In Hebrews 2 verse 15, which Trevor mentioned in his talk, starting at verse 14. Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared their humanity, so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. Fear of death is a fearsome master. It holds people all their lives in fear, fear of death. Physical death is one thing that you can absolutely guarantee. Not even taxes are certain, but death is certain. Every person eventually will die physically. And it is the knowledge of this fact that enslaves us. This dark, mysterious enemy that we know is one day going to come and take us. It could come without warning. We're constantly looking over our shoulder. When is death going to come? When is death going to take me? The Hebrew, well there's a number of Hebrew words used for death, but a common word and a word that you see often in the Psalms, it was used in Psalm 116 that I read, is the word Morveth, often translated Sheol, or the grave. In the King James Version it's translated Hell. and it's equivalent to the word in the New Testament, Hades. And it wasn't specifically understood as a place of punishment for evil people. It was just that the dark, shadowy place on the other side of the grave that everybody went to, it was dark and mysterious. We don't know exactly what happens on the other side, but everyone suffers the same fate. Everyone goes to the grave, to Sheol. And the word has implications of asking, demanding, requiring. The grave demands, the grave requires our life and one day the grave will take our life and there's no resisting it when it comes. In Psalm 89, the psalmist says, How long, O Lord, will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire? Remember how fleeting is my life. For what futility you have created all men. What man can live and not see death, or save himself from the power of the grave? Every culture in the history of mankind has known the reality of the power of the grave, its insatiableness, its power, and the inability that we have to overcome it. And so we fear it. We fear death. We fear death because death is unnatural. We as human beings are not designed for death. And every human being knows, at the core of their being, I am not designed to die. When God created Adam from the dust, the ground, he breathed into his nostrils and Adam became a living creature. Human beings are designed to be creatures full of life, full of the life of God himself that he gives to us. We're more than just animated meat. We are designed to be exuding and overflowing with life as creatures made in God's image. We're not immortal in and of ourselves, God alone is the immortal one, but we are created by, in the image of the immortal God, we are created to be clothed with his immortality. And so the reality of death, physical death, of disease, of decay, is such a contradiction to who we are as human beings. It is incongruent to our very nature. The way we deal with that incongruency is we either try and suppress it Pretend it's never going to happen, we live as if we're immortal or invincible, or we try and laugh in the face of it. We jump out of planes with parachutes and off bridges with big rubber bands tied to our ankles. I overheard a conversation earlier about some guys who went rock climbing around Granite Island. Sounds like fun, if only my wife would let me do it. But the reason it's fun is because in some way we're cheating death. We're laughing in the face of death and we think somehow, by doing that, we will overcome our fear of death. So we fear death because it's unnatural, it's not what we're created for. But we also fear death because death, the physical death that we see around us and we see in ourselves, actually speaks to us of the reality of our condition as human beings. If death is so incongruent with being a human being, then something has gone terribly wrong for human beings, for death to have gained mastery over us, to have that control over us. Physical death and decay is a sign to us that constantly the human race is living under the wages of sin. The wages of sin is death, so when we see death we are reminded we are facing the consequences of our sin. Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgement. And we strive constantly to ignore that reality, but really our fear of death is a fear of judgement, because we know when I die, I'll come face to face with my Creator and I'll have to give an account. And I know because I'm living under His wrath, I'm living in my sin, I know that that account will be wanting. And so I fear the judgement that comes to me after death. We fear death because we know it's what we deserve. We know we deserve that judgement. That means that death is not just an event that will happen at the end of our lives, but it's something in which we live every day. Because we live under God's wrath every day, when I say we, I'm speaking on behalf of the whole human race. Because we are under God's wrath every moment of every day, we are also living in death every moment of every day. Paul talks about the widows when he's writing to Timothy, and he talks about them, the widow who lives for pleasure, who lives for herself, is dead even while she lives. And that's descriptive of the whole human race. We have a life of sorts, we have physical life, we have a life that's unto ourselves, but really we are dead even as we live. So death in essence is not a biological phenomenon, but it's a relational phenomenon. We are dead in our fractured relationships with God. We are dead in our