Fear of Death
We are most comfortable receiving advice from, learning from, and following those who have undergone what it is we seek to undergo. Experience is the best way for us to learn, so it’s only natural that we would want to learn from those who have experience. However, the issue with human existence itself is that we are created beings who are meant to follow the path of our Creator. Every individual human life is filled with highs and lows, tremendous joys and heartbreaking losses, pain and delight, fear and excitement. How could a perfect and omnipotent God ever know the difficulty we have with these moments in life, and how could we possibly follow in His path if He has never had to deal with them? Out of the most simple but also the most perfect form of love, he became one of us. He knows that it is our weakness and our immaturity that make us think we need to experience pain and fear in order to grow, but He does not judge us nor does He ignore us. Instead, He decided to go through the same pain we experience, and even chose to undergo more pain and suffering than any other human being.
In our fallen state, humans are gripped by fear. We are particularly afraid of the unknown, which is rooted in a deeply-rooted lack of trust in God. If we are convinced that God is loving and that He would never abandon us nor force us to undergo what would destroy our souls, we would be fearless in the face of sin. The greatest power that sin has over us is death; the fear of death, which is ultimately humanity’s greatest fear, keeps us as slaves to the “one who has the power of death,” according to the letter to the Hebrews. But as Christians, we are not slaves of the one who has the power of death, but rather the sons and daughters of the one who has power over death. Did Christ fear his own death, though? On the one hand, he did ask the Father to let the cup of his death pass from him if it were possible, which was indicative of his true humanity. On the other hand, Christ never feared death when he faced it in others. To the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Naim, and Lazarus, he exercised his full authority over death. In some instances, he gave the proper response that any human would in the face of death through grief. In others, he treated death as a mere sleep that could be interrupted with a quick act of divine authority. Christ underwent very real human experiences, such as the deaths of loved ones and his own death, but behaved in the face of these experiences through his divinity; occasionally, others needed to be reminded of God’s power over death and the frivolity of fear, while at other times Christ wanted to grieve and mourn with those whom he loved because he deemed it necessary and appropriate.
Fear of death also makes us fearful of our health and well-being. Christ still exercised his authority over the precursors to death through his multiple healings. When he healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, he may have done so for more than just prolonging the life of a loved one. Peter’s mother-in-law was miraculously healed, but simply resumed her normal responsibilities by waiting on them. There was no sense of a “second chance” or a “new life”; instead, she expressed in her actions what Christ tried to tell us - our fear of death is a result of our slavery to sin. When we are convinced of God’s authority over all things, we are simply left with what we were created to do, which is to serve Him. Christ didn’t come to heal the sick and perform miracles as a spectacle. He came to deliver us from sin and death, and the fear it might induce within us. He came to convince us that we have nothing to fear but the almighty power of God.
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