Bible Text: John 8:42-59 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Lent 2021 | Whoever keeps my Word will never see death. This is the assertion of the Lord Jesus. The Greek is more elaborate and expressive and beautiful, Whoever guards my Word will by no means see death for ever. That’s what it says. It’s a powerful, dogmatic assertion, spoken with all confidence. And we’re going to deal with this assertion in three ways today. First, we’re going to talk about what it means. Second, we’re going to talk about why people reject it. And finally we’re going to talk about what it means that we believe it.
First, the good Lutheran question: What does this mean? It clearly doesn’t mean that if you believe Jesus’ Word you will never die a physical death. The Jews are quick to point this obvious fact out as they mock Jesus. Abraham died. The prophets died. And besides that, so far, since Jesus spoke these words, everyone in the history of the world who has believed in Jesus has died. Of course. But Jesus speaks of death differently from us. Because He thinks of life differently. And we need to understand this. He says to the Jews that they can’t understand it, because they’re from the earth and they think in earthly ways. But we, we are born of God, we’re baptized, we believe Jesus’ words, we are the sheep who listen to the voice of the good shepherd, we have the heavenly, divine perspective.
Life is fellowship with God. Life is not eking out a miserable existence serving our own selfish desires. That’s not life, not the way God speaks of life. When God told Adam that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would die that very day, he meant it quite literally, not simply that Adam’s heart would eventually fail some day and he would return to the dust 900 years later, but that Adam would die that day, because he would cut himself off from God. That’s death. Because life is life with God. God is life. So when Jesus promises life, He isn’t simply promising an eternal existence, the medical phenomenon of a heart beating and synapses firing in the brain, He’s promising life with Him, with sin erased, with love and knowledge of the Holy Trinity restored. As we sing, “We thank you Christ new life is ours, new light, new hope, new strength, new powers.” This is the Christian life. It’s so simple it’s almost a tautology, a truism. Keeping Jesus’ Word is life. It’s the definition of life. It’s to stand before God without fear and claim Him as our Father with total confidence because His Son, who is the great I AM, not simply the Son of God, but the eternal Son of the Father, YHWH himself, has become our Brother, has loved where we failed to love, has rescued us from death precisely by rescuing us from the sin that darkens our minds and turns our hearts away from God, cleansing us from it by His precious blood, suffering in our place the wrath of God against us, forsaken by His Father, so that we can be united again to Him by His Spirit. This is life.
So when Jesus says, Whoever keeps my word, he will by no means see death for ever, he is very literally telling you who trust in Him that you will never see death. You will never be separated from God. How could you possibly be forsaken by Him when you confess your sin and find your forgiveness in the blood of your Lord? How could you possibly be separated from Him when you call on Him as Father and He hears your prayers for the sake of His Son? How could you be forsaken by Him whose Spirit literally lives in you and gives you the power to fight sin in your daily life and confess your Lord and suffer while praying Thy will be done? How could you be without Jesus when He feeds you with His own body and blood and has died and risen to tell you that He is with you always? And this life, this communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this knowing the holy Trinity, this love and trust in God, this is the life that never ends.
In fact, if anything, what the world calls death, physical death, will only give us this life more fully. We live it now only dimly, but in the resurrection we will know as we have been known. This is why the Christian can have complete, utter confidence that we will never die. Our life is Jesus. And Jesus lives, having died for us. This is why we can with all seriousness, even while enjoying the Christian life God gives us on this earth, we can with all seriousness look forward to dying a Christian death, so that we can awake in Christ’s likeness and see our Lord in His glory. This is why St. Paul can say, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain. Our spirit is yearning within us to have the life fully that we live now by faith and so our spirit prays by the power of the Holy Spirt, Come Lord Jesus, come quickly. And we’re content, more than content, that He answers that prayer by coming to us in His body and blood, and forgiving us, and teaching us, and leading us on this earth, but in the end our prayer is that He come and we see His glorious face. This is life. Keeping Jesus’ word. And so we will by no means see death for ever.
