According to the Scriptures

Damian Kyle: He's not only saying that death has been defeated by Jesus, but that death is going to be destroyed one day. Already been defeated, but will one day be destroyed. I can't help but join the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, "Ding Dong the witch is dead." The wicked witch, the witch of all witches, however the song goes.

That always comes to my mind here. God forgive me, I hope nobody stumbled by it, but Ding Dong, death is defeated and one day it'll be completely destroyed. That's the wonder of the resurrection of Jesus and His victory for us.

Guest (Male): The official term for it is thanatophobia. It is the fear of dying. And a good number of people have that fear to the point that it is a full-blown phobia. Thanatophobia. But you see, the Christian doesn't need to fear death because it's been swallowed up in victory.

Jesus defeated this great enemy of mankind at the cross, and through faith in Him, we can have eternal life. That comes to our attention here in 1 Corinthians 15, which is where we'll camp today here on According to the Scriptures. Here's Damian Kyle.

Damian Kyle: We now know what happens to Christians when they die. But what happens to Christians who are alive when Jesus returns at the Rapture of the church and who never die? Paul's answer to that question is he begins by declaring it to be a mystery. A mystery, as the word mystery is used in the New Testament, is never used to describe something that is impossible for us to know.

The word mystery is used to describe some kind of a subject or something where we don't have revelation about it in the Old Testament, but that God has given us revelation of this teaching or of this doctrine in the New Testament. The Rapture of the church is what he's talking about here. It was a mystery in that it hadn't been known in the Old Testament. Now it's revealed in the New Testament at the unveiling of this New Covenant that is ours in Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection.

What is this mystery? He answers it for us. He says, "We shall not all sleep," that is die. Not all Christians are going to die. There's going to be a generation of Christians who will not experience death as a means of then receiving their new bodies, bodies made for heaven and eternity. Instead, they will receive their new bodies following the Rapture of the church and immediately prior following the Rapture of the church.

Paul writes about this in his first letter to the church at Thessalonica in chapter 4, and I refer the teaching of the doctrine of the Rapture to your own investigation by way of tape and in the lending library and online. He elaborates upon this event a little bit in verse 52. The Rapture, he says, complete with receiving a new body made for heaven, is going to happen in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

The twinkling of an eye is the time it takes light to reflect off of your eye. We all know from how small we were in elementary school for being taught how to count off how long is a second. One thousand one. Saying one thousand one is a long time compared to the time that it takes a ray of light to hit our eye and flash off. In other words, the Rapture is going to occur in just a moment in time.

He says, "But we shall all be changed." We shall not all die. The Rapture is going to claim some of us and bring us into eternity, some group of Christians. The fact of the matter is, whether we die before the Rapture or are alive at the time of the Rapture, we shall all be changed. No matter which time it is, each of us are going to be changed out of the corruption and the mortality of this body that is subject to death and into bodies that are incorruptible and immortal.

Again, these bodies we have now are not adequate for heaven and eternity. They are from Adam and Eve and made for this earth. We will be further clothed with a body made for eternity and for heaven. Wouldn't it be a bummer if our new body was whatever the condition of our body was in our final moments here before we headed out of this life and into the next one?

Paul says, "No, we're all going to be changed." That word "changed" means to change, to alter, to make different. We talk about changing our clothes and boom, we go into a room to change our clothes and then our old clothes are sitting in a pile on the floor and now we're wearing new clothes. Whether it's at the moment of death or the moment of the Rapture, the change from the old body to the new is going to be no more difficult than changing into a new T-shirt or a new blouse.

How many of you tonight are ready for a change? Paul says it's coming. It's coming. And that's a cause for celebration. I'm in an age where every movement comes with a sound. I'm not trying to do it. It's involuntary. I just look back on the teens, but 20s and 30s and even beyond that, where all you have to do is just wake up in the morning, open up your eyes, and you bound out of bed without a single thought. Instead, your first thought is, "Am I alive? Is this another day?"

You get up slowly so your head doesn't drain of its blood, put one leg over the side of the bed after the other, and then plant yourself firmly upon the floor. I'm not quite there, but I can sense it coming. I certainly don't bound out of a bed, but I'm ready for a change. One of my favorite jokes related to getting older is you know you're getting old when you bend over to pick something up off the floor and then you ask yourself, "Is there anything else you can do while you're down there?"

