“Death has a sting…For Now”
Today’s Purpose with Perspective post is written by my guest and dear friend, Joellen Lee. Joellen is a teacher, mom of 3, wife and friend to many. She loves to pour her love for Jesus into others as she encourages them to seek His Word, journal prayers and sit at His feet. Check out her perspective on a heavy topic that brings pain, but not without purpose and a promise…
If you’ve been raised in the “church” or even attended a time or two, you might recall the shortest verse in the Bible. Do you know what it is? Yes, without hesitation and possibly in unison, you would quickly reply, “Jesus wept.”
Indeed, He did. For so long, I assumed that He cried real tears as a result of his loyal friend and brother suffering illness and ultimately losing his earthly life. I thought how difficult it was for Jesus to have such a close and intimate relationship with Lazarus and his sisters, and then to see the devastation in their eyes as they cried out to him as if to ask, “Where were you? If only you had been here?”
On August 31, 2023, those same questions began to run through my mind after my dad died. “Where were you, Jesus? If only you had been there, this would not have happened?” I had been walking and abiding in Christ for a long time, and I began to hate my questions, doubts, and unbelief that started to arise within my soul. I did not want to offend the Lord. I was completely torn. I wondered how I could ask such questions of my God and friend, but the other half of my heart asked, “How could I not?” Over the past year, I have been forced to wrestle with God after death literally punched me in the gut. Death was a shock to my system. It felt wrong, unnatural, gross, and final. The effects changed me in a way that sometimes could not be expressed in words. It wreaked havoc on all my senses and cut deep to my core. Death, in a sense, came in uninvited and quickly exited taking a piece of me with it. Death is devastating. Death has a sting.
As I reflect, I think about how I wept over death just as Jesus did many times. But Jesus’ tears were not just from the loss of life. He wept over what sin had wrought. What sin had broken. What sin had tried to destroy. Jesus’s first taste of death came way before the senseless murder of his cousin John the Baptist, or even the passing of his beloved friend Lazarus. In the garden, Christ was present as Adam and Eve unleashed havoc on perfection, and death came to wreck the party for the first time ever. It was wrong, unnatural, gross, but definitely NOT FINAL. The pain and shock had begun to cloud my vision of what that truly meant. You see, The Father’s love and protection for His children is so deep and far and wide that he would never have let sin and death win. He has always had a plan to deal with and defeat the sting that plagues us to this day. Jesus not only tasted death, but became death so that the wrong of death would be made right. That not only would we be saved from the sin in our heart and freed to live abundantly now, but to live abundantly with Him in eternity free from this piercing sting.
However, we are living in the already, but not yet. Christ has died, was buried, has risen again, and sits at the right hand of God the Father. The groaning earth still lives and breathes with the effects of sin and death, and as we come face to face with it, the sting is still so very real. But the good news is, so are His promises! You see, death only has its say for a moment. The Lord spoke through the prophet Isaiah stating without a doubt that He WILL remove the cloud of doom and the shadow of death that hangs over us all. He WILL swallow up death forever and wipe away every ounce of pain that sin and death let in. And as the Apostle Paul states in 1 Corinthians, we can be assured that those in Christ will rise with Him and He WILL have the final say! Death WILL be defeated once and for all, and these words will echo through eternity.
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
Death has a sting…for now.