Next, the world’s reaction to all this. Why do they reject Jesus? This is what we see in our Gospel. The Jews mock Jesus. And then they get angry and try to kill Him. They mock what they don’t understand. Because sin has darkened their minds. We always have to remember this. Sin makes us stupid. We see this in our lives all the time. The old antidrug commercial had a kid saying, when I grow up I want to be a druggie. And that’s irony of course. Obviously, no kid dreams of being a druggy when he grows up. It’s a miserable existence. He dreams of becoming a firefighter or a teacher or an architect. Yet people still become druggies. No one dreams of growing up and getting married only to get divorced. That’s silly. That’s painful. But divorce still comes. And day after day we make bad decisions, we choose to say things or do things or dwell on things that only make life hard. It’s a daily repeat of the garden. Why did Adam eat that fruit? Well, we ask the same questions of ourselves. Why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I let myself think that?
But what we see in our Gospel is the root of all of it. It’s not simply a moral stupidity, making the wrong choices, it’s a theological one. Sin makes people not understand God. The Jews in our Gospel refuse to learn who God is and who we are in relation to him. And when Jesus tells them plainly that He is the I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of creation, they get angry. And so it happens today. People throw away life, real life, life lived in communion with the real God, as we were created to be, and they dream up another god and another way to him. The Jews thought they knew God because they were blood descendants of Abraham, they were God’s chosen, and they kept a few rules, lived decent lives. Many an American thinks the same, that he knows God because he’s patriotic and claims George Washington as founding father and hasn’t done anything too heinous in his life. Meanwhile the liberal dreams up a god who justifies and even encourages all manner of carnal sin and perversity and champions equality enforced at all costs. There are a million different gods and religions that pop up out of our sinful minds, all of them designed to make us look good, all of them simply wrong, all of them hostile to the Lord Jesus and the life He gives.
What’s amazing is that Jesus is actually sympathetic with our silliness. He knows what sin has done to us, how it’s made us not understand the words of the God who made us. So He says to the Jews, right before our Gospel lesson, When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I AM. That is, He understands they don’t believe, they can’t believe, they don’t get how this Man could possibly claim to give eternal life, that there is no way to the Father except by Him, they don’t even get what life is. But when He dies on the cross, when they lift Him up, and the Son suffers for their sins to reconcile them to His Father, when He rises from the dead and offers peace by His wounds and gives the Holy Spirit, then they will know that He is God, the great I AM.
And this gets us to the third point. What does this look like for us, to keep the Word of Jesus and so never see death? It means to learn not to judge things from our own understanding. Not our lives, not death, not God. We’ll only mess it up, think death is life and life is death and imagine a god who doesn’t exist. The name for this Sunday is Judica. It means judge! It’s a command, a plea to Jesus, that he alone would judge. And when you let Jesus do the judging, let Him do the teaching, you will find yourself always pointed to His cross. Luther said it well, the cross is all our theology. There we see how far our sins removed us from our God, that God Himself would have to suffer their punishment, that a murderer would be saved, and the prince of life slayed. That this is the cost of our reconciliation with God. That no work of ours could ever accomplish this, no tears, no trying, no nothing, but the blood of God was required. And God spilt it. And more than this that the Father offered it, commanded it, and the Son willingly, happily obeyed, out of love for His Father and for you, whom He dearly wants as brothers and sisters, to enjoy the life He has lived forever with the Father and the Spirit.
Abraham simply obeyed God’s command. He didn’t understand it. He couldn’t. Why would God tell me to slay my own son? But he let God do the judging. And in the end, God saved Isaac from death by substituting a ram. And then Abraham understood all. And He rejoiced to see Jesus’ day. We’re not always going to know all the whys and the hows in this life. Why the cancer, why the death, why the family trouble, why the loneliness, why my stupid sinful mistakes, but what will make sense of it all, what will not only make sense of life, but give true life and comfort and peace with God is to look always to the cross, where God substitutes the Lamb for you, and see how your God has loved you, that the Son is your brother and suffers for you. Here is love unknown to this world, but known to the true children of Abraham. And rejoice with Abraham that you have seen Jesus’ day, that you treasure His word and so will by no means see death for ever. Let us pray.
Jesus, may our hearts be burning with more fervent love for Thee.
May our eyes be ever turning to Thy cross of agony.
Till in glory parted never from our blessed Savior’s side
graven in our hearts forever dwell the cross the crucified.