It is beyond any doubt that we Christians
are convinced that we are created for life; it is not God's will that we die.
God doesn't want death; He wants life. In the Scripture, death is the enemy.
The Apostle Paul even calls death, "the last enemy". Death is not
natural, not a natural part of our life and not willed by God. The Wisdom of
Solomon, which for us is part of the Bible, says very clearly, "God did
not create death". Death comes into the world as a rebellion against God.
Death comes into the world because people do not choose life, but choose death,
darkness, and themselves over God.
It is our
teaching that death results from human rebellion against God from the beginning
and with the help of the demons (who are lovers of death, darkness and evil).
The Bible teaches actually teaches kind of a 'package plan', you have God,
truth, life and glory, or you have the demons, darkness, death, satan, sin,
corruption, ugliness and rot. This is the basic reality, and there is no middle
path.
In the eight
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says, "working in
our members is always a heterosnomos (another law)". Human beings think
that they are economists, in other words, they are 'a law unto themselves', but
according to the Scriptures we are not. Either there is the law (nomos) of
Christ, which the Apostle Paul calls the law of the Holy Spirit and Life in his
Epistle to the Romans, or there is the law of sin and death. There is either
one law or the other that works, if it isn't the one it is the other. Here we
interpret the Genesis story as the choice of death. Furthermore, it is even not
strictly Orthodox to think of sin as a corrupted choice or making the wrong
choice. I believe that our teaching is that the problem is not whether it is
right or wrong but choice itself (as taught by St. Maximos the Confessor),
because if you are a creature you have no choice.
If there is
God and God is God and God is the living God and God is Who He is, our only
choice is to give up our choice and listen to and obey Him. This is very
important to understand, because the modern people think that the more choices
they have and the more they deliberate the more the freer they are, however
this is not Biblical. What we say is that if there is God, at any given moment
the only choice we have is to give up choice and obey Him, listen to Him, trust
Him, to love Him and to believe Him. The primordial sin is exactly saying
"no, I will not obey, trust or love God. I will do it my way". You
know what takes place when you do it your way; you perish and die. That is
where death comes from. Where there is obedience, love and trust in God, there
can not be death. If one was to obey God totally, live in communion with God,
trust and love God in everything, that person will not be able to die.
It is
interesting in the Genesis story, God did not say to Adam and Eve, "eat of the
tree and I will kill you". He said, "you must not eat from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil", meaning choice rather than obedience,
"for when you eat of it you will surely die", for it is sin that
kills you. God doesn't kill anybody, in that sense; we kill ourselves. So the
minute we take our life in our own hands to do what we want to do, and do not
obey God, basically we commit suicide. Furthermore, we put that death over to
our children who are born in the same condition of death when born into the
world. That is what the 'ancestral sin' is all about. A second point is that we
would say that the human task is to overcome and destroy death, and to make
death to die so that life can then live.
The whole
Old Testament, which includes the Law, Psalms and Prophets, is really about
teaching people the will of God to reconstruct a rebellious humanity in order
that ultimately death can be destroyed. For example, in the Law of Moses you
have two very interesting things, one is God says, through Moses, 'I present to
you only two ways: the blessing and the curse' (i.e. life or death). Then it
says, 'choose life and don't choose death'. The Law, Psalms and Prophets say
Obey God, give up your choice, obey God and you will live. For example, Psalm
118 (119) that is read in our funeral service and on the night of Holy Saturday
before Pascha says, "Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the
law of the Lord! Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with
the whole heart!" Then the Psalm continues "If I keep I Your law, I
find life in it and I can not die". That is way it is read over the body
of the dead Jesus, because He is the only One who kept the Law of God
completely, and therefore could not die.
What we
believe is that Jesus Christ our Saviour came into the world in order to die.
He is the only One who came in order to die so that He can transform death
itself into a victory through His death. He is the only One, the only Person,
and the only Human who has ever been born in order to die. He is also the only
Human who is the Son of God, Who is divine as the same divinity as the Father,
Who is born of a virgin, Who is begotten of the Father, Who comes exactly into
the world for one purpose; to destroy the work of the devil and death, and to
give us life.
Before the
coming of Christ, according to the Bible, everyone is caught by death, no
matter how good or bad they were. We can even say to this day that is the
truth. Biologically, we are all dead; we are a room of dead people. It is a
good idea once in a while to remember that. In fact, many of our monastics
would even put a coffin and cross in their room to remember that. There is an
American church story about some southern Protestants who heard about a Roman
Catholic monk who used to write "remember death" and that he had a
coffin prepared for his death. One of them says to the other, "You know
that they used to do that, and sometimes they'd even sleep in that
coffin?" Then the other character said, "Yep, they weren't as advance
as we is". However, the question is who is really advanced?
The problem,
however, is that in our time death has been so naturalised nobody will even
think of it as an enemy. In much literature it is considered the last stage of
life, normal, or you go into some sort of light somewhere, and if you are tired
of this life or this world you call some doctor to end your life. However for
Biblical Christians, that is absolutely not the teaching.
Let us
compare the death of Socrates to the death of Jesus. Socrates the philosophic
man, corrupting the youth of Athens because of his teaching of philosophia,
says that the real philosopher is the one who can face death. When they finally
catch him to put him to death and his friends want to rescue him, he says no.
When they bring him the hemlock he drinks it and dies. By the way, the
euthanasia society in the state of Massachusetts in the United States is called
the Hemlock Society.
