Scripture Introduction
Bobby’s first deep-sea fishing trip turned into what he felt certain was the dumbest decision ever made. With every pitch and roll of the boat, he doubted he could survive the remaining four hours of the excursion. Who would believe that seasickness could be so awful? One of the deckhands tried to cheer him: “Don’t worry, young fella. Nobody ever died of seasickness.” Bobby responded: “You’ve just taken away my last hope for relief.”
Sometimes people speak of death like Bobby on the fishing boat—it’s only good is blessed release from pain. We even have the word “euthanasia,” derived from two Greek words meaning “good” and “death,” which is generally defined as “a deliberate intervention with the purpose of ending a life in order to relieve intractable suffering.”
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a student lament how terrible her life has been. She turned to me and said, “That’s how I know I will go to heaven; there has to be something to make up for the hell I have lived here.” Certain she deserved better than life provided, death would relieve her suffering.
But God does not make escape from misery the great benefit of death. Instead, both life and death are glorious because both offer opportunities of fellowship with Jesus. Last week we considered the first part: how to live for Christ. Today we discover the gain of death, promised in Philippians 1.21-26.
[Read Philippians 1.21-26. Pray.]
Introduction
John Piper claims that a critical question for our faith is this: “If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there?” (God is the Gospel).
In one sense the question is unfair because we cannot really separate the presence of Christ from the blessings which flow from his hand. The Bible describes heaven with images of delightful things. But Pastor John’s point deserves our thought: what have we set our hearts on? Is what I really desire from life a few pleasantries, an existence mostly free from sorrow and pain? Is a life worth living one in which I escape many of the troubles which threatens my ease? Not that it is evil to desire less trouble in life, but what do I live for—comfort for Glenn or communion with God?
It makes a practical difference, doesn’t it? When my heart longs for the pleasures of the flesh, then problems in this life turn me away from the pursuit of God. If, however, “my soul thirsts for God, for the living God,” then “trials of various kinds” which test my faith and “produce steadfastness” are all joy because there I share in the sufferings of Christ and experience the sustaining Spirit.
How do we know if we have that faith? One way is to answer Pastor Piper’s question, to ask myself what I hope to gain in heaven. If my heart longs for a closer walk with God, then “death is gain,” and I will live for Christ today so that I begin to have some of what I hope for in death. To live is Christ because death is gain! Such was Paul’s passion in life and hope in death, and God wants it to make it ours. Notice, first…
1. God Makes Death Gain for Those Who Long to Know More of Christ
Francis Bacon (English philosopher of the early 17th century) felt that “Men naturally fear death as children fear the dark.” What a surprise, then, that the Bible can call death, “gain.” How can this be? Because death instantly transports the believer into the presence of God and of his son, Jesus Christ. Look at verse 23: “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” Paul insists that leaving his mortal body immediately places him in the presence of Christ—which he wants that more than anything else!
Nor is this the only place which depicts death as the doorway into the throne room of God. Christ was crucified between two other men. One of the criminals railed at Jesus, demanding that if he were truly God he should save both them and himself. The other, however, rebuked the first, noting that though their punishment was deserved, this Jesus did nothing wrong. And for his faith, Jesus rewarded him with salvation: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23.39-43). Death moved him directly from earth into God’s presence. The Jesus he honored in death would be his friend forever in heaven.
One of my duties as an engineer was the business trip. To be sure, there are niceties about travel on company dollars, like fine restaurants and fancy hotels. I have a framed poster from the Public Market in my office as a memory of a wonderful trip to Seattle, and the wine tour and golf in Napa Valley was fantastic! And the work was great—I enjoyed presenting our products on the public stage; I knew our efforts were valuable. And yet, for all the fun and glamour of company travel, better to be home. It may be cliché, but it is true: home is where the heart is, and my heart would rather know the substantive pleasures of home than all the trinkets of a business trip.
Paul speaks this way in Philippians 1.24-26: “To remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.” The work was good, rewarding, and necessary. It was Paul’s pleasure and the Philippians’ advantage that he live for Christ and minister to their souls. But there is something better—home with God. He told the Corinthians the same.
2Corinthians 5.6-8: “So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, 7 for we walk by faith, not by sight. 8 Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
The true Christian sets her heart and hopes on her eternal home—with the Lord in heaven—this is the promised gain. When this “tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,” and there we will be with him forever and see him, no longer as “in a mirror dimly, but face to face,” (1Corinthians 13.12). Their mirrors were not like ours, but polished brass and poor reflections indeed! But after death we will see God as he is! The Christian affirms with Job, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold and not another” (Job 19.25-27).
For those with faith that convinces their hearts to long for God and thirst for his presence as a panting deer thirsts for water, death is a gain and the promise of being with Christ sustains a life lived for him. But is death a gain for everyone?
2. God Does Not Make Death a Gain for Those Who Live for Themselves
Look carefully at verse 21: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Death is clearly better for Paul. But is this true for everyone, or are there some for whom death is not gain? Do some lose in death? To answer that, we must look elsewhere in the Bible. We find three truths I would show you:
First, the idea of losing in death, a place of separation from God and lasting punishment is not simply the creation of angry preachers seeking to manipulate weak-minded followers. There are those who hope to control people with visions of the fires of hell. But there is more. Psalm 16.11 reminds us that “In the presence of God is fullness of joy,” but the Bible also describes a place full of misery, called, “hell.” The word we translate “hell” (ge,enna, Gehenna) appears twelve times in the New Testament; eleven from Jesus. The one known for love and compassion believed in a place of dreadful judgment and mercifully warned us to save and deliver us from that suffering.
