The Foundations of the Faith

Studies in Genesis 1-11

Sermon Number Twenty-seven: The Doctrine of Death (part 1)

Jim Bordwine, Th.D.

Introduction

Most people do not like to talk about death. Death is one of those things which we push to the very back part of our mind—we know it’s coming, we know it cannot be avoided, but that does not mean that we want to think about it, talk about it, know about it or plan for it. Death is an intrusion, it is not welcome; no one likes death and most people feel uneasy when death gets too close. Nevertheless, it is our duty and to our advantage to know what the Bible says about death. As it turns out, this is the next topic mentioned in the early chapters of Genesis.

This record begins with the creation—a wonderful, awe-inspiring account of the power and wisdom of the Creator. The record includes the creation of man and a simple test which he failed. And then things turn ugly. God curses His creation, man is kicked out of the beautiful place prepared for him having ruined his relationship with his Maker and his companion and the entire rest of creation. And that is only the beginning. Soon, one man, despising God, rises up and kills another. Death makes a grand and violent entrance into the world. Cain bashed in the head of his brother Abel, or perhaps he stabbed him with a sharpened instrument of some kind—how he did it doesn’t really matter. Abel’s blood cried out as it soaked into the earth. He was dead. The most unnatural thing, the most disgusting thing that could occur in this setting did occur.

But isn’t this exactly what God warned would happen if Adam disobeyed? Didn’t the Creator say: “In the day that you eat from this forbidden tree, you shall surely die”? Wasn’t Cain’s murder of Abel just an acceleration of a process which had already infested the human race? Didn’t Adam and Eve become subject to death when they did what God told them not to do? Death is related directly to Adam’s transgression and it took almost no time for death to become part of the reality of this world. Once it was here, it rapidly made itself known.

There’s every reason to expect, therefore, that these opening chapters in Genesis, where we have seen so many foundational doctrines introduced, would also have something to say about death. And they do. However, the manner in which death is brought before us for our extended consideration is not through a shocking murder. Genesis gives us a picture of death which makes death routine, expected, normal, part of everyday experiences. This is done in a subtle way, but if we stop and consider where and how this all began—with the magnificent, sovereign God calling into existence from nothing all that is—then the regularity of death, which is presented to us in Gen. 5, is sickening and depressing. We are so used to death being an element in our existence that we will have to work to see death for what it was early in our history.

01. Presentation of the Doctrine

Gen. 5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. 2 He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created. 3 When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. 4 Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters. 5 So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. 6 And Seth lived one hundred and five years, and became the father of Enosh. 7 Then Seth lived eight hundred and seven years after he became the father of Enosh, and he had other sons and daughters. 8 So all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died. 9 And Enosh lived ninety years, and became the father of Kenan. 10 Then Enosh lived eight hundred and fifteen years after he became the father of Kenan, and he had other sons and daughters. 11 So all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years, and he died. 12 And Kenan lived... [and] 14 all the days of Kenan were nine hundred and ten years, and he died. 15 And Mahalalel lived... [and] 17 all the days of Mahalalel were eight hundred and ninety-five years, and he died. 18 And Jared lived... [and] 20 all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years, and he died. 21 And Enoch lived sixty-five years, and became the father of Methuselah. 22 Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah, and he had other sons and daughters. 23 So all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. 24 And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him. 25 And Methuselah lived... [and] 27 all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and he died.

I want to call attention to three things from this passage. First, notice the opening words in vv. 1, 2. Moses writes: “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” (v. 1) Adam was the first man. Adam knew God. Adam was personally instructed by God. Adam was the beginning, the first of many more. This phrase verifies that Adam was the head of our race. “The book of the generations of Adam” is Adam’s legacy. This is the record of the line of the seed of the woman—in contrast to the previous line of the ungodly descendants of Cain recorded in chapter four—as it develops past Adam, past his sons and on for several generations.

Of importance, too, are the statements which accompany that first phrase: “God created man... He made him in the likeness of God... He created them male and female... He blessed them and named them Man...” (vv. 1, 2) This takes us back to the beginning, back to the record of Adam’s creation. Before telling us about Adam’s descendants, the writer reminds us where man came from and he reminds us about the nature of man’s beginning. Man was a special creation of God. Man was blessed by his Creator. Man began in a perfect environment, one in which he had God’s companionship, God’s care and God’s favor.

