There is a natural fear of death, and the devil, and hell, rooted in all people, always. It may not be always felt, yet it is easily wakened. This fear puts people in bondage. Because of it, they do not dare to meditate on death, or God’s judgement, or hell, as deserved by themselves. However, Christ’s death delivers His people both from the danger of this evil, and from the bondage of this fear also. None but a child of Christ’s can have solid and true courage against death, neither is there a free man in the world, except the true Christian.
The fear of suffering pain, along with the fear of needing to rely on the care of others, leads many people to imagine what a ‘good death’ might look like. For some, it means being in control of when they die — the key is choice and self-determination. Beyond death they either believe there is nothing or presume that things will be better than they are now. Those who believe in Jesus, however, have something better to hope for than the absence of physical suffering. On their behalf, Jesus has actually abolished death. He has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. Whatever their final weeks and days look like, believers fall asleep in Jesus and wake up to see Him face to face. David Dickson reflected on Jesus’ victory over death. He shows that if we relinquish self-determination in order to entrust ourselves to Jesus, death’s destroyer and our deliverer, fear is displaced by peace and contentment.
Jesus has destroyed Satan.
Paul tells us that Jesus took the nature of His people, “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14–15).
Sinners, without Christ, are under the sentence of death, both temporal and eternal. Satan has the power of death (as the hangman has power over the pit and gallows), to take away those who are not delivered from his power into torment at death.
However, Christ has destroyed Satan’s power and tyranny on this point, on behalf of all His elect, and true believers.
The way Christ has overcome Satan is by His own death, ransoming His own. In order to do this, it was necessary for Christ to be a mortal man, as well as God. This is how He was able to die.
Love to the “children,” that is, the elect who were given to Him, made the Son of God come down, and make Himself a man also. Christ, in His human nature, is as much a man as any of the elect, having flesh, and blood, and bones, just as we do. His flesh and blood is not only similar to ours, but a part of our substance. He has come of the same stock of Adam and Eve, as surely as we have, of the same substance, and not made either by creation out of nothing, or by transubstantiation of some other thing.
Jesus delivers believers from the fear of death.
As well as destroying the devil, another fruit of Christ’s death, is the delivery of believers from the bondage of the fear of death, in which they lie before belief.
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