fractured relationships with one another. And this is the essential reason for the dysfunction in our lives. We are essentially introspective and selfish, living for ourselves, living for our own pleasure, And the scriptures speak of us being alive to ourselves, but by being alive to ourselves, by living for ourselves, we are dead to God, we are truly dead. And so biological death, decay, sickness, disease, is really a sign, a physical outward sign of the reality that is actually taking place within human beings and their broken relationship with the Father. Because of this, death is breathing down our necks every moment of every day. It's like the painting in the haunted house with the eyes that follow you wherever you go. Death is always there waiting, hanging over us like this fearful spectre, this fearful burden. But our bondage to death is not just a subjective thing. We are in bondage to the fear of death, and that's a terrible bondage. But even if we were to convince ourselves, brainwash ourselves, that death was not to be feared, just a part of life, that it's necessary maybe to promote the species. Whatever reasons we come up with to deny the reality of death and that death is fearful, even if we convince ourselves we will still be under the bondage of death, because death is directly related to God's wrath. God's wrath is a concrete reality that is there above the human race and because his wrath is on the human race, then death is a concrete reality. So the only way to be freed from death is to be justified, to have that wrath dealt with. And the only way to be released from the fear of death is to know that you are a justified person. Our society is very much driven, in fact all of human societies are very much driven by the desire to remove death as this dark spectre hanging over us. How many millions of dollars, billions of dollars are spent on medical research to overcome the diseases and the frailties that eventually send us to the grave? how many billions of dollars is spent on developing technology to improve our life, all these things we invest our lives into to try and escape this reality of death. We're trying to take our minds off what the writer of Ecclesiastes says when he said, when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had taught to achieve, everything was vanity. a chasing after the wind, nothing was gained under the sun. And so I guess one of the biggest fears we have about death is that when I die, that'll be the end of me, myself. All the things that I've strived for and worked for, the kingdom that I've built up around myself, Like the man who built his barns and filled them with grain and God said, you fool, tonight your life will be demanded of you and all of that will come to nothing. My greatest fear, I speak not just theologically but personally, my greatest fear when I think of death is that it will be I have to lose myself and everything that I've worked for. No wonder people turned away from Jesus when he said, if anyone wants to come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. In essence, if you're going to come after me, you must die. You must die to yourself. You must be willing to take up the cross and actually give up your life to follow me. It's not just about the natural outworking of our incompetence. We sinned and so the natural outworking of that is death. If you break the speed limit you might crash your car and you'll die. But it is an actual handing over by God of us to the outworking, to the consequences of our sin in His wrath. And as I said, because the wrath of God is a concrete reality, so is the bondage of death and the fear it instils. And I don't think we can ever eradicate that fear from our hearts of death, no matter how hard we try. Even the fact that I go to these great lengths to cheat death and to deny its power over Even that is proof that I'm fearful of it, because I'm trying constantly to push it out of my mind. And death is final. Once I'm dead, I'm dead. The grave is unyielding, as it says in the Song of Solomon. It's a place of no return. And when I'm dead, not just physically, but dead towards God, there's no way that I can somehow clamber my way out of it. What can a dead person do to get out of the grave? Absolutely nothing. You're dead. There is nothing that we can do of ourselves to escape this reality of death. It needs to be an action from outside of ourselves. For someone who is stronger than death, who has the power over death, to reach into the grave and take us and bring us back to life. This is what God has done in His Son. Because of His great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves. You are dead. You haven't done anything of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast. God has done in his Son what we were neither able to do or even wanted to do. He has taken us from death to life. He has freed us from this dark master. But he hasn't done it by removing death. Death is still a reality in our lives and in the world around us. Death, in a sense, still has a sting. If any of you have lost a loved one, you know the pain that comes with death, the ripple effect that it has on relatives and friends and loved ones. So death is still here, death still is in our lives in some way, and it will only be on the final day, that we will be able to say, death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting? Revelation 21.4 says there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. It's something that we look forward