The Reward For The Righteous (2): The Christian Never Dies!

The Bible says in 1st John 8:51 -- "Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep my saying, he shall never see death." 11:25, 26 -- "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?"

What Jesus means here is not that the believer shall not pass through the experience that we call death, but that in reality it is not death, at least, not in the sense in which it is death to the unbeliever. Jesus has taken the sting out of death. How sharply the contrast between death and the experience through which the believer passes is presented in 1 Thess.4:13, 14 -- "But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleeps in Jesus will God bring with him." Jesus "died" -- He tasted the awfulness of death; the believer in Him "falls asleep." Cf. John 11:11 -- "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth."

Furthermore, we have no ground in these words for the modern doctrine of soul-sleeping. Christ did not mean to say that the soul is unconscious between the time of death and the resurrection. For, when the disciples did not understand His figurative language; He told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead" (11:11-15). What Jesus meant was that death is something like that which takes place when we go to sleep. What takes place when we go to sleep? Surely the current of life does not cease, but flows on, and when we awake we feel better and stronger than before. There is a shutting out of all the scenes of the world and time. Just so it is in the case of the believer's death. Three ideas are contained in the word "sleep": continued existence, -- for the mind is active even though the body is still; repose -- we lose our hold on and forget the things of the world; wakening -- we always think of sleep as followed by awakening.

The word “see” in John 8:51 means that the believer shall not gaze at death protractedly, steadily, exhaustively. Death is not the objective of his gaze. The believer's outlook is that of life not death. The death of the body is to be reckoned no more as death than the life of the body is life (1 Tim.5:6). The believer's back is turned upon death; he faces and gazes upon life. The temporary separation of the soul and body does not even interrupt, much less impair, the eternal life given by Jesus.