Then look at
how Jesus dies. He is in the garden and begs His Father to let 'this cup pass'
and sweating blood. For Him it is an outrage to die or that any person would
die; it is the total victory of the devil. We were created to sing halleluiah
to God, not to be corrupted and rot in the tomb. In the Old Testament, there
was a big debate about death. Some thought that death is natural and you just
died and went to your fathers. They also believed that God continues to live in
the people and the dry bones of Israel (or the people of Israel) are
resurrected, but the individual person is lost. These people, at the time of
Jesus, were called the Sadducees. The Sadducees, if you read the Bible, did not
believe in the spirit, soul or the resurrection of the dead. However, the
Pharisees believed in them all. They interpreted from the Scripture that there
will be a resurrection from the dead and the dead will rise. They also believed
that when the God Messianic age will come, when God's glory will fill creation,
when God's kingdom will finally be established through the Messiah the main
thing that will happen is that the graves will be open. Then all the dead will
rise and God will judge every single person that has lived.
In the Old
Testament, however, whatever the position was about resurrection everyone was
dead. In the Bible, the place of the dead or the condition of being dead was
called Sheol in the Hebrew or Hades in the Greek. One problem is that sometimes
Sheol or Hades is translated into English as hell, and people speak of God
descending into hell, but it should never be called hell, because there is no
hell until the end of time.
In the
Bible, specifically in the Wisdom of Solomon, it says that if you were a
righteous, just person and died, you were still somehow in the hands of God who
cares for you. People think that it is a tragedy, but it is not because God is
still there. This was kind of a blissful state of death and was called the
bosom of Abraham. So the righteous dead were in the bosom of Abraham, and those
who believed in the Resurrection believed that they were blissfully dead until
the Messianic King would come to raise the dead and then they would enter into
glory. David, Solomon, the Prophets and even John the Baptist was in this state
of bliss in the bosom of Abraham. In our Orthodox tradition, John the Baptist
is the forerunner of Jesus even into Sheol. As expressed in his troparion, he
dies before Jesus to announce that the Son of God is coming into the realm of
the dead to smash it open, to raise up everyone from the dead, to usher in the
kingdom of God, and to grant us the great mercy of everlasting life with God.
There is
also the teaching that this realm of the dead, or Sheol, had what is called the
'pit' where the evil people were. When the Messianic King comes, those in the
pit were also raised for just condemnation and judgement. It should be pointed
out that the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in the Gospel is exactly about
this. It has nothing to do with heaven and hell. In the parable is about the
rich man in the pit talking to Abraham and not to God. The whole point of the
parable is if you do not listen to Moses and the law of the Prophets and really
love, choose and obey God you will not be saved even if a poor man rises from
the dead. In other words, if you do not love God and do not find life before
you die then you will not find it after death, even if Jesus the Son of God
comes in order to be crucified and die to descent into Sheol and raise the dead.
For us, that is the very center of the Gospel.
The Gospel
is that we now have the new, final and last Adam named Jesus. St. Paul says
that the first Adam was a 'tipos' of the one Who was to come. Jesus is the real
Adam, because He is the One who really obeys God His own Father. He obeys God
from all eternity as the Son of God begotten of the Father and became human
born of the Virgin Mary to be the Man who literally could not die and to be the
Man who was literally, totally and completely dedicated to God, His Father. His
word was the word of the Father, His will was the will of the Father, His work
was the work of the Father, everything that He did was the Father, and when you
saw Him you saw the Father.
Everything
that is attributed to God in the Old Testament is now attributed to Jesus, this
Man who is a real man but not mere man. He is the Man that the Son of God, Who
is the source and author of life, comes down on earth and takes on Himself the
sin, the curse, and everything of our human falling's including the last enemy
(death itself), in order to destroy death by death. It is our teaching that
that is the only way death can be destroyed, because God desires all people to
live, all sin to be forgiven, and that His is loved with all our soul, mind and
love. Furthermore, if we were to keep His word and love Him, we would live
forever, but nobody does this. We are all non-righteous and we can not save
ourselves. The Psalm asks, 'who can bring themselves up from Sheol… who can
raise themselves up from the dead?' Even the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus,
could not keep herself from dying, because everyone is under the curse of death
and in the hands of the power of the evil one.
Jesus is the
only One to can in order to die, because He came in order to love, obey and
trust God His Father no matter what. And how do you show that you love God? By
loving your neighbor and your worst enemy, and by taking their sin and evil
upon yourself and even by dying their death for them so that you can liberate
them from death, because they have no power over it. That is exactly what Jesus
does and that is what our faith is. So Jesus comes into the world in order to
die, and He destroys death by death. In our Orthodox faith, this is the only
way this can happen. That is why the center of our Church is "Xristos
anesti ek nekron," (Christ has risen from among the dead,) "phanato
phanaton patisas…"(by death trampling upon Death…). God became human and
had become a curse, sin and die and for us, because that is the act of ultimate
obedience, trust and love. This is a perfect act of love, which destroys death
from the inside and raises up all the dead whether they want it or not. In fact
everyone with be raised from the dead, irrespective of his or her wishes,
during the Universal Resurrection of the dead, as taught by the Orthodox
Church. This is way our Paschal icon shows Jesus even pulling Adam and Eve,
with all the righteous and unrighteous from the dead.
If you have
even been to an Orthodox funeral, you hear the fifth chapter of St. John's
gospel. It says, "… the hour is coming in which all who are in the grave
will hear His voice and come forth - those who have done good, to the
resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of
condemnation. I can of Myself do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and My judgement
is righteous, because I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who
sent Me". This part of the gospel is extremely important, which says all
and everyone will be raised. Not just the good people, but everyone. This
Universal Resurrection is our teaching, because death is destroyed...
Source: http://www.orthodoxchristian.info/pages/afterdeath.htm
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