Now there are many things that we could say about these opening two verses of Gen. 5, but one thing which stands out is the contrast established by Moses when he reminds us of Adam’s origin and then, in vv. 3 ff., tells us about Adam’s end and the descendants which followed after him. There is something striking about the image given here. Moses begins with a quick look back to the creation, back to the Garden, back to the days of peace and joy for mankind, back to the time when he walked with God, back when he rightly understood his place and the place of his Creator. The problem is, all of that has changed. The innocence has been lost, the days of living without fear, without guilt, without the anticipation of judgment are over. That’s all in the past, as Moses makes so vividly clear in the manner in which he constructs this chapter.

I’m talking about the second element in this passage which I want to emphasize. It’s that little, three-word phrase: “and he died.” Over and over again, beginning with Adam, we are told, “and he died.” It doesn’t matter who it is, we are told, “and he died.” Adam is the first in this list. After reminding us of Adam’s origin, Moses starts listing the man’s descendants; and he uses a pattern that, in one sense, resembles a mournful lament or funeral dirge: “and he died, and he died, and he died...” Man after man comes to the same end: and he died. Adam’s life is compressed to three verses! He lived for a while, had children, lived a while longer and then he died. This is Adam! This is the creature fashioned from the dust of the earth by the hand of God Himself! Is this it? Is this all that God had for Adam? He lived a while and then he died? That doesn’t sound right!

I’m emphasizing this point because I want you to realize how unnatural death is in God’s creation. God is life; death is the most unsettling element that could appear in God’s creation; it is so totally opposite all that He is and all that He offers. Death is a termination, while God is eternal; death prevents things from being completed, while it is God’s nature to see things through to completion; death brings disorder, while God brings structure; death brings disruption, while God brings peace; death scares us, while God comforts us. But, then, that was the point of God’s warning to Adam, wasn’t it? When Adam disobeyed, he really did ruin this world. His behavior really did result in God’s world taking on a character foreign to its design. An element was introduced which brought chaos.

God told Adam, in no uncertain terms, that disobedience would bring ruination, but Adam did not obey. Here is the result; here in Gen. 5 we learn that death became a routine element in human existence. As I said, it did not matter who it was—even Adam, the first man, wasn’t exempt—and it did not matter where or when you lived or what you accomplished with your life or how many descendants you left behind. You lived, you had a family, you worked and then you died. That is the way it’s been ever since. This is what our existence is like. We are born, we live a while, we do a few things and then we die.

Considered from this perspective, it’s not a very pleasant thought, is it? Death waits, down the road somewhere, for everyone. This must have been one of the points to this book of the generations of Adam. The Spirit intended to do more, I’m sure, than just give us a list of Adam’s descendants. There is a point to ending the record of all of Adam’s descendants with the report of their death. There is not another list like this in the Bible; there is not another list where one generation follows another and where every generation ends with that simple phrase, “and he died.”

It is interesting that one reliable commentator says: “At once we are struck by the longevity of these patriarchs; all except three lived in excess of nine hundred years.” (Leupold, 233) Although this writer is simply trying to account for the contrast between the length of the lives of these early men and our own, that is not what strikes me when I read this passage. What strikes me, as I have been stressing, is the routine nature of death in a world only recently brought into being by a God who is life and light. Do you see the point I was making earlier? We are so accustomed to death being part of our existence that the thing which catches our attention is a long life! The same writer goes onto say that the repeated phrase, “and he died,” shows, nevertheless, that God’s justice and wrath against sin are strongly emphasized in this chapter. And that, I believe, is getting closer to the point of this particular wording.

There is a statement made by Paul which I would like to refer to briefly. In Rom. 5, as he begins explaining how and when sin entered the world and what were the results of this and how Christ figures in the restoration of all things, the apostle writes: “death reigned from Adam until Moses.” (v. 14) Paul uses a word (basileuo) and a tense (aorist) which means that death “became king ” or that death “exercised dominion” over mankind beginning with Adam. This is a graphic way to speak of the presence of death in the world. Paul says that death ruled over men, which implies that death is forceful, that it cannot be overcome and that all were subject to death from the time of Adam. Genesis 5 illustrates this truth perfectly. This is what happened. Death came into creation and it began to reign over all men making all men liable and seeing that no man escaped.

