If there’s one thing that’s probably true for most people in the midst of these strange and hard times, it’s the difficulty of coming across encouraging words. Our eyes are far more likely to glance at discouraging (or even blatant attempts at panic-inducing) headlines than they are to locate words that point us toward anything that could truly be encouraging. And so I’ve been trying my best recently to pivot toward the places that encourage me deeply in speaking truth clearly.
One of those places has been the music of Andrew Peterson. I’ve been deeply influenced and helped by his songwriting for the last twenty years. As I was listening recently to one of his albums, a verse from the song “After the Last Tear Falls” jumped out at me again.
“After the last tear falls, after the last secret’s told,
After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone,
After the last child starves and the last girl walks the boulevard,
After the last year that’s just too hard.
There is love.”
This has been a hard year for so many people. Any time we see or hear about so many lives lost, death itself becomes more real to us. Now, people die every day, obviously. But it’s difficult to attempt to go about life-as-normal when every single day we turn on the television or scroll through our social media feeds and see a rising death count in the world. We’re constantly reminded that life is often hard and very short. What kind of hope could we possibly have, then? How could we possibly face such a painful and certain enemy as death? What can even be done about it?
I honestly don’t know how one could find intellectually and existentially satisfying answers to these questions apart from what I’m about to tell you, but I believe with all of my heart that these questions can be answered with certainty and hope.
And here is the great hope that this song brings to our attention: There will, one day, be a last death. There will be a last person to die in the history books. And then death itself, because of Jesus, will come completely undone, and those who have faith in him and not in themselves or any other thing will experience life with him forever. Everything will be made new. There will be no more death.
We see this described for us in one of the last chapters of the last book of the Bible.
[1] Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. [2] And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. [3] And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. [4] He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1-4).
Did you hear that? Death will be no more. There will be a last death––not just in this pandemic or from this specific virus. There will be a last death from anything. Ever.
As one of my former professors, the late, great, Grant Osborne, writes in his commentary on Revelation,
“This is the universal hope that has comforted the saints down through the ages. Death was the primary stepchild of sin (Rom. 5:12; James 1:15), and it is always presented in Scripture as a malignant force tormenting humankind. But Death, the last enemy, has itself been destroyed (1 Cor. 15:26; Rev. 20:14), and all its precursors (mourning, crying, and pain) have gone with it.”
But how is this possible? Well, as the Apostle Paul writes, “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned … as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” In other words, while death was ushered into this world because of sin and rebellion, Jesus Christ stood in our place and took our death upon himself at the cross so that we might have life in him. He then rose from the dead, defeating death for us and inviting us into newness of life. And one day he will stamp out all death forever.
What does that mean? It means that if you find yourself troubled by bad outcomes from a virus or any other tragedy that has the potential to bring about death, and you wonder what hope there might be for any of us since all of us will inevitably die, you can find a very real hope in knowing that God has made a way for you to be saved out of death and into life. The worst outcome of death apart from Jesus is actually the eternal separation from God that we all deserve because we wanted to be God and rebelled against him. This is why Jesus describes the outcome of death apart from him as “outer darkness.” It’s not unjust. It’s just what we deserve.
Yet even in the midst of our sin and rebellion, God set out to save us. Jesus took what we truly deserved at the cross––death and judgment––so that by putting our faith in him to save us rather than looking to ourselves or any other thing, we might get what he truly deserved––new life that starts now and goes on forever.
Again, I’m not sure what any kind of hope could possibly look like in the face of death apart from Christ. But I am sure that while we definitely have a great need for a savior because of the pain and certainty of death, we also have a great Savior for our need who grants eternal life with him to all who call out to him for salvation. His name is Jesus. It’s because of his work accomplished for us that after the last death there is perfect love, forever. Do you know him?