to, but in this present life we still have to wrestle with death. Even Paul, who knew the victory and the deliverance of Christ, cries out, what a wretched man I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Paul, who knew the justification and the freedom that Christ brought him, still struggled as he looked at himself and he struggled with his sin and his flesh and he knew that death was still at work in some way in him and he wrestled with that. And it's not a guarantee that, as believers, that we will necessarily welcome our death when it comes. Many strong, faithful believers have still wrestled with their own death when it's come upon them. So death is still very real in our lives. We grow old, we struggle, we get sick, we have pain. Even though death is present still in our lives, it no longer has mastery over us. It is no longer something that enslaves us to fear. Paul tells the Philippians that his desire is to exalt Christ in his body, whether by life or by death. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. So death has now become something through which Christ may be exalted. So what has God done to turn from what a wretched man I am, who can save me from this body of death, to live as Christ and to die as gain? God has set us free from death, not by removing it, but by handing us over to it. I'd like to turn to Romans chapter 7 verse 9. Once I was alive, apart from the law, I was alive to myself. I had that life It seemed like life. I was alive to myself, fulfilling my own desires and trying to find fulfilment and satisfaction. Once I was alive, apart from the law, but really I was dead to God. But when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me and through the commandment put me to death. So then the law is holy and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. God hands us over to death by giving us his law which brings our sin out, which reveals our sin to ourselves and it condemns us and it puts us to death. And he does this not so that somehow we can work through it, so that we can think, oh, I'm a sinner and I deserve death and I'm living in death now. What am I going to do to somehow work it out and to clamber out of this grave that I'm in? Because he doesn't hand us over to death on our own. He sends his son to enter into our death. and to die on our behalf, and we are united with him in that death. The Christian faith is unique amongst all the religions of the world in that the heart of our Gospel, the greatest news ever declared, is the death of a man, the death of Christ. It was by the death of Christ that he set us free from bondage to death, but it was the death of the Christ who shared our humanity, who took us all in himself to that place of God's wrath, as we heard from Dean, to the place where the wages of sin were paid in full. Wrath has been dealt with and so the wages of sin, death, has also been dealt with. He was delivered over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification. For Christ's love compels us because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, no longer be alive to themselves, but for him, be alive to him, be alive to God, who died for them and who was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come. The old, the body of death, condemned by the law, facing the inexorable embrace of Sheol, the grave. The old that cries out, what a wretched man I am, who can save me from this body of death. The old has gone, the new has come, the new life of freedom in the spirit, with no condemnation, no enslaving fear, an assurance of a secure future when God will wipe every tear from our eyes and banish every fear. I'd like to read to you a vision of sorts. It's not something I actually saw, just something that a few years ago I just found myself writing. Partly it was after I'd read an evangelistic tract that had implied that I was desperate to find God and there were certain things that I needed to do in order to find God. I found myself standing on the edge of a cliff. Behind me stretched a vast barren plain, and before me a wide, yawning chasm. I edged forward to peer into it, but had to scramble backwards with my heart in my mouth as the edge began to crumble under my feet, sending sand and stones flying into the emptiness. I never heard them hit the bottom. A haze of dust hung in the air for a moment before slowly sinking, and as I laid sprawled on my back I had a second to process what I had seen for only an instant. The bottom of the chasm, if it had a bottom, was shrouded in blackness, a darkness which seemed almost fluid and somehow alive as if it were a trapped creature wanting to escape its pit and to pull me down. I know what this is, I thought to myself with a cautious chuckle. I'm in one of those tracts. Bridge to life or something. Pretty soon, a giant wooden bridge in the shape of a cross will appear and enable me to walk over to the other. For the first time I raised my eyes above ground level and what I saw made my mind go blank with sheer terror. Any desire to cross to the other side of the chasm immediately fled as I saw him. He appeared to be a man, yet his form could not be focused on, for it shone with a brilliance which seemed to heighten all of my senses to a point where I felt I must die from the intense pain to the whole of my being. While the sight of him was unbearable, my eyes were drawn against my will to continue staring. Holiness, purity, Righteousness, wrath, and I knew it but denied it, love, were words which seemed