The third matter to notice is the one exception in this list: “And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.” (v. 24) As we read this list, especially if we will read it more than once, the experience of Enoch stands out. He is the only one about whom it is not said, “and he died.” In Heb. 11, the writer puts it just as plainly when he says that Enoch “was taken up so that he should not see death.” (v. 5) So, what did it take to avoid death? It took the intervention of God who, in this case, supernaturally translated Enoch from this place to heaven. And, so, Enoch is a striking contrast to everyone else on this list in Gen. 5.

Once again, given what we know about God and about the beginning of this existence, doesn’t it bother you that it is the man who doesn’t die who is the exception? God did not create man to die, God did not create a world to be ravaged by sin and laid waste by this awful intruder. In the strictest sense, death is not natural here in God’s world no matter how common it has become. Death is the ultimate consequence of sin, as the Creator warned, and it is no coincidence, by the way, that the story of the flood follows this chapter on the reign of death. The flood, as we will see later, introduces us to the doctrine of divine judgment. And when God expresses his judgment toward the earth, what happens? In the flood, everyone dies.

02. Development of the Doctrine

Let’s give our attention now to the development of this doctrine. What does the Bible have to say about death from this point forward? How does this unsettling doctrine unfold in later revelation? Once again, many things could be said about the Bible’s teaching on death. However, all that is said about death crystallizes when God’s word speaks of the atoning work of Christ. Here is the pattern we see developing in Scripture: death comes as an unnatural and destructive consequence of Adam’s disobedience; death quickly becomes part of human experience; death stalks every man and breeds fear in our hearts; and death becomes our chief worry and the one thing we prefer not to contemplate.

However, if we go back to the point of the fall, we are reminded that God promised to restore fallen man and He promised to crush the serpent who was, after all, instrumental in bringing death into God’s creation. Together, all this—the entrance of death, the progress of death and the promise of God—means that if God is going to keep His promise, then something has to be done about death. Death stands in contradiction, as I have pointed out, to God and God’s work. Therefore, the conquering of death ends up being a vital theme in the atoning work of Christ because His mission was to secure our restoration to God. He comes to face death, the ultimate, unavoidable result of disobeying God, and His success in winning our redemption depends on His ability not only to face death, but also to defeat it.

Biblically speaking, then, death cannot be considered apart from its root in sin. When we forget this simple fact, death becomes just a part of life—the last part, to be sure—as it has for so many people in this world. Very few now ask why death has to occur or where death came from. This has not always been the case, of course. Previous ages had a proper view of death and those folks understood that it had to be considered in relation to sin and the Savior’s work. But this is not true of our time and that is troubling. We are living in a time when, increasingly, death is not being viewed Biblically, that is, in relation to sin and Christ’s work of deliverance. Without a proper view of death, without a Biblical understanding of death, we don’t have a right view of life and we won’t have a right view of God. Being aware of our own mortality is an essential component in a Biblical world and life view.

I want us to consider briefly two passages in the New Testament which will help illustrate what I’ve just said. First, let’s look at Heb. 2:

14 Since then the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; 15 and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.

Obviously, the writer is speaking about Jesus Christ and His work of atonement. He explains exactly what I was saying earlier, viz., that Jesus the Savior had to face and conquer death in order to win our redemption. The writer says that “through death He rendered powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil.” Death was Satan’s most potent weapon against us; it was a weapon for which there was no defense; it was a weapon from which no one could hide. It was, therefore, the perfect weapon to disrupt and destroy God’s creation. It is a weapon that is one hundred percent effective. Death never comes and finds a barricade through which it cannot penetrate; death never comes for a man only to find out that the man has figured some clever way of escaping. Adam’s sin brought death into the world and it ran uncontrolled and unstoppable through generation after generation.

But here the writer says that “through death” Jesus rendered the devil powerless; Jesus negated the effectiveness of death as a tool of torment for Satan (notice that the writer says that death brought forth fear in us which made us little more than slaves of death all our lives—we were trapped, as I said earlier, death was here and it was waiting for us and there was nothing that could be done about it). Jesus changed all that! And the means of change ranks as the most brilliant combative maneuver in all history—Jesus, as our Captain, as our Deliverer, as the One who came from heaven to fight for us, faced our adversary and defeated him by submitting to death! He saved us, not by denying the reality of death and not by speaking only words which were designed to take attention away from death. Jesus changed this situation by submitting to death Himself. Just as death was the perfect weapon, so the Lord’s submission to death was the perfect method of rendering it ineffective. This is because, of course, Jesus, once having died and once having surrendered Himself to this menace, lived again; and that change everything!

You see, if you can face your enemy and allow him to use his most powerful weapon against you and if you can allow that weapon to have its full effect upon you and then recover or, in this case, live again after death has visited you, then you have won! You have overcome! You have achieved victory through seeming defeat. If you let your enemy do his best and you let him succeed in doing his best, but then live again, as Christ did, then you have rendered him powerless and you have forever changed the nature of death. If you die upon the cross, but then come forth from the tomb where your dead body was placed, then you have proven that you are more powerful than the most powerful weapon which Satan has at his disposal. There is nothing more for him to do. In regard to this matter, Jesus did not simply take away the devil’s weapon, He made the weapon ineffective. Death still comes, but in Christ, it encounters a stronger Opponent, an Opponent over which it has no sway because He surrendered to it already and then took up His life again. And in Him, the same thing will happen for us—we will die someday, but we will live again in the resurrection. The fear of death now no longer holds us captive.

And so, with Paul, we cry:

1 Cor. 15:54... “DEATH IS SWALLOWED UP in victory. 55 “O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR VICTORY? O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR STING?” 56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; 57 but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul is celebrating the triumph of Christ over death at the end of this chapter on the resurrection. Since Jesus rose again, it means that death did not, in the final analysis, conquer Him, but that He conquered it. And, given the nature of death’s threat against us, the defeat of death is cause for jubilation. Death overcame Christ but was then, itself, “swallowed up” in His victory when He rose from the grave. Now death, and by way of implication, Satan, can be mocked: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Satan thought he was victorious, but his victory was hollow and momentary because something greater than death was involved and that was the power of God.

And, as I reminded us earlier, Paul connects death with sin, as it must be and is in the Bible. Throughout our lives, death annoys us with little reminders that it is coming. This is what Paul means when he says that “the sting of death is sin.” Every sin we commit is a subtle reminder that we’re going to pay the price, which is death. God’s law, as Paul also states, makes that sting powerful because it forms an unalterable contrast to what we so often experience. But, we know that Christ has come and has paid for our sins and has kept the law for us and, therefore, has taken away the sting of death and has defeated death by becoming subject to death. There is nothing else to say, except: “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”

03. Application of the Doctrine

One thing that I can tell you with absolute certainty is that you are going to die. You are not going to escape that experience. It may come soon for some or much later for others, but it will come one day. You will be living your life just as you always have, going through your routines just as you always have, and then death will come to you. There will be no bargaining with death, no “last-minute” reprieve when death comes. With this knowledge in mind, with the knowledge that death is coming and that it’s only a matter of time, then the question becomes: What will death mean for me?

Death can be encountered in one of two ways. You can face death as it is intended, that is, as the ultimate punishment for sin and you can die in your sins and face the wrath of God for your sins. You can live as well as you can now, have as much fun as you can now, gather as much around you as possible and then have it all become instantly meaningless and empty the moment you realize that it is time to die. That is what death is designed to do, it is designed to stop you in your tracks, it is designed to make light of all that you have accomplished, it is designed to dash your hopes and bring sorrow to those who love you.

Yes, you can face death and let death do its work. Or, and this is the most wonderful news you will ever hear in your whole life, you can face death as a defeated enemy. By trusting in Jesus Christ as your Savior, by believing what the Bible teaches about Him, by believing that His death was in your place, you can face death and have no fear. Imagine that—no fear of death. In Christ, death was overcome. Jesus showed a greater power than death when He left that tomb. He really did die, but He really did live again! And that is what God meant when He promised to crush the head of the serpent, that is what God meant when He promised to deliver man from Satan’s deception. This is the gospel.

Jesus said: “Everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die.” (John 11:26) He did not mean that if you believe in Him you will live forever on this earth in this life. He meant that if you believe in Him as your Savior, then death, when it comes, will not be the end of you. He meant that death would cease to be a dreaded enemy because in Him, you would live again. So, what do you think? What is death to you? If you are in Christ, then you can rejoice with Paul and mock death. If you are not in Christ, if you have yet to call upon Him to save you, then death mocks you and will come for you one day.

Conclusion