We're getting close to that, some of us. Paul tells us that that change is coming. Then Paul tells us that at that moment, verse 54, end of verse 54 and at the end of verse 57, death is swallowed up in victory. That's a wonderful truth. That phrase, "Death is swallowed up in victory," is a very powerful image for us. That word "swallowed" is very powerful in the original language. It means to swallow something up so completely that it produces the cessation of the thing swallowed.

Here Paul takes that word and, for the Christian, he applies it to death. When I was a young boy, I really enjoyed reading. It was a wonderful escape for me. I checked out every book in our local city and county library on the Texas Rangers, on Congressional Medal of Honor winners, and every Hardy Boys book that I could get my hands on. All of these things I would grab and read voraciously.

I used to like books that included pictures. Some of the pictures that really impressed me as a young child were where there would be a story of something related to the sea and then there would be these great sea creatures and sea monsters. The pictures that impacted me the most were those of a great whale coming up from the bottom of the ocean and headed up right toward a great ship. It was big enough to swallow the whole ship.

It was big enough to swallow the boats that had been launched from the ships that the sailors were in and that had been dispatched from the ship. Up would come the great whale, explode to the surface, swallow up the ship, and then go back down under the water in the depths of the sea. In one moment the ship was there and the very next moment it was completely gone. The surface of the sea did not have a ship left upon it any longer.

Paul takes and applies this to death. He says up to now, death has prevailed and it has swallowed men up. But he says here is something different. Death is swallowed up forever. Death is pictured by Paul as being on the ropes. Death gets a terminal diagnosis for a change instead of the other way around. Notice that death isn't just swallowed up, but Paul says it is swallowed up in victory.

What victory? Whose victory is he talking about here? Who has defeated death so completely? Of course Jesus did. Jesus declared in Matthew chapter 20 to the disciples, "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man," speaking of Himself, "will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again."

He did. His resurrection was a demonstration intended to communicate many things, including His absolute victory and authority over death and over hell. One of my favorite verses about death and hell is found in Revelation chapter 1, verse 18, but I'll read verse 17 to you as well. John writes, "And when I saw Him," that is the Lord Jesus glorified in heaven, "he said I fell at His feet as dead."

"But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, Don't be afraid. I'm the first and the last. I am He who lives and was dead. And behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen." Amen means that's the truth or so be it. But he doesn't stop there. Jesus then goes on and says, "And I have the keys of Hades and death." By the time Jesus got done with death in His death, His burial, and His resurrection, these two great enemies of mankind, death and hell, He had not only defeated them, but He's reduced them to keys on His keychain.

I was always impressed, these are little boy stories I'm telling you, but always impressed in elementary school when I would see those janitors with all those keys. Where are all the doors that they can open with all of those keys? Even as a kid we recognized, we couldn't put it into words, but we recognized what a key represented. A key represents authority. It represents authority over a lock, over a door, and over a room.

When you have the key to that, you can defeat that lock and do as you like related to it. Here Jesus speaks and declares of the fact that He has complete authority over death and hell and He's defeated them in His death, burial, and resurrection. At this point, someone might be thinking, "Well, I'm very happy for Jesus, but what does this have to do with me? How can Jesus's victory over death transfer to me? How can it become my victory?"

Paul tells us there in verse 57, it's through faith. "But thanks be to God who gives us the victory when we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ." Jesus's victory over death becomes our victory over death as well. There's only one way to prepare properly for death and eternity that follows this life, and that is to make trust in Jesus, put our faith in Him as our personal savior and in His death, His burial, and resurrection.

Allow those three great events in human history to become our great victory as Jesus shares it with us. When that happens in our lives, we can join the Apostle Paul in his sanctified taunting of death. You notice there in verse 55 as he writes, "O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law."

For those of you who are a little bit older, there's a lot of these passages in the Bible. I don't share everything that comes to my mind. I want you to know that and you can be thankful for that. But I do read passages in the Bible that remind me of a lot of things in my life and I'm sure that that happens in your life too. These two verses in verses 55 and 56, the picture that comes to my mind was the picture of the then Cassius Clay standing over a very knocked out Sonny Liston in their heavyweight boxing match in 1964.

There is Cassius Clay, later to rename himself Muhammad Ali, and he's got his fists coming like this and he's taunting. This is like the Apostle Paul just in the beauty of Jesus's victory here, the taunting of death and the celebrating of this knockout of death as it relates to us as human beings in Jesus's resurrection. Look at that bold faith that Paul had there in verse 55 as he brings this chant and this sanctified kind of mockery of death, a defeated enemy.