three-dimensional as I understood for the first time the full meaning of the phrase, your God is a consuming fire. The pain of my senses I knew to be the pain of my own sins, a lifetime's expression of disdain and indifference to Him, a life of anti-love, which I knew well deserved his just wrath, a wrath which I realised was soon to fall upon me as I saw with horror that the light was increasing in his form, becoming more distinct. He was coming to me across the black chasm. I jumped to my feet, tore my eyes from his face and turned towards the plane, which suddenly appeared incredibly appealing. which suddenly appeared incredibly appealing despite its cracked soil and hard, dry thorns. And I ran. I ran with an energy I'd never known before. My legs were empowered by hate and anger, pride and guilt. Selfishness was the fuel which I was sure would carry me far from his intruding presence. Yet when I glanced backwards, I saw that I had only moved a few feet from the edge of the chasm, even though it seemed I had been running for hours. Lust and apathy increased my pace, and the love of my own life brought me new momentum as the flight extended to days, weeks, years. Yet every time I looked back, I was just a fraction farther from the edge, and His encroaching presence also near. Eventually I just closed my eyes and ran with my head down, oblivious to the thorns as they tore at my flesh, and ripped my clothes to shreds, leaving me bloody and naked. Finally, he caught me. A second before, I felt the burning of a thousand suns, and then his arms were around me, clamping my arms to my side and stilling my legs in a vice-like hold. My effort to struggle lasted only a second, for I was helpless to move a muscle, and when I opened my mouth to cry out, my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and only an inaudible whisper emerged. In an instant we were back at the cliff edge, and then we were falling, down, down, turning and spinning, towards the pool of darkness which reached up long grainy tendrils to pull us down. The shadows engulfed us, and he still held me in his inexorable embrace. The darkness, like a swarm of flies, filled my mouth and nostrils and ears, and as they did so they stung like hornets. My mind and heart were filled with an overwhelming shame, as the guilt of my sin was poured over me with all its terrible, eternal consequences. Even now, his arms still held me firmly to himself, as if we were one person, and somehow I knew he too was experiencing my shame and thinking my thoughts of fear. Although the pain was not diminished, I knew that he felt it too, as if he were me. The blackness had become thick like a bog and was pressing in from all sides as if we were at the bottom of the ocean. I knew that very soon we, or I, would be crushed by its infinite weight. At the very moment I thought I could bear no more, I realised with surprise that we had changed direction. We were going up, not down. The blackness began to melt and dissolve around us, and the searing pain with it, as we rose into the light, still intensely bright, but no longer unbearable. Never once during this dreadful excursion had the grip of his embrace loosened. Before I knew it I had been placed on my feet on the far side of the chasm. The bruised and bloody sores that had covered my body were gone, and my flesh felt as fresh and tender as a newborn child. As I stood there, straight and tall, he placed over my shoulders a cloak of pure white, which shone with unimaginable brilliance as it reflected his light which now surrounded me. Guilt and shame and death had been left at the bottom of the chasm, which now appeared as a shrinking crack in the rock underneath my feet. The rock was red, indelibly stained not with my own blood, but his. blood which sang eternally of the strong love of Him who had pursued me to my grave, and carried me in Himself through death and judgement. Suddenly I felt within His embrace my arms were freed. He turned me around to look at His glorious face. My arms reached down in thankfulness and praise, and I embraced Him. We have been united with Jesus in his death and we have been united with Jesus in his life. The victory he has over death is our victory. In Romans 6 verse 8, now if we have died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again. Death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. Jesus in his life on earth could go into the bedroom of a little girl that had died and say, little girl, get up. He could go to the village of Nain and interrupt the funeral procession. and say to the young man, young man, get up. He could go to the grave of his friend Lazarus, who had been dead for four days, already his body was decaying. He could say, Lazarus, come forth. He is the one who has victory over the grave, victory over death. And we are one with him and so we share in that victory. Verse 11 of Romans 6, in the same way count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. In the same way that since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again, death no longer has mastery over him, in the same way count yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. For us now, death is no longer the dark, menacing enemy, but it's a door that the Father opens to us and says, welcome home, come in and share my rest. God, who's rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead for our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you've been saved, and he goes on in that vein. It's in that context that