Second, this place of darkness and destruction would seem to be unending. Jesus calls the fire of hell unquenchable and eternal, and in Matthew 25.46 he calls the converse of eternal life, “eternal punishment.” Although some Bible students hold out hope that the suffering of hell must someday end in order to bring the final reconciliation of the universe to Christ, it is hard to find much Bible teaching to support that.
Third, the Bible clearly calls the wrath of God a just punishment due sin. Now many complain just here. They feel such judgment disproportionate to our failings, believing instead that most people deserve happiness and pleasure. However, such thoughts arise only when we downplay both the wickedness of our hearts and the holiness of God.
Jonathan Edwards speaks to this in his treatise, The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners. “The crime of one being despising and casting contempt on another, is proportionally more or less heinous, as he was under greater or less obligations to obey him. And therefore if there be any being that we are under infinite obligations to love, and honor, and obey, the contrary towards him must be infinitely faulty…. But God is a being infinitely lovely, because he has infinite excellency and beauty…. So sin against God, being a violation of infinite obligations, must be a crime infinitely heinous, and so deserving infinite punishment…. The eternity of the punishment of ungodly men renders it infinite… and therefore renders no more than proportional to the heinousness of what they are guilty of.”
So where are we? We hear the Bible claim that the great gain of death is to see and savor the face of God. As Augustine said (in what is one of the most quoted statements in church history): “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in you.” Those who, by the gracious work of the Spirit, have their hearts changed so that now their great hope and happiness is to know and see God, will find that desire fulfilled for eternity. This assured future grace of reward at death then works backward into their lives so that their faith makes them live for Christ, in spite of this life’s light and momentary afflictions.
By the same reasoning, those who care little for a vision of God will not live for Christ here and now, but for their own pleasure and glory, because the gain of heaven is of no value to them. For them, death will prove how ugly and unsatisfying and undeserved is their own praise, which they so sought from a self-serving life.
Everyone dies; some win the victory in death, for they gain the eternal delight of feeling God’s pleasure. Others find only the eternal misery of losing their own. Which will it be for you?
3. God Can Make Death a Gain for You
Since the reward of the gospel is God, death is a gain only if that is our heart’s desire. When the Holy Spirit converts someone (makes them a true, born-again Christian), he gives that longing. We could say it this way: gaining at death enables you to live for Christian now, and to be with him forever.
Pastor Harry Reeder tells this true story from the very first week of his first pastorate in Florida (From Embers to a Flame: How God can Revitalize Your Church): “I had arranged for the organist to come up after the sermon, while I was praying, and begin to play softly. I wanted to give people an opportunity to commit their lives to Christ right there. But as I began praying and encouraging the people to pray, I noticed that there was no music playing. I opened one eye and peered in the direction of the organ, only to find that no one was there. I was disconcerted, thinking that the organist should be there, especially because she was getting paid almost as much as I was! Then I thought that maybe my sermon was so bad that she had walked out! But as I swung my open eye back to the congregation, I saw that she was kneeling at the front of the church, with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.
“Preacher,” she said, “what you said, I don’t have. I want that.”
“Her name was Roxanne. She was the head of the music department at Florida International University, and she had been the choir director at Pinelands for eight years, but she did not know Christ until that day.” [Now we travel forward several years.]
“The last time I talked to Roxanne she told me that she had terminal lung cancer. ‘They say I don’t have long,’ she said. ‘I think God is planning to take me home soon. But I’m ready, and I want to go be with Him.’ Here was a woman who had sung within the Metropolitan Opera, directed a university music department, and had many other accomplishments. But all she wanted to talk about at the end of her life was that Sunday morning when God changed her heart and life,” when she accepted Jesus as the most precious possession in life because God is the great gain of death. What is your most precious possession? If it is not Jesus, then death cannot be for you gain, because, the gain in death is God.
If you, like Roxanne, do not have that, please know he is ready and able to change your desires, to forgive your sins, to adopt you into his family, to love you with an everlasting love. Will you, today, recognize Christ as a treasure of great price, one worthy of your life’s passion and pursuit? Come to God and admit that your selfish and sinful heart would seek its own way even to the end of losing everything?
Let me be clear—the Bible promises that those who set their hope on Christ and eternal life will, necessarily, suffer some loss in this life.
“If anyone would come after me,” Jesus said, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels” (Luke 9.23-26).
The essence of sin is that our hearts constantly claim that we can gain something in this life by living for ourselves. Jesus answers your heart with this: suppose you get that; what have you gained? What if you gain the whole world, but then lose yourself? Instead, lose your life for Christ and gain eternal happiness. As Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
4. Conclusion
“To the best of our knowledge, the New Hebrides had no Christian influence before John Williams and James Harris from the London Missionary Society landed in 1839. Both of these missionaries were killed and eaten by cannibals on November 20 of that year, only minutes after going ashore” (John Piper, online paper).
Eighteen years later, a 32-year old pastor named John Paton sensed God’s call to return to these people with the Gospel of life. I will allow Paton to tell his own story: “Amongst many who sought to deter me, was one dear old Christian gentleman, whose crowning argument always was, ‘The cannibals! You will be eaten by cannibals!’” [The memory of Williams and Harris weighed heavily on many minds.]
Paton responded: “Mr. Dickson, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my Resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer” (Autobiography, 56).
Death will soon serve this body as dinner either to worms or cannibals. All that we have gained in this life will be left behind. Our souls will stand naked before the judgment of God. Those whose faith allows them to make Christ their gain in this life will gain every heart’s desire in death. Those who live for themselves will lose all. Will you, today, make Christ your life and death your gain?
