Unless Christ returns first, we will all face death. Experience teaches us this truth. Death is even more certain than taxes. Our experience on earth, however, cannot tell us what follows death. Here’s where faith comes in, for faith believes to be true what your experience cannot tell you. Beyond death, God reveals little.
God does tell us death is not the end of a person’s life. Yes, death does end our physical life—all because we enter this world with a sin-corrupted body, so the body can’t escape death.
Scripture calls our body dying “the second Death” (Revelation 21:11). Why? Our first death is our baptism, where the Holy Spirit buries us into Jesus’ death, as Romans 6:3 reveals. When your body dies, your soul does not die but still lives on.
We celebrate All Saints’ Day every year to remember this reality, not let it lie fallow, forgotten in the dust of our dreams. On this day, we remember God’s promises to us beyond death.
You die, but you don’t stop existing. Your soul still lives, separated from your body for a while—and so you become an incomplete being. For you are not the person God created you to be in the beginning. Yes, you will experience relief, for you will be free of sin, but you will still be incomplete, lacking a body.
The Christian’s soul joins the angels, archangels, and the whole company of believers’ souls in the beautiful and blissful presence of God. Our human imagination and language cannot describe the glory awaiting us. Did you ever wonder why the book of Revelation is so weird to us? It tries to describe the indescribable.
You lose someone you love. Death comes without warning, and the pain strikes deep. You find yourself unprepared. You lose your bearings and become inconsolable. Sadness and anger fill you—with the world, yourself, and God. What would you wish for when you suffer such grief? Would you want more time? How about an extra day to share those words you wanted to say to the person who died?
Oh, what a temptation—but think about it! Wouldn’t it be selfish? Would you call back someone you loved, who now is experiencing God’s presence without the weight of sin? How horrific! Who could wish that on another? So, the pain you experience doesn’t become easier, but you can now rejoice for the saint in heaven’s glory.
Here’s another promise from our loving God. Death doesn’t end our connection with the Christian who dies. Do you believe this? If you understand God’s promise and trust it, you will still mourn, but not like someone without hope! Oh, you do experience separation, but only for a while.
Someone you love is dying. Others visit you and may sigh: “You must let him go.” We use such statements because we are unsure what to say or do. But when we understand reality through our eyes of faith, we come to a different conclusion. “We know everything works together for the good of those who love God—those whom he calls according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
So, our life becomes, not about letting someone go, but trusting God can, and does, use this wickedness called death for someone’s eternal well-being. We may be clueless about how, but we still believe it is true.
Now expand from the slice of how hard it is to understand God working His will with one person to the entire cosmos. Working all for our eternal well-being, God appointed a day for His Son to return in all His glory. Of this day, no one can give the date and time but God.
Jesus will return with His angels in a show of pure, divine power, and the end of history as we understand it will take place. The prophecy of Isaiah, of our Old-Testament reading, spoke of this Day. Jesus will raise all the dead. All these physical bodies, born into sin and death, will come back to life, reunited with their souls.
How will this be? By the same mighty Word, who called everything into existence out of nothing. Jesus will call forth the dead to rise. How specific Isaiah is in his description! “Your dead will live; their bodies will rise. Those who dwell in the dust will wake up and shout for joy…. The earth will bring forth the dead” (Isaiah 26:19).
1 Thessalonians tells us the dead in Christ, believers, will rise first and be caught up in the sky, with the believers who are living when our Lord returns. These saints of God will live in the new heaven and earth, which will be our new eternal home (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
What unshakeable promises! We won’t only be souls and spirits floating around in some otherworldly, heavenly existence. We will rejoin our resurrected and glorified bodies, which Scripture describes as being like Jesus’ resurrected and glorified body.
Our eyes will give us sight, and our tongues will give us song and speech. We will hug one another again, walking together, living together. After the body’s resurrection, unlike here, accidents, illnesses, death, and separation will be forever gone. Best of all, we will bask in God’s divinity, and His divinity will bask in us. We celebrate All Saints’ Day as we gaze beyond and above and dream and trust.
Still, we woke up this morning alive in this world. So, as much as we may dream of the eternal realms awaiting us, we also must come back to earth. For we don’t become saints only when we die; we are saints even now because, by faith, Jesus’ righteousness become yours. You become holy. Did you ever note how the New-Testament Epistles begin? They start out: To the saints in Rome, Ephesus, Philippi, and so on. God, here, now, counts us as His holy ones, His saints, because of what Christ gives us, which we receive by faith.
So, you are a saint. What does that mean? This: The Holy Spirit brings us into the Church of Christ, what we confess as “the communion of saints.” Imagine living out the reality of our brothers and sisters in Christ being the saints they are. Oh, how such an understanding would transform what we do and how we act!
Turn to your right, your left. Those around you aren’t only sinners; they are also saints. Well, if they are, it now becomes harder to be angry with them, to undercut them at every turn. If we in our Lord’s Church treated one another like the saints we are, what a living confession we would be to the world! So, instead of trying to push others to get your way, you would live out kindness, gentleness, patience, and forgiveness.
But more exists to our Lord’s Church than fellowship for the saints on earth, for the Church is more than we who struggle in this fallen creation. The Church also consists of the saints in heaven. Are we not one Church? Yes! Still, how can we be sure?
In the Parable of the Lost Sheep, Jesus reveals how our turning away from sin affects the saints in heaven. “I tell you… there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). So, a loved one who died in Christ rejoices when you repent. Jesus tells us this truth. What does that mean? He or she rejoiced when you confessed your sins at the beginning of the service.
The book of Hebrews tells us the saints in eternity are a vast cloud of eyewitnesses surrounding us (Hebrews 12:1). To be a witness, at least as the Greek language of the New Testament works, means these saints in eternity are viewing, watching, what is going on in our lives. Now, if they can’t see what’s going on, they can’t be “eyewitnesses.”
So, those you love, who earlier died in the faith, now surround you, encouraging you to run the race of faith (Hebrews 12:1-2). But they, with us, also await the body’s resurrection! Our souls wisping around in heaven is not our Lord’s final fulfillment of our faith. No, for the saints in eternity also await their salvation’s fulfillment. True: no sinful flesh burdens them, but they still await their resurrected bodies, which Jesus will call forth and perfect on the Last Day when He returns.
So, when a Christian dies, he is not lost to death. No, he transfers from the Church Militant, where we struggle, to the Church Triumphant, where he is free from sin. Only his address is different, an eternal one!
We experience this one Church in heaven and earth during Communion. The veil, which separates the saints in eternity from those in this world, disappears in Christ! Communing in Him in His supper, we commune with all the saints of heaven!
Here’s how the book of Hebrews describes it: “You have come… to the heavenly Jerusalem, to countless angels in joyful assembly… to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:22). Receiving Christ in His Supper, in Him, we are one with the saints in heaven—and they are one with us.
A gravestone for John McCavitt in Killeney, Ireland reads: “Good people dear as you pass by, on my cold grave, do cast an eye. As you are now so once was I, as I am now so shall you be. Prepare for death and follow me.”
The surly side of us may well respond: “To follow you I’m not content until I know which way you went.” For us, this is not so, for we do realize where we will go. In Christ, you recognize where you’re going, how you’ll arrive there, and what an incredible destiny awaits you. All Saints’ Day reminds us of this reality every year! Amen.
