392: Great Enemy One: Death | Tim Henderson

One of my favorite things every Sunday in the second service is that horde of children that come stampeding down the ramp here to get ready to go, and we get a similar version of that after the first service when all the kids run across. They caught on that we've had donut holes the last couple weeks over in the fellowship hall. Poor Barb just about got trampled to death. But today the joke was on them because we didn't have any donut holes. Just a bunch of mournful kids staring blank faced at bagels. Like, what's a bagel? So fun. But we do have a marvelous time hanging out with each other after the service, even though there are no doughnut holes, but you should still come. It's gonna be a good time.

Death and Loss

My dad died on 11/18/2013. So it's been ten years. Everything's fine. But those last few months of his life were brutal, as it often is. He had prostate cancer years earlier, which was treated and the treatment held until it didn't, and eventually the prostate cancer metastasized into his bones. And if you know anything about bone cancer, it's extremely painful. It certainly was for him. We think that he knew about this for some time. We are certain that he didn't tell us, including my mom, until the very end. And by the time that we caught on, the cancer had spread significantly. It was severely advanced, and there was nothing that could be done. And those last days were just really, really terrible.

My wife's father, Jack, he died just about two months ago. He'd had dementia for a number of years, and that was pretty miserable and difficult. And when he died, it was its own specialized version of pain for both of our families.

When my dad died, when Kelly's dad died, it just brings home for you the reality that we're all dying.

When I remember when my dad was dying and when we were learning that he knew this—or almost certainly knew this—but didn't tell us, I remember being curious: was he not telling us this as an act of kindness to prevent us from some realization that, of course, we were gonna come to have anyway, or was he just living out his own particular superpower of living in denial?

My dad—I may have told you this story before—when he was a little boy, maybe six, and his sister Heather was about three. They were playing at a lake. He wanted to come home, she didn't want to come home. He went home to get his dad to get his sister. His dad was passed out drunk, and by the time they made it back to the lake, Heather was under the surface. And my dad lived his whole life with a really advanced ability to just deny reality, and that's a useful skill in certain circumstances, but it can outlive its usefulness. But death, I think, had a shadow over his whole life and even until his own death.

But in any case, when the house fell, it fell with a great crash, and those days were really difficult.

My father has died. Kelly's father has died. Several of our best friends' parents have died just in the last few weeks. Neil's mom just died. Another friend, Kelly Scott, his dad died. Kelly's best friend Sharon, her father just died about three weeks ago. A mentor of mine just had a heart attack and died. There's just this string of this, and all of it reminds me of something that Tim Keller said. And by the way, he recently died. He said, "One thing I can tell you for certain is there is a lot of death in your future. Your own, but if you live for a long time, the death of many others."

As I run through that list of all these people, it's probably the case that many of you are thinking about somebody that you love who has recently died, or possibly you're even beginning to churn on your own pending death, which is certainly coming.

Ecclesiastes and the Reality of Life

Last week, we kicked off our series on Ecclesiastes. I hope that you are here with us. I think it was a really important time as you began to look at this enigmatic but incredibly insightful book in the wisdom literature called Ecclesiastes. The wisdom literature is a really important part of the scriptures, but it's hard to make sense of. It speaks about things in some different ways. Psalms and Proverbs use a lot of idealized language that might be hard to justify with some of your experiences. The teacher of Ecclesiastes comes in on the exact opposite side of the spectrum, and he takes this very raw, very candid, very pull-no-punches view of life, and he says over and over and over and over that under the sun, everything is meaningless. It's vain. It's futile.

You guys remember the Hebrew word that he uses to describe the very nature of life? Remember this? Hevel. Everything is hevel. If all that we can see is all that there is, life is hevel.

Now if you missed that talk, if you weren't here last week, I'd love to invite you to go back and either watch it or listen to it. This QR code will take you to the audio that's available right now. You can also go to YouTube and look up Church of the Holy Spirit in Roanoke, and then find the video of last week's talk. I think it just says Ecclesiastes introduction or something like that. If you want to watch it or hear it, I hope that you will, because everything that we said last week, I'm gonna want to say again every week. But we don't have time to say it again every week. I'd love you to know these things.

