Never See Death

Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death. (John 8:51)

This morning I decided to do some research in the original language to see if this verse might be more explicitly clear there. It did not take long to discover that this is the case. The sense that nearly every version conveys in their translations of this verse leads one to assume that Jesus was saying a believer will never see the kind of death we normally think about on this earth. But from that perspective we are saddled with the problem of dealing with the reality that every believer does die here and we wonder why Jesus said this the way He did.

But in the Greek it is much more clear and explicit. As I looked over the words in that language a number of interesting things emerged in this verse, some of which can be seen in the English translations and some which are not so obvious.

The first two words, truly, truly are much stronger than we typically view them. Actually in Greek they are the word Amen used twice, the same word that we usually put at the end of a prayer. The reason theologians don't use them at the beginning of a statement even though this is actually the case many times is simply because its use in this way violates our cultural way of speaking. But Jesus tended to use this phrase quite a number of times in His teachings and He did so whenever He wanted to strongly emphasize something very important. It was not just a habitual cliché like we might fall into the habit of using in our religious jargon, it was more along the line of how we might say, “I can't emphasis the importance of what I am going to say enough. If you miss everything else, pay attention to this!”

The second thing I find compelling in this verse is the word translated keep in relation to the word of Jesus. The Greek word for this conveys the idea of guarding something very carefully like a military contingent would pay very close attention to guarding something of extreme value to protect it. It also implies paying very close attention to it and valuing it as extremely important.

Another fascinating insight I discovered was the double negative relating to death. It is like Jesus was saying, you can be absolutely guaranteed that you will never, never die!

Next I looked over the words relating to death and Jesus' promise about this for those who take Him seriously. What emerges from the Greek rendition of this is much more clear about the kind of death Jesus was talking about. What He was saying was basically that we would not perceive or enter into the experience of the death of the future age or what we usually refer to as eternal death. In the Bible this death is carefully distinguished from the kind of death most of us think about when a person quites breathing and returns to the ground and that Jesus called sleep. This worse kind of death in this verse is referred to in Revelation and is called the second death. (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8)

This is the interpretation that I have been given all of my life, but it is not because people were trying to force this text to fit their preconceived beliefs. But if the translators had understood these concepts and had allowed the original language to be expressed in English the way it stands in Greek this understanding would have been much more obvious to those reading it today.

But even the Jews listening to Him when Jesus spoke these words originally chose to misinterpret what He was actually saying and to apply His reference to death to mean the first death we are familiar with. This may have been because they were not so familiar with the concept of the second death themselves. This would not be a big surprise because no one had at that point ever even experienced or had even talked much about this mysterious idea of a 'second death'. Shortly after Jesus' discourse with these men they were able to carry out their diabolical desires to kill Him and in the process Jesus ended up experiencing both types of death, both the first death and the horrors of the second death that He was referring to in this verse. And while humans were able to impose the first death on His body with all the sadistic torture they could invent to make Him suffer the most, that pain was nearly unnoticed compared to the inner pain and horror from the mental and emotional anguish Jesus experienced as He took upon His conscience the guilt and shame and condemnation for every person who had ever sinned and allowed all of that guilt to crush out His life on the cross.

Sadly most people assume that it was God who inflicted the second death experience on Jesus, that it was the Father who was unleashing His rage and anger against sinners at the cross and that Jesus was stepping in to take the blame for them and receive the arbitrary punishments meant for lost sinners. But viewing it in this way causes us to miss the real truth of what happened on the cross and paints God in a very distorted light. This view reinforces some of the worst lies of Satan about God's character and personality. Satan has done everything possible to convince us that God harbors many of the attributes of the devil. Satan shifts as much blame as possible off of himself to God for many of the bad things that happen in this world. But Christians should be very careful not to join Satan in his false accusations against God by giving credence to his falsehoods.

Satan is the instigator of all evil and does everything possible to destroy, bring pain and suffering and to exterminate life. It is not God who imposes suffering and death upon sinners. Satan seeks to deceive, to destroy and to kill. It is high time that we begin to get this straight and to place the blame where it really belongs, squarely on the head of the devil who is behind all of this mess. Additionally Jesus did not come to run interference between sinners and a vengeful, arbitrary God bent on punishing sinners; Jesus came for the purpose of revealing the truth about His Father's love and forgiveness and the truth that it is Satan who hates us, not the Father. To accomplish this revelation Jesus allowed sinners as well as demons to display their true animosity toward God and to inflict all the pain and suffering they could conjure up on the Son of God made human. In addition He also took upon Himself the mental anguish that results from being separated from the only Source of life that all will experience who find they are lost on the day of Judgment. Thus Jesus experienced on the cross the horrors of the second death while providing the only way of escape for everyone who will believe the truth about God. And that truth is what Jesus came to reveal in His life and His teachings.

When viewed from this perspective this verse makes much more sense. Jesus is saying here most emphatically that the truth about God that He wanted to convey to humanity would itself be the very factor that will deliver us from the throes of the second death. Properly understood, the second death results from resisting the truth about God which destroys our own capacity to respond to His love. Then as we come into the presence of the most passionate, powerful love in the universe, because we lack capacity to endure the intensity of that exposure we will face most horrific internal agonies as our hearts self-destruct from all the resistance we have built into them against God's love for us. It is just like a resistor overheating in a circuit because it is resisting energy of the electricity flowing through the circuit that is far beyond its capacity to survive.

But Jesus is saying here that there is no reason for anyone to have to suffer that second death horror. If we will accept His teachings, embrace the truth about God that Jesus revealed in His life and His words and allow those truths to transform and prepare us for His presence, we can be transformed into His likeness, we will take on His character and will be prepared to be glorified in that same exposure to infinite love that has the opposite effect on those who have resisted it.