Death, where is your sting?

By Michael Walker

Within the Western church in this 21st century, for the first time in man's history, death is as much a taboo subject as without, yet the Christian's greatest hope is not for this present life. Instead it is in the “afterlife”, where we talk of “being with Jesus” or “going to Heaven” as though these are better options for us than our present life. Yet, the way we live our lives does not reflect these ideas. And how can we live our lives in the truth of death, unless we know what the bible tells us about our certain hope – our “afterlife”?

This book looks into what the bible says about death and what happens after death, and consequently what the Christian's future is, so it is a book of great hope where the saint has much to look forward to after death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716246159

Michael Walker

Michael Walker is the bestselling author of Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood and What You Want Is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star Was Born. He has written about popular culture for the New York Times and is a contributing editor at the Hollywood Reporter. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

Preface

I strongly encourage you to check out Bible references and particularly the context of those references. Sometimes it is useful to refer to multiple versions of the Bible so as to build up a more accurate picture of a particular verse or phrase. Also a Bible dictionary can prove to be invaluable because the Bible was written in Hebrew (Old Testament) or Greek (New Testament) and was also initially written to people in a quite different culture to our 21st Century Western European one. There are, in the Bible, many culturalisms. That is, words, phrases or entire passages that can only be correctly understood by knowing something of the culture of the people who wrote it or those to whom it was written.

Related to this are the actual words that bible translators choose to use to denote a Hebrew or Greek word and we continually need to be aware that translators are fallible people. Relevant to this book is that word Hell that, as far as I know, all the King James variants of the bible (e.g. AKJV, MKJV, NKJV, KJ2000, UKJV) use that word to translate Sheol or Hades. The problem here is that in our 21st century culture, the popular understanding of the word Hell does NOT equate to Sheol. So, why even today, bible translators are translating Sheol into Hell is a mystery, rather than introducing the reader to the accurate word Sheol. And there are plenty of other examples. My reason for talking about translators is to not pull them down, but rather to encourage the reader to verify for themselves the accuracy of the translation and to read the bible with that in mind. On the subject of paraphrases (for example, The Message translation), there are times when a paraphrase may be very beneficial, but it will rarely help in an in-depth bible study.

I will also give a further word of warning about Bible translations. There are some modern versions and paraphrases (e.g. New Living Translation (NLT) and Today's New International Version (TNIV)) that have diluted some of the more politically incorrect verses. I suspect this comes partly from a humanist influence that seeks to make the Bible more user friendly, but, who knows? I could be wrong. As always, you the reader must decide for yourself.

Generally, I have tried to apply a classical literal reading of scripture (the sensus literalis rather than modernist or post modernist) that takes into account the literary style of the scripture verse, for example whether it's a historical narrative, a poem, a letter, a parable, a prophecy and so on.

I have tried to keep to a minimum any of my own interpretations, though it would be impossible to not include some. If you have a different interpretation then that is fine – you must hear what God is saying to you personally. We do have freedom to form our own private interpretations, but what we do NOT have is the freedom to distort and twist even the smallest part of scripture to try and make it say what we wish. I would only caution you that your interpretation should not contradict the overall revelation of God in the Bible. The reason for this is that scripture is very good at interpreting itself and that it all hangs together as a whole. It is not a series of disjointed sections where each section can be interpreted independently of any other section.

This work expresses my theology as at the time of writing and I reserve the right to change my theology should God reveal different things to me, or illuminate passages of scripture that could change my theology.

Finally, there are other ancient writings that did not make it into the bible for various reasons, but can shed some extra light on this subject. I have not included any references from these non-biblical sources, not because I doubt them, but because they do not carry the same weight of authenticity as the bible. A couple of such books are: The Apocalypse of Moses (or The Death of Adam and Eve) and the Apocalypse of Paul. I don't doubt there are others, but these two are freely available on the internet and are worthy of being read with the caution that they are not scripture.

As with all other Christians, I am on a journey and would appreciate your grace and mercy for any errors or misinterpretations you may find here.

Death, where is your sting? – a bible study

Introduction

This study has its origins in the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, when most of the world went into an over-reaction and governments and mass media started giving the impression that this was to be a major killer. On social media, the impression I got from most people was one of dread, terror and fear and this was from both Christians and non-Christians.

Upon reflecting on this common response I became aware that, in 22 years, I had never heard any preaching or teaching (either in-depth or superficial) on what the bible tells us about death and what happens to us (whether Christian or not) after we die.

It also occurred to me that this subject was as taboo within the church as without. This is despite the fact that while we should have a great hope in our mortal lives, our greatest hope comes after death, that the point behind our faith is the afterlife, that Jesus and the cross was all about what happens after death, that God is desperate to be with us. In the world of modern Christianity, there is a knowledge of how important it is to be saved, but I wonder if too many people are at best only vaguely aware of what they are saved from and what the alternative actually is. What a person is saved from might commonly be conceived as Hell with all its horrors, which has often been portrayed by artists great and small since time began. Artists such as Bosch, Bruegel, Kazunobu, di Marcovaldo, Doré, Napoletano, Limbourg Brothers and Swanenburg (and countless others) have portrayed Hell with controlling demons doing unspeakable things to their powerless victims. Over the past couple of thousand years, some of these visualisations have been used by the established church to instil a level of fear into the congregations for the sordid purposes of control and manipulation, rather than God's love, compassion, care, provision etc being the purpose for a person to be part of the church.

This taboo subject is despite the inevitability of death and the many funerals we are likely to attend, where we talk about being promoted to glory or going to Heaven or going to be with Jesus as though death is the doorway to something better. The shallowness of these statements is exposed when we then fail to talk about death, to ponder death, to debate death and, dare I say it, to prepare ourselves for either our own or others' deaths. Death is something that we (I generalise here) actively avoid, commonly through cocktails of drugs that only delay the inevitable. If a death is not a natural death, then there needs to be someone we can blame for the tragedy. Sometimes, even when a death is natural, someone needs to be held to account. In the wider society, death should not happen. We put our elderly into homes so we do not burden ourselves with them and their impending demise. We insulate ourselves from the inevitable deterioration that an elderly person goes through prior to death. We commit their care into the hands of strangers who have no personal interest in the elderly person or knowledge of them (except from what is filled out on a form). I know there are some very good carers who do genuinely care, but, from my own experience, they are not common. When an elderly, frail person dies, there often has to be an inquest to determine the cause of death and to determine whether more could have been done to prolong the person's life, regardless of that quality of life.

I know that I am generalising here and that there are exceptions. There are people who know they are ready to die. There are families who know that it is time for their loved one to die. In a real sense, they are the latter day pioneers of death, they have reached a place I believe we all need to get to.

With my own mother and father, their final years were not what they would have wanted – they were being kept alive with various cocktails of drugs while having no discernable quality of life. I won't go into all the details, but generally we would have put our pets down before they had got to where my mother and father were. When my mother and father actually died, I had said my goodbye's a long time before and it became a relief when they did die as they were then out their utterly miserable existences. And I am not blaming anyone, but it is a reflection of the world we live in where death must be avoided no matter what misery must be endured. Also I am not advocating euthanasia, but something has gone seriously wrong in our society. A part of these issues are modern medicines, the health system, pharmaceutical companies, political correctness, societal norms and the general lack of belief in an afterlife that could be infinitely better than the pre-death life. While this book only deals with the afterlife, those other aspects could usefully be discussed much more widely within society.

I find it interesting that there have been many muslims who have been happy to do literally suicidal works in the belief that their afterlife will be one of many rewards. Our western mindset considers them completely mad such that they should be locked