One thing I can't resist reviewing is the fact that he explains life is hevel because of essentially three different enemies. What we're gonna do for the next three weeks is look at each one of these primary enemies that the teacher of Ecclesiastes says makes life hevel—meaningless, vain, futile. As we walk through Ecclesiastes all summer, we're not gonna do it like a normal person, going chapter one, then chapter two, then chapter three. The reason is, Ecclesiastes is very stream of consciousness. The teacher is gonna repeatedly say things like, "then my mind turned to," "then I reflected on," "then my thoughts were drawn away to this." You're basically gonna follow him on this journey, trying to make sense of life that is just so full of pain. He bounces around—he'll hit a topic, that'll remind him of something else, he'll talk about that, then he'll return back to the previous thing. All of his thoughts are braided throughout the whole book, and we're gonna unbraid it. Instead of going chapter by chapter, we're gonna go strand by strand.

We're gonna talk about these first three enemies, and then we'll talk about his recommendations, strategies, and all these other things that are yet to come. The first great enemy that he talks about is death, and so today is gonna be about death. That's a dicey thing to talk about under any circumstances. This is particularly dicey because I don't get to say everything that the Bible says about death, and I don't get to say everything that I would like to say about death. I really don't get to say everything that I suspect some of you might find comfort in as we talk about death. Instead, my job is to tell you what Ecclesiastes says about death, but to do so in a way that's considerate of the fact that this is often a very tender spot.

He talks about death so many times—it's like this sea serpent that keeps coming up throughout the whole book. But his biggest treatise is in chapter nine. So that's where we're gonna be. If you have your Bible, you can turn to chapter nine. We're gonna look at the passage that Bob just read to us. But as you read through Ecclesiastes this summer, just notice how many times this theme will reemerge.

Death: The Primary Enemy

Here's what he says in chapter nine:

I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God's hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits him. All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with the good man, so with the sinner. As it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun. The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil, and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope. Even a live dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, their jealousy have long since vanished. Never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 9:1-6

So there are about seven or eight things that the teacher of Ecclesiastes hates about death. He talks about them in multiple chapters throughout the book. Here in chapter nine, there are three, four, five particular things that he picks out. I'm not honestly sure if the things that trouble him about death are the same things that trouble you about death. Perhaps they are. What I think is interesting is what he skips over—what he doesn't really focus on. I don't honestly think that's what I am most troubled about. When I think about death, I don't think that much about my own death.

Perhaps I will as I get sicker or older, what I tend to think about is people that I miss, that death in my direct experience is the loss of an opportunity for continued relationship with somebody that I love. I miss my dad. Perhaps you miss your son, or your wife, or your best friend. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes has a little bit of a different focus, so we're gonna chase his thoughts on what he's saying.

The thing that he hates most of all just dominated the beginning of that chapter nine section. The thing he hates most of all about death is that it is the common destiny. Just listen to what he's gonna say here, that it happens to everybody and it really chafes him.

If you go back to nine two, all share a common destiny. The righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean, the unclean, those who offer sacrifices, those who do not. As it is with a good man, so with the sinner. As it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun. The same destiny overtakes all. — Ecclesiastes 9:2

I don't know if it's obvious what he means by that. I don't think he's using that as sometimes it might even be a comfort, like, hey, man. It's just everybody. Like, just strap in. I think he sees in this commonness an injustice that he's disappointed there is no differentiation. I think what he means is that some people ought to die, and maybe some people ought not. I suspect he would put himself in the latter category. But nevertheless, it doesn't really matter if you were good or bad, common destiny, and that is, as he would say over and over again, heave. There's no distinction. I think he just thinks that death is the great equalizer, and it equalizes things that are not equal, and it just drives him nuts.

Second thing he hates: We will all be forgotten

Listen to how this goes.

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward. And even the memory of them is forgotten. — Ecclesiastes 9:5

So I wanna do a quick experiment with you. Everyone in this room has two parents, four grandparents, and eight great grandparents. And I'm curious if you know who they are. Could you give me the first and last name of any one of your eight great grandparents? If so, would you stand up?

