Daily Lesson for Wednesday 9th of April 2025
Perhaps the cruelest aspect of living in a world detached from its Creator is the way that death lurks in the background of every life, ready to strike at any moment. It is the “wages of sin,” the penalty that we pay for having been disconnected from the only Source of life in the universe: the Creator. As such, it plays a major role in Bible prophecy, both its reality and, even more important, its solution, which is found only in Jesus and His death and resurrection.
Both the first mention of death in the Bible and its first occurrence shed much light on this major theme in prophecy, helping us to understand the gravity of the sin problem and giving us important tools to understand God’s solution to the problem.
Read Genesis 2:15-17, Genesis 4:8-15, 1 Corinthians 15:15-19, and Revelation 1:18. What do these passages—which include the first mention and occurrence of death—tell us about why people die, how God views death, and what His solution is for our problem?
Image © Review & Herald Publishing at Goodsalt.com
We often say that “death is just part of life.” That is a lie. Death is the opposite of life, the undoing of life; it is an alien intruder that was never meant to be part of our experience here. Even though we have become accustomed to death, our hearts still protest strongly when we encounter it, as if the human race still collectively realizes that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. As painful as death is, there are some instances of death that seem even more tragic than others, such as the death of a child. For the most part, we expect that parents will precede their children in death, and we have come to accept that as the normal order of things.
The first death recorded in Scripture, however, goes against the expected norm. Before Adam and Eve went through death themselves, they experienced the tragedy of death when their righteous son was murdered by his unrighteous brother. It was a particularly unjust death.
Think about Jesus, the righteous murdered by the unrighteous, as was Abel. What death could have been more unjust than Christ’s? What other parallels might one find between the death of Abel and of Christ on the cross? How might the nature of Abel’s death help us to understand why Jesus has “the keys of Hades [the grave] and death” and what God is offering us in Him?
|
Without the problem of death being solved, why are our lives ultimately useless, meaningless, and futile? What does this fact teach us about how thankful we should be for what Jesus has done for us? |
(0)
