It is our Lord Jesus Christ who REALLY holds the power of death….He is already waiting for us up ahead, at the day of our own death…“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even if he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25)

Inasmuch, then, as the children all share in flesh and blood, he himself partook of flesh and blood just as they did, so that through death he might break the power of him who held the power of death —that is, the devil—and release those who, through the fear of death, were subject to bondage all throughout their lives.
Hebrews 2:14-15

Unless the Lord Jesus returns beforehand (and in my case very beforehand), we who are Christians will die. When that happens, who will be in charge? Who will determine the day and manner of our death? Who will bring death to us and take us through it. Will it be God, or—as the text cited above might tempt us to think—will it be the devil?

The answer is: It will certainly be God, and the Christ who, by his righteous life and atoning death, purchased our redemption, brought us to faith, delivered us from condemnation, and released us from the fear death, which had previously held us in its dark and destructive grip.

On this matter of physical death, the Scripture is clear: It is altogether in the hands of God (1 Sam. 2:6). It is the judgment he himself imposed upon the family of man due to the sin of the first Adam (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 5:12). It is part of the curse that he himself wisely laid upon the whole creation (Is. 25:7; Rom. 8:20). It is part of the flow of events that we call history, a history decreed by God and altogether under the control of him who upholds all things by his powerful word, and who guides them to their appointed ends (Psalm 139:15; Is. 46:8-11; Rom. 8:28-29; Eph. 1:11; Heb. 1:3). And as we see clearly both in the resuscitations performed by Christ and in his own resurrection from the dead, he, and he alone, holds the keys to death and hades, having both authority and power to release his beloved people from their grip once and for all (Matt. 28:1-10; John 11; 1 Cor. 15; Rev. 1:18).

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