The best that I can do is one, and her name is Grammy D, and that's all I got. Alright, if you only know one, if you're like me or even half like me, sit down and stay up if you have two. You may know two or more. Can you name two or more of your great grandparents? You're still staying strong. How about this, sit down if it's only two, and stay up for three. Sit down for three, stay up for four. Sit down for four, stay up for five. Do we have six? Anybody stay up if you still have six? Can anybody go seven? Seven? Can you do all eight? Yeah. But not off the top of your head? Then you don't know. You just wrote it down, and if we included the things that I wrote down, that doesn't count.

Listen. Here's the thing. Let's just say that you did know all eight. All you know is their first name and their last name. If all that somebody knew about you was your name, would you feel like they knew you? They wouldn't know what makes you tick, what you love, what your career involved, who you love, like, all of those things.

Here's the point. The eight people without whom you couldn't exist, you don't know who they are, and more to the point, you don't care. Does anybody like, oh, great. I'm gonna run home and go look this up? Nobody really cares. And here's the thing, your great grandchildren, they're not gonna care either. You're going to be forgotten. All that I mean, I literally got one and it's Grammy D, and all I know about her is she was super, super, super old, and I had to go visit her in the nursing home, and I didn't like it very much. That's the whole thing. We will be them. He's right. Even the memory of us will be forgotten. And he says that is heave, at least under the sun.

Third thing: We will no longer participate in earthly activities

Look at verse six.

Never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 9:6

And he says a little later in verse ten,

In the grave where you are going, there is neither working, nor planning, nor knowledge, nor wisdom. — Ecclesiastes 9:10

He sees death, you guys—this is the vacancy as an absence, as a nothingness. You lose out on everything, you miss everything. All the things that made life sweet are lost into an undifferentiated mass, an end where the things that seem so important to you, including your very self, are forgotten.

So the question is: Is he right? Is the teacher of Ecclesiastes right in these assertions? And the answer is, yeah. He is under the sun. And the framing of this book, yeah, everyone dies, nobody gets out alive. And you will be forgotten, even by your own great grandchildren. And the bustle of this world will continue without you. All of it's true.

But as you read through Ecclesiastes this summer, never lose sight of the phrase under the sun, and never forget that we who are in Christ do not live merely under the sun, and we do not die merely under the sun.

The Bridge Between Testaments

One funny thing about Ecclesiastes is there are no direct citations of Ecclesiastes in the New Testament. It never gets quoted. But it is alluded to multiple times. Probably the clearest allusion is in Romans 3. If you read through Romans 3 and read through Ecclesiastes, you should find like an "Oh, that's a pretty tight phrase—Paul was quoting Ecclesiastes."

But the grandest and the most overarching allusion to Ecclesiastes comes in Romans chapter 8. To understand it, you gotta know a little bit about the way the Bible was translated through time.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew—overwhelmingly Hebrew, with a little bit in Aramaic. And the New Testament was written in Greek. So remember our word, right? What's our favorite word in Ecclesiastes? Hevel, hevel, hevel, hevel. Okay? So that word, hevel, it can't possibly exist in the New Testament because hevel is a Hebrew word, and there are no Hebrew words in the Greek New Testament.

But there is a bridge: the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. So what scholars will do is they'll see: what was the Greek equivalent of this Hebrew term? And where do those get used? And that's how we can best see which specific terminology from the Old Testament survives into the New.

So listen to this. This is Romans 8:18:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. — Romans 8:18-21

That Greek word behind "frustration"—that is the translation of the word hevel. When Paul uses the word "frustration" right there, he is saying hevel. He's ripping this off. It is a hat tip to Ecclesiastes, and he's essentially saying that creation was subjected to hevel, and in Christ, God is liberating the world from hevel.

Not only that, as he continues, listen to this—this is so ecclesiastical, it's ridiculous. In verse 22, he says:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. — Romans 8:22

The language of Ecclesiastes: everything is meaningless. That's what he's saying. He is taking this whole thesis of Ecclesiastes and saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. We live here. We walk through this every day."