he talks about mercy. It's unbelievable mercy. If you still do not hear it today as unbelievable mercy, you are still blinded, you've slipped into an evangelical ghetto, and you're down in a deep hole where you can't hear or think anything except go through the motions. You are in a terrible state. All sin has its origin in the fact that we want to judge what is right and be our own judges. We set ourselves up as Christians against God. For this reason, God encounters us in the flesh, face to face, and the person of his incarnate Son, Jesus. What think you of Jesus? I sometimes get appalled that I think of Jesus as a theological principle. I think of Jesus as a verse in the Bible. I think of Jesus as a code or a theology by which I must adjust my lives. But the incarnate Son, God in human flesh, Were somebody who had touched his arm, he would have felt warmth and it would have quivered. And in human flesh, God confronted us and confronts us in that same man in human flesh. Still human flesh. Still human flesh. Glorified. Still confronts us. For this reason, God encounters us in the flesh, face to face with the person of his Son. This is so that God may pass on to this one the judgment we have merited. There are a lot of ways you could say that. One quote for so many of them, Christ suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, but it's just a text. So this warm, fleshy human being, I mean, this I and Thou, and he's Thou, intimately linked with me, who understands me in a way in which no one else could ever understand. I, Thou, he's a Thou, not an it, Thou. And so we're told he died in our place, he died for our sins, he's our representative, and he's our great high priest, and he reconciled us, he's our redeemer, and repeated and repeated through the Gospels, we hear that story. But for the Son of God to be made flesh meant for him to exist with us under the wrath of the loving God. to be made flesh, he lived under God's wrath. He lived in our flesh. It's without sin. As our flesh and bone, God then is in the right to be against him. And to be flesh for Jesus meant to be in a state of perishing before God, ultimately on the cross. But it also means that Jesus was broken and destroyed by God. Others have cried Jesus' words in Christ with the cross. That's a very important thing to do, and I'm going to do it now. As the flesh of our flesh and bone of our bones, God is right against him, and Jesus in this ministry concedes that the Father is right and is in the right with all that he does, and so the Son does the will of the Father all the way through and is obedient to him. God's sentence fell on him. And as a man, Jesus is judged like us, as the Son of God. Jesus has the competence to allow this to happen to him. If that all seems a bit academic and theological, it means that for the sake of the best, the worst had to happen to this man, and for the sake of the best, in his union with us, he's taken us with himself, and in his own dying, as God's hand comes upon him, as he is judged by God, so we too are judged with him, and God's wrath burns up all the muck and the dross and the deceit and all the future religion is all dealt with in this man. We're crucified with Christ. The corrupt humanity that could do nothing but sin was brought to an end at Golgotha and God's wrath, which is a total judgment there, is destroyed. Just out of Spaulding, we had a big bushfire earlier last year. It was a bit of a threat and it took a long while for them to put it out. I went to preach at a place called Booberowie just before Easter, and we'd had a rain. And to come out of church, I looked up and I was with the minister, and out into the south-west of the area was this big hill they called Bald Hill. It had been totally devastated by the fire. It was the first place to go green. Because God's wrath has fallen on Christ, all wrath has been destroyed. We are Christians, we know about that. If we live against the love that has brought that, we still know that wrath. So we have to look back to see what's been done about it, and believe in it, and change our minds. Take account. Don't whitewash what we're saying. This is a critical school. If the sun shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. The heart of man is deceitfully wicked, including Christian man. The heart of a Christian man or woman is deceitfully wicked and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it? But he bore our sins in his body on the tree, he took our pain and our grief, and he bore our wrath. On the cross, after Christ had descended into that, you'll know in John's Gospel it says he bowed his head before the Father. He had completed the work. He cried out, it's finished, it's completed. We no longer then need to rationalise our sin as a Christian woman. You don't need to do that anymore. If you've been rationalising your behaviour, today is the day to stop doing it. You don't need to. It's mucking you up. The psalmist says, Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not hide my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Have you done that? Have you actually done that? Have you done it? Just acknowledge the state that you've got into. He says, and he forgave him, that my health returned and I lived and stood before God. For there's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. In overthrowing wrath for a moment, God says to us, I hid my face from you. But with everlasting love, I'll have compassion or mercy. I'm in. Seize the Lord, you Redeemer.