Sin kills. God brings new life.

People are weirded out by death. We avoid talking or thinking about it. Unrealistically, a lot of us don’t make plans for our own deaths, or for the deaths of anyone we know and love. We freak out when our loved ones do die. Heck, we freak out when strangers die in front of us.

That’s because, deep down, everyone knows that human death isn’t normal. We’re not meant to die. Plants and animals die, and that’s just part of the natural circle of life. But we innately understand human death is different. We have to psyche ourselves into believing it’s natural. But our instinctive reaction is closer to the truth: It’s not natural. We shouldn’t die. It’s just wrong. We should keep living, forever. Right?

Right.

This post is part of a synchroblog, a bunch of different Christian bloggers reacting to the common topic of new life. Wanna get in on it? Visit the synchroblog blog.

Edwin Aldrich: Finding new life in our new home.

Loveday Anyim: Spring forth ideas that speaks new life. • Inspired by the spring to create new life.

Anita Coleman: New life, the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, and eternal living.

Michael Donahoe: New life.

Kathy Escobar: New life through nonviolent communication.

Carol Kuniholm: New life. Mystery fruit.

Glenn Hager: A personal resurrection story.

Doreen A. Mannion: Each day a new decision: Choose life.

Jeremy Myers: I get depressed on Facebook.

Sarah Quezada: Post-winter delight.

God’s original intent was for humans to live forever. In the scriptures this was represented by the tree of life, in Paradise, where God put the first humans. Whether this was a literal tree or an allegory, doesn’t matter: God’s intent was for humans, unlike other animals, to live forever, in perfect harmony with themselves, nature, and God.

We humans, however, ate off the other tree.

Death and the universe.

Certain Christians teach that before Adam and Eve sinned, there was no death in the universe: Everything lived forever. Plants, animals, humans, everything. Death didn’t exist.

Which makes no logical sense. Because animals eat. And even if the young-earth creationists are right and they didn’t eat meat, they still ate plants, and plant death is still death. The only way for an ecosystem to not have death in it, is if everything only ate inorganic matter: Rocks and sand and dirt and water. But let’s not be any more ridiculous than the idea of a universe without death: The universe has always had death in it.

Otherwise the warning to Adam and Eve makes no logical sense.

“The knowing-good-and-evil tree: Don’t eat from it.

When you eat from it, you die, die.”

—The LORD,

If there’s no such thing as death—if you can’t see how catastrophic that would be, because you have no experience of watching an animal or plant die, and don’t realize this means they’re forever gone—this is no threat. This is an abstract idea. Every parent knows their kids don’t take abstract ideas seriously: “If you don’t eat your vegetables, you get no cookies” is no kind of threat if the kids don’t know what cookies are. Even if you described cookies really clearly (“flour and butter and sugar”) it’s no substitute for the experience of eating one—or watching someone else eat one.

Imaginary penalties don’t work very well. That’s why a lot of people don’t fear hell. Now, those who’ve had bad experiences with fire: They fear hell. Everyone else is (half-sarcastically), “Ooh, a lake of fire. Sounds scary.”

Because of the way God later describes the tree of life—

The LORD God said, “Look, Adam is like one of us:

He knows good and evil.

Now, lest he stretches out his hand

and takes from the life tree, eats, and lives forever…”

The LORD God sent him away from the Eden garden

to work for the ground he was taken from.

—

—it appears the eternal life humans were meant to have, was dependent on having access to this tree. We don’t have it anymore. God can’t just permit us to live forever carrying sin around. God wants to wipe out sin, just like we’ve wiped out smallpox (as far as we know). Everyone infected with sin needs to die, just like the animals and plants.

And if you’ve memorized Romans 6.23, you’ll recall the wages of sin is death. Our paycheck for letting sin run amok in our lives, is we don’t live forever: We die. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. If we’re lucky, we’ll live a century; if not, we’ll die later today. But with extremely rare exceptions, everybody dies. (We know of Enoch, Elijah, and some traditions say Jesus’s mother.) I’m going to die. So will you. It’s inevitable.

But we can’t just be dead, can we?

Most cultures deal with death by either embracing the idea of an afterlife or reincarnated new life… or through utter denial. Our culture picks and chooses between all three. A large number of us refuse to deal with it till we can’t any longer: Somebody dies, and we have to square up what we believe just happened.