But listen, verse 23:

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. — Romans 8:23

That line—the redemption of our bodies—is talking about the renewal of our dead bodies. The day is coming that the dead in Christ will rise. We will not stay dead forever. One of the most central promises of the gospel is that if we are united with Christ in his death, we will be united with him in his life. All that was true of him will become true of us. He is the first fruits. He was raised from the dead, and so we will be raised from the dead. And the heaviness of death will be unmade. That is what Paul is saying.

The place where he primarily unpacks it is 1 Corinthians 15. If you're curious about what we know about our resurrection, there's a myth—a false idea that persists in Christianity: that the gospel is that when you die, you go to heaven and live happily ever after. That is nonsense.

We are not looking forward to going to heaven when we die, although we will. It's a blip. It's a moment. What we're looking forward to is the resurrection from the dead when Christ returns and raises the dead and restores all things. That is the good stuff. And First Corinthians 15 is about the good stuff. There's a whole bunch he says in there. We won't unpack it, but at the very end, he just mocks death.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. — 1 Corinthians 15:55, 57

Death had won every contest for all of human history until it met Jesus. And then when Jesus defeated death, he didn't just defeat it for himself, but he defeated it for us. Think about Jesus' total domination over death, and then lay it back over these three things that the teacher of Ecclesiastes hates.

First thing that he hates is that death is just a vacant grave. There's no activity. All is lost. Here's the question: Will we who are in Christ miss out on life? Not at all. Not even close.

When those who are in Christ die, they will take hold of the life that is truly life. — 1 Timothy 6:19

It gets better, not worse. We are not facing some cold dead eternity. We are facing warmth and welcome of relationship and love and life.

This is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. — John 17:3

Ecclesiastes says that all meaningful distinctions are obliterated, that we're driving towards a common destiny. Will we be in some undifferentiated mass of dead humanity with no distinction between the righteous and the wicked? My goodness, no. Not even close. The chasm between those who have died in Christ and those who die apart from his grace literally could not possibly be more severely, vastly divergent.

Come, you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. And to others, depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. — Matthew 25:34, 41

Jesus is laying out everlasting life and irreversible destruction. This distinction could not be any greater. Friends, the same fate does not await us all.

His third lament is that we will just be forgotten. Will those who are in Christ be forgotten forever? No. Under the sun? Yes. But we don't live under the sun, and we don't die under the sun. Our lives go far beyond it.

When Jesus returns to raise the dead and restore all things, he will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Christ. — 1 Thessalonians 4:14

It never describes us as dying. It only ever says we fall asleep because those who sleep awake. There will be reunion and relationship and love and community for all eternity. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

An Invitation

Some of you, I suspect, have a view of death that is essentially like that of Ecclesiastes, that all you can see is under the sun. It might be that you're trapped in grief over someone who died, or maybe you're just fearing your own death. I would love to invite you out of that and commend to you the one who conquered death on your behalf.

If someone that you love has died in Christ, they are happier than you are. You will see them again. And when we are all raised from the dead, their particularity, their individuality will be brighter than it's ever been.

Since the children have flesh and blood, Jesus shared in their humanity, so that by his death, he might destroy 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

Because you don't need to fear death anymore—not the death of those that you love and not your own. The bee will continue to buzz, but it has lost its sting for Jesus defeated death.

We'd love to invite you today. Maybe this has particular relevance for you as you are facing your own death or grieving the death of another. This would be a good day to talk to him about that. Jesus loves to intercede for us. He loves to commune with us. You can come down on these curved rails and meet with him and just talk to him about what you've been fearing, but also ask him to give you the grace to step away from being afraid of death.

For Christians, the whole game is different. And if you want to talk to somebody, we'll have people at the straight rails, and they would love to be with you as you process some of that, or honestly, anything at all. Whatever might be on your heart today, it's our pleasure to serve you and love you and to enter into it with you.

We pray for us. Lord, who is like you that has already defeated death? We know that we will rise, but it's pretty impressive that you went first.

And we ask you, Lord, would you hurry the day that you'll finally wipe every tear from our eyes and tell us face to face that there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

For the old order of things has passed away. — Revelation 21:4

Lord, we long to see you. We grow weary and impatient as we wait for you. Come soon. We love you. Amen.