Sometime when we’re children, we discover the reality of death—perhaps a grandma no longer with us—and later in life we come to understand that mortality is something in everyone’s future, so what should we think about this existential fact?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #250 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
My wife and I are now in our 70s. When we first reached this milestone, I remember saying to her, “Well, we are now in the decade when every so often, we’ll hear about a friend or acquaintance passing, or they will hear about us.” I wasn’t trying to be morbid or funny, just honest.
This past week I heard of a high school classmate who passed. I knew her from study hall and years later a couple of interactions on Facebook, but I haven’t seen her since we graduated in 1970. She was a friend but not a close one, so I am not sure why her transition to heaven struck me, but it did. Maybe because she was my age. It seemed so sudden and, well, too early. But her homegoing caused me to do some thinking about my own mortality.
Scripture is remarkably honest about life. It does not romanticize the human condition. It does not promise an easy road. Instead, it speaks plainly: we are born into a world marked by sorrow, struggle, and mortality. We are, the Scripture says, born in sin (Ps. 51:5). This isn’t a reference to wrongdoing on the part of our parents but to the nature of the world we live in. Then, at some point, “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27).
But the Bible also proclaims something astonishing — for those who belong to Christ, death itself is transformed from defeat into victory.
After humanity’s rebellion, what’s called the “Fall,” or fall from grace or fall into sin, God speaks consequences into the fabric of creation—pain in childbirth, toil in labor, frustration in work, and eventual death become part of human experience (Genesis 3:16-19). The ground resists us. Our bodies decay. Relationships strain. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
This is not accidental. The apostle Paul explains in Romans 5:12 that through one man sin entered the world—that’s Adam—and death through sin — and so death spread to all.
Job captures the human condition with poetic bluntness: In Job 5:7, “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” And again, in Job 14:1, “Man who is born of woman is few of days and full of trouble.” Moses echoes this sober assessment in Psalm 90:10 — our years are marked by toil and sorrow.
The Bible is not naïve. It recognizes hospital rooms, broken relationships, gravesides, and unanswered questions. Christianity does not begin with denial of suffering. It begins with truth about it.
But that is not the end of the story. If trouble is universal, is it meaningless? Scripture answers: no. Affliction, while painful, is not purposeless in the hands of God.
The psalmist David makes a startling confession in Psalm 119:71: “It was good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.”
James intensifies this paradox in James 1:2-4: “Count it all joy… when you meet trials… for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”
The Apostle Paul provides the spiritual progression in Romans 5:3-5: Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope.
Notice that suffering should not produce despair in the believer — it produces hope. Not because pain feels good, but because God is shaping something eternal through it. Not because we are tough, but because of God’s providence, promises, and presence in our lives.
And importantly, trouble does not mean abandonment. Psalm 34:19 says, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.”
And Paul calls God in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 the “Father of mercies and God of all comfort.”
The Christian life does not bypass suffering — it reinterprets it. Trials become tools in the hands of a sovereign Father. Yet even refined saints still face death. So, what then?
Death entered through sin. It is called an enemy in Scripture. And yet, for the believer, death is no longer ultimate defeat.
The prophet speaks tenderly in Isaiah 57:1-2: “The righteous is taken away from calamity; he enters into peace.”
In the New Testament, the tone becomes even more explicit. In Philippians 1:21-23, Paul writes, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain… to depart and be with Christ… is far better.”
Far better.
Death, for the Christian, is not annihilation. It is not “soul sleep.” It is departure. It is relocation into the presence of Christ. The deceased believer is not “gone” in the sense of disappeared forever but in the words of Scripture the deceased believer is merely “absent,” now more alive than ever in heaven.
Paul reinforces this confidence in 2 Corinthians 5:8: to be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord. This will be true for us one day if we are believers. It is true of loved ones who’ve passed if they were believers. Our hope, our peace that passes understanding in the face of their loss is based upon the fact that God holds them in his hand.
The final book of the Bible adds a beatitude to death itself. In Revelation 14:13, Scripture states, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord… that they may rest from their labors.”
Notice the language: blessed… rest… peace… gain. Christian hope does not celebrate death as natural. It celebrates Christ as victorious. Christian hope is not a vain wish in what might be, but a confident expectation of what will be based upon a historical fact, the finished work of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection.
At the grave of Lazarus, Jesus makes a staggering claim in John 11:25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Death is real — but it is not final. Indeed, death is only physical: “and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecc. 12:7).
Paul announces the culmination in 1 Corinthians 15:54-57: “Death is swallowed up in victory… Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Swallowed up. Overcome. Conquered.
The final chapters of Scripture lift our eyes even higher. Revelation 21:4 promises a day when God will wipe away every tear — and death shall be no more.
The Bible moves from a garden where death enters… to a city where death is abolished.
Understandably, we celebrate the birth of babies and mourn at funerals, but thinking about these events biblically there is irony in this. Babies are born into a world fractured by sin and trouble. Yet through Christ, death becomes gain.
For those in Christ: from dust… to trouble… to redemption… to resurrection…to eternity in heaven. And that is the hope of the believer.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best.
If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. For more Christian commentary, see my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com, or check my YouTube channel @DrRexRogers.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
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