Most religions have an afterlife. After your spirit leaves your body, it goes to the good afterlife, or the bad one. In “heaven” you either become a guardian angel, or you spend the rest of existence in a cosmic retirement community. In “hell” you’re either completely alone in the black, or in a burning underground fire tormented by evil spirits and other hell-residents. These ideas actually come from Greek mythology, not Christianity; Dante Alighieri borrowed them for his Divine Comedy, and overlaid a lot of Christianity over them, and they became part of the popular culture. But they’re not biblical. (Relax; I’m getting to what is biblical.)

A few religions have reincarnation: When you die, your spirit goes into another body, and you’re reborn, and get a do-over. Sometimes it’s a better or worse life, depending on your karma; sometimes you can escape this cycle.

Certain materialists, because they have no scientific evidence for an afterlife, just accept the idea there may not be one. So they try to enjoy this life as best they can. Or they hope science will progress to a point where they can be revived (i.e. better life-prolonging medicine or cryogenics) or reincarnated (i.e. their consciousness uploaded to a computer), and have sort of an afterlife—though a material one.

But the fact humans embrace all these ideas of the afterlife—that most of us take for granted we’ll live on, in one way or another—just goes to show how we refuse to accept death as a natural part of human existence. It’s more than just a mass delusion.

Resurrection.

The Christian view (one which you’ll hear a lot about during Eastertime) is resurrection: New life. Not afterlife; not a next life. At the end of history, God undoes death.

In the present, we die and go into the ground. Our spirits go elsewhere, though we’re not entirely certain where. To God, we assume. There are hints throughout the bible of some form of afterlife, but we have very few details, and I don’t consider the fictional ideas of Christian poets, or the near-death experiences of various people, to be reliable testimonies. They contradict one another too often.

But in the future, when Jesus returns, we’re made alive again, just as Jesus was made alive again. Not in zombie bodies, or reanimated corpses: New bodies. Improved, permanent, resurrected bodies. And by the way: They’re sin-free.

Some will object, “How are the dead raised up? What sort of body do they come in?” You’re being dense.

When you sow seed, it’s not brought to life unless it dies. And you’re not sowing the body to come: You’re sowing a simple kernel, like grain or some other plant. God grows it into the body he wants; each seed its own body. Not every species comes out the same: There’s the human species, animal species, fishes, birds, heavenly bodies, earthly bodies—but the heavenly bodies are reckoned differently than the earthly bodies. The sun is reckoned different than the moon and stars; one star is reckoned different from another. Same with the resurrection of the dead.

It’s sown rotten, raised fresh.

It’s sown unwanted, raised in honor.

It’s sown in weakness, raised in power.

It’s sown in a soulish body, raised in a spiritual body.

(There’s a soulish body and a spiritual body.)

This is why it’s written, “The first human, Adam, became a living soul:” The final Adam is made alive in the Spirit. But not spiritual first: Soulish, then spiritual.

The first human was made from earth, soulish.

The second human is the Lord, from heaven.

Those made from dirt are dirty.

Those made from heaven are heavenly.

Just as we have the image of dirty humans,

we’ll also wear the image of heavenly humans.

Christians, I’m telling you flesh and blood aren’t able to live in God’s Kingdom. Rottenness can’t live in freshness.

—Paul and Sosthenes,

Resurrection is a tricky concept, because (as Paul pointed out), we want details. We wanna know just how immortality is gonna work. Are we made out of spirit?—and if so, how material are we? If I’m immortal, what happens if I hold my breath, or stop eating and drinking? What if I accidentally cut off a finger? Or fall off a cliff? (My Sunday School teacher’s pathetic answer to shut me up, “There are no knives or cliffs in heaven” isn't gonna work on adults, you know.) Does God suspend free will, and make all accidents impossible? Or maybe having multiple trees of life in New Jerusalem is meant to deal with that.

Regardless of our speculation about details we don’t need to know yet: Sin kills us, but God un-kills us. The hope of Christianity isn’t a really nice afterlife. It’s new life.

Death is still awful. But it’s temporary. Most of the sting of death is taken away by the fact God intends to undo it. Not all the sting is gone; it’s still a sad thing when loved ones die, and we still need to grieve. It’s not a permanent loss, but it’s still a profound loss. Still, in the resurrection, we’ll definitely see them again. Sin is fatal, but Jesus has the keys to death, and death doesn’t have the final word: Christ does.