We can have it too in the face of death. At the very thought of death, completely freed Paul was and we're to be of the bondage of the fear of death. "O death, where is your sting?" He says the sting of death has been removed. I remember hearing a story a long time ago or reading it. It was a story about a dad and he had his son, seven or eight years old, in the car with him and they're driving on a summer day.

The windows are down on the car and a bee comes into the car and begins to buzz around. The boy goes into an absolute panic because he's allergic to bees. If you're allergic to bees, you know what that panic is about. He's in an absolute panic, the father understands it, and he reaches out and is able to grab that bee in his hand and hold it there. To the mortification of the son, he releases the bee again into the car.

His son goes into a panic once again. Then the father said, "Look, son," and he held up his hand with a stinger in it and he said, "His stinger is gone. He can't hurt you any longer." That's what Jesus has done for us. Just as the bee loses its sting when it stings, so death lost its sting when it stung Jesus and we are thankful for that. He says, "O Hades, where is your victory?" Hades has been robbed of its victory.

Jesus's death on the cross for our sins, His burial, and His resurrection have put every Christian beyond the reach of not only death but beyond the reach of hell. Because of our faith in Jesus, it has placed us beyond the reach, he tells us in verse 56, of both sin and the law and it's done so forever and ever. He tells us in verse 57, "But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

He declares all of this truth concerning Jesus and His victory over death for us is a cause for celebration. He closes it with celebration. Who's given us the victory? Jesus as He's given us this great victory. The Apostle Peter felt very much the same emotion in celebration that Paul did and he put it this way in his first epistle, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has born us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

Now here's one of these things that I think twice about saying that comes into my mind. When I think about not only what Paul is saying here, he's not only saying that death has been defeated by Jesus, but that death is going to be destroyed one day. Already been defeated, but will one day be destroyed. I can't help but join the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, "Ding Dong the witch is dead." The wicked witch, the witch of all witches, however the song goes.

That always comes to my mind here. God forgive me, I hope nobody stumbled by it, but Ding Dong, death is defeated and one day it'll be completely destroyed. That's the wonder of the resurrection of Jesus and His victory for us and for our lives. His closing encouragement is there as he closes the section in verse 58. In the face of this false teaching that there's no resurrection, he said remain steadfast in the truth about the resurrection.

Resist this false doctrine steadfastly and always abound in the work of the Lord. Keep serving, knowing it's not in vain. This life that we're living is eternal and it has eternal consequences. Praise the Lord this evening in our hearts that death is swallowed up in victory. This great enemy of mankind has lost its sting and one day it will cease to exist entirely for the child of God.

What a chapter, really. You think about all the questions that we can have about the resurrection. It's important to us, the body after this and how God can take even questions that are offered in scorn or mockery of some truth of God. God says, "Well, if they would only bring the question to me, this is what I would say." He inspires Paul to say it for our edification tonight. If you're here this evening and you are not yet a Christian, death is your enemy and it has begun to stalk you from the day you were conceived.

There is no escaping that apart from a faith in Jesus Christ because it is He, He is the only one in His resurrection who has defeated death in human history and in a way that allows Him to share that victory with you. Not only in putting your faith in Jesus are you born again into a personal relationship with God and forgiven of your sins, have the confidence of heaven after this life, but then death becomes a non-concern for you in terms of the paralysis that the fear of death can bring into a human life.

It's all of these problems, all of these needs that you have in your life that you've maybe never given any thought to at all, but they're there and you wouldn't know they're there except God brought them to our attention. All of them are taken care of in one simple thing of deciding to become a follower of Jesus Christ tonight and honoring God by putting your faith in His Son for the forgiveness of your sins. We'd love to pray with you to do that tonight if you've never done it before. If you need prayer for anything, of course, we'd love to pray with you and for you as well.

Guest (Male): There's no need to fear death as believers in Christ. The sting has been removed at the cross, and we can know that when we breathe our last, we'll instantly go to be with the Lord. Today on According to the Scriptures, Pastor Damian Kyle has been in 1 Corinthians 15, revealing to us that death is indeed swallowed up in victory.

If you'd like to get the CD that contains today's message from 1 Corinthians, give us a call, 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. Pastor Damian's messages are found at accordingtothescriptures.com, as well as oneplace.com and on most of the major podcast apps. If you missed one or two messages on the radio, there are many ways to catch up.

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Coming up Friday, Pastor Damian Kyle will present a special Easter message on the resurrection, and then we'll get back into 1 Corinthians next week. According to the Scriptures is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto.