we can be made alive and can look forward to eternal life with God in heaven forever. Jesus came to bring spiritual life to the spiritually dead. He came to remove the alienation that exists between God and us because of our sin and to reconcile us to God, promising us the joy of his presence forever.

In chapter 11 John records that Jesus attended a funeral. There Jesus expanded on the promise he makes here: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (11:25-26). Jesus promises, “Even if he dies, [he] will live.” Though we still experience physical death, we will not experience eternal, spiritual death.

When we think about the fear of death, we really fear two things: death’s uncertainty and its significance. When we receive the life that Jesus promises, the uncertainty is gone. We may not know when or how our physical death will take place, but we are certain about what will happen the moment it takes place. As one author wrote, “Death is only the introduction to the nearer presence of God” (Barclay, John, 2:38). For the Christian physical death is not a separation but a homecoming. Death means being ushered into the presence of Jesus. The significance of physical death has also been irrevocably altered. Before, it signified the eternal separation we would experience from God in conscious torment because of our sin, but not anymore. Those who’ve believed on Jesus have been given life that physical death cannot extinguish. Death has lost its finality. Nothing can sever the life-giving relationship we now enjoy with God.

Donald Barnhouse was the pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church when his wife died and left him with young daughters to raise alone. While driving to her funeral he realized that he had to say something to explain all of this to his girls, to somehow put in perspective for them something with which he himself was already struggling. They stopped at a traffic light while driving to the funeral. It was a bright day, and the sun was streaming into the car and warming it. A truck pulled up next to them, and the shadow that came with the truck darkened the inside of the car. He turned to his daughters and asked, “Would you rather be hit by the shadow or by the truck?” One of them responded, “Oh, Daddy, that’s a silly question! The shadow can’t hurt you. I would rather be hit by the shadow than by a truck.” He tried to explain to them that their mother had died, and it was as if she had been hit by a shadow. It was as if Jesus had stepped in the way in her place, and it was he who had been hit by the truck. He quoted the familiar words of Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Anderson, “Valley”).

That’s the promise Jesus makes. We who believe will never experience death, just its shadow. We will never be cut off from God. We will only be cut off from our physical bodies.

Who Is This Promise For?

This promise is conditional. It begins with the word if. Something must be done in order for this promise to apply to us. Jesus says in John 8:51, “If anyone keeps my word . . .” So this promise is only true for those who keep his word. To keep Jesus’s word means that we embrace and hold to what he says. We hold to the teaching of Jesus that apart from him we are lost, sinful, spiritually dead, and without hope. We must recognize the only remedy for our sin is to turn from that sin and to Jesus Christ as our Savior. To believe in him is to reject any and all attempts to reach God on our own and to trust singularly in his saving work on our behalf.

The beauty of this promise is it’s free and available to all men (v. 51). He said “anyone.” Jesus excludes no one from this offer of salvation. No one is excluded because of being too bad to be given eternal life through Jesus, and no one is included because of being good enough to earn eternal life apart from Jesus.

We each relate to God in one of two ways. While Jesus was on earth, he interacted with people from all different backgrounds, but the Gospel writers and Jesus himself lump them into these two broad categories. We could call them the sinners and the self-righteous.

The sinners were those who knew they were lost and cut off from God. They would be the nonreligious, the men and women who either didn’t care that they were sinners or thought they weren’t salvageable.

The self-righteous were those who thought their good behavior and good works earned favor with God. They kept from the “really bad sins” like immorality, stealing, and murder. On the outside they looked good. However, each good deed they did was their attempt to put God in their debt. With each righteous act, they grew more confident in their own efforts to please God.

Jesus told both groups the same thing: “You’re spiritually dead, and apart from me you can never experience spiritual life. However, if you turn from your sin and from your self-righteousness and place your faith in me alone, I will give you eternal life. You will never be cut off from God” (my paraphrase). In John 3 Jesus spoke one-on-one with a religious leader, and in chapter 4 he had a private conversation with an immoral outcast. As different as they were on the outside, they shared a common state: spiritual death, a common future: separation from God, and a common need: a Savior. Jesus gave them both the same message—the message he gives these Jews in chapter 8, and the message that applies to us today: believe on me and you will not see death.

Why Should I Believe This Promise?

You don’t believe everything you hear or read. What criteria do you use to determine what’s believable, to decide who’s trustworthy? A couple of criteria guide all of us. First are a person’s qualifications. What about them makes them trustworthy? Jesus lists his qualifications in verses 54-58. He’s the one and only Son of God who came down to this earth as a man to save mankind from the penalty that our sin demands. But he’s not just the Son of God; he’s God himself.

Abraham had been dead for nearly two thousand years, and Jesus claimed to exist prior to him. Jesus is not to be regarded as a good man or a moral teacher but as God in the flesh. Jesus demonstrates he is God by taking the divine name and claiming it as his own. In the Old Testament God revealed himself using the name “I AM” (Exod 3:14). Here Jesus takes that name to himself (John 8:58). Jesus is not a man God adopted. He himself is divine. Jesus is also the promised Savior (v. 56).

When God created the world, he created it perfect. Mankind was made to live in perfect harmony and communion with God. We were designed to worship and enjoy him in his presence forever. However, man sinned, and with that sin came the awful penalty of death—separation from God. In that moment when God revealed to the first humans the penalty for their sin, he also made a promise that one day he would send a Savior who would reconcile man to God, who would restore that broken relationship (Gen 3:15). A number of generations later, God promised Abraham that this Savior would come through his offspring and that through this child all of the families of the earth would be blessed (Gen 12:3). The rest of the Old Testament is tracing this lineage with anticipation for the fulfillment of this promise.

The New Testament begins with a record of births. From Abraham’s line of descendants, Jesus of Nazareth was born. But he was no ordinary baby. God had sent his own Son to take on human flesh and be born as a man. This was the fulfillment of God’s promise. The coming of Jesus as the Savior of mankind was what Abraham was rejoicing about. He believed God would fulfill his promise of a Savior who would reconcile sinners to a perfect God. We can believe Jesus’s promise because he is the Son of God who came to this world to bring life. His qualifications are impeccable.

A second reason we believe someone is because of their experience. If you’re scheduled to have surgery and are nervous about it, the best people to talk to are a doctor (because of his qualifications) or a patient who’s successfully gone through the procedure (because of his experience). Best of all would be a doctor who had the surgery successfully performed on himself. We not only believe Jesus’s promise of victory over death because of who he is but also because of what he’s done.

Sadly the religious leaders rejected Jesus Christ and attempted to kill him (John 8:59). Though this attempt failed they would later succeed. The religious leaders would turn Jesus over to the Romans to die the cruel death of a criminal. He was beaten, mocked, tortured, and then stretched out to hang on a cross until dead in chapter 19. If the story ended there, we’d have no reason to believe his promise. But in chapter 20 a woman visits his tomb and finds it empty. She weeps, thinking his body has been stolen. All of a sudden, Jesus, resurrected from the dead, appears to her. He’s no longer dead; he’s alive!

We believe his promise of victory over death because he has experienced it. He has triumphed over death—both physical and spiritual—and now he stands ready to allow us to experience the same victory. If we turn from our sin and trust in him as our Savior, then we too can be assured that death will not conquer us because Jesus has conquered death. The separation from God that our sin demanded was taken by Jesus upon himself so that we don’t have to bear it, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ has left death powerless. “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor 15:54). Because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, we have nothing to fear—we will never see death. His death in our place has freed us from the paralyzing fear of physical death. The beautiful lyrics penned by Henri Malan, a nineteenth-century Swiss pastor and hymn writer, capture the confident hope available to every Christian.

It is not death to die—to leave this weary road,

and join the saints who dwell on high who’ve found their home with God.

It is not death to close the eyes long dimmed by tears,

and wake in joy before Your throne delivered from our fears.

It is not death to fling aside this earthly dust

and rise with strong and noble wing to live among the just.

It is not death to hear the key unlock the door

that sets us free from mortal years to praise You evermore.

O Jesus, conquering the grave

Your precious blood has power to save.

Those who trust in You will in Your mercy find

that it is not death to die.

Reflect and Discuss

1. What does Jesus’s promise mean?
2. How will those who keep Jesus’s word never experience death?
3. What is death?
4. Where does the soul go at death?
5. What does Ecclesiastes 3:11 teach us about man’s understanding of life?
6. How does the gospel change the significance of physical death?
7. Who will receive the promise Jesus makes in this passage?
8. How is keeping Jesus’s word different from the Pharisees’ attempts to keep the law of Moses?
9. How is Jesus’s promise available to all men? Does this conflict with Jesus’s teaching on election in chapter 6?
10. Why should you believe Jesus’s promise?