sermonette: You Shall Surely Die
Craig Sablich
Given 22-Aug-26; Sermon #1890s; 18 minutes
You know, when I think back to the days when I finally realized that God might actually be calling me. I remember how unsettled it felt. Something opens in the mind almost quietly at first, and suddenly you're seeing things you never really noticed before. Your thoughts start moving faster than you can keep up with. Because what you're hearing doesn't always match what you grew up believing. The things family and friends believed or even things most of Christianity treats as settled truth. You find yourself wondering, what am I supposed to do now? Where do I go from here? And before long, the questions start gathering in a way that makes you realize you're standing at a crossroads. You can choose to look away and try to ignore it. Or you can keep searching and see where it leads. Thinking back on those early years and even up till recently, I could never quite figure why Christianity seemed to keep so much of the Hebrew scriptures in the background. How many of you grew up with one of those little pocket New Testaments with the Psalms added on? Remember those? Those things always gave me the impression that the Old Testament was not all that important, like out of sight, out of mind. Kind of like a cornerstone buried beneath the structure. You can't see it, but everything standing above it depends on its strength. Well, when I decided to look into it, I found myself back in the garden. That's when I realized I was not just looking at two trees. I was looking at two completely different ways of understanding reality. In my last message, we spent some time with what I believe is the first primary mark that identifies Satan's counterfeit system. That quiet challenge has God indeed said. That was Satan's attempt to attack God's authority to define what is true, good, and right. Well, today I want us to walk through what I believe is the 2nd identifying mark. The corruption of the truth about life and death. Please open your Bibles to Revelation chapter 20. Brethren, if we misunderstand death and resurrection, there is a good chance we will misunderstand God's plan. Because resurrection sits right at the very heart of that plan. So let's take it slow and let John's vision speak for itself. In Revelation 20:12, John writes, and I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their works by the things which were written in the books. When we think over what John describes, it should make us stop and ask whether we actually believe what we just read. Because if we do, then we are accepting something that doesn't quite fit the way most people talk about death. If the common idea is that people move straight into heaven or hell the moment they die. Then why does John see the dead standing before God? And if their judgment was already settled, What exactly is he watching unfold? Those thoughts have a way of slowing you down because life and death and resurrection aren't some small ideas tucked away in scripture. They sit right in the middle of everything God has been doing from the beginning. And when you trace them back far enough, you eventually find yourself standing in the garden again, listening to two very different statements about the same reality. God saying you shall surely die. And the serpent saying, You shall not surely die. Somewhere between those two voices, the whole human story has been trying to make sense of what death actually is. Have you ever thought about how so many civilizations separated by oceans and centuries somehow arrived at nearly the same idea? The details and languages changed. Even the gods changed, but underneath it all, the same assumption kept resurfacing that man doesn't really die. Consider Egypt. They pictured life continuing beyond the grave. Greece talked about an immortal soul. Eastern religions imagined cycles of rebirth. Many pagan cultures believed the dead remained conscious and still involved with the living. These systems should have had nothing in common. But underneath their different names, stories, and rituals, they carried the same foundation about death. And once you notice that, you begin wondering how such different civilizations ended up carrying the same idea. Paul gives us a glimpse into that teaching explaining that humanity did not simply lose God's truth, it replaced it. And once people began deciding truth for themselves instead of trusting the Creator, The lie spoken in the garden found fertile ground. If those ideas were already woven into the culture long before Christianity ever spread. Then I think we have to ask, did they ever really fade away? When you follow the history, they do not seem to. Instead of a lot of those same old assumptions, the immortal soul, instant reward or punishment, talking to the dead, starts showing up again just dressed in Christian names. The labels changed, but the thinking underneath stayed mighty familiar. The historical evidence suggests tombs and graves became places of devotion. People began directing prayers toward departed saints. The names shifted, but the practices felt strangely familiar. The old pagan gods were not abandoned so much as renamed. People once prayed to those pagan deities for healing, safety, a profitable harvest, and protection. Later, the names changed as many prayed to saints, martyrs, and religious heroes for the same desires. So if those ideas survived into Christianity, What would we expect to find? The Catholic Encyclopedia states, quote, Believers may pray to departed saints and to Mary, who is viewed as having a special role of intercession with Christ. In this view, the communion of saints unites the faithful on earth, the souls in purgatory, and the saints in heaven. So the faithful ask for their prayers, much as one Christian might ask another to pray for them. End quote. Well, that's worth remembering, yeah, because most people did not invent these beliefs. They inherited them, generation after generation, sincerely convinced they were following biblical truth. Yet underneath it all one quiet assumption kept shaping everything. You shall not surely die. But Paul brings us back to the center of God's testimony. In I Timothy chapter 2 verse 5, saying, for there is one God and one mediator between God and men. The man Christ Jesus. Scripture never points to other mediators. It keeps returning us to Christ. But that's how the serpent has always worked, not by removing truth all at once, but by replacing it piece by piece until the original becomes hard to recognize. So the lie spoken in the garden keeps finding new forms. Now, if that really is how those ideas spread, then another question rises right behind it. Did God ever change what he first said? Or has his testimony stayed the same from the beginning Well, Jesus said in John chapter 3 verse 13. No one has ascended to heaven but he who came down from heaven. Now let's think about this. If people were already in heaven, you can't help wondering why Jesus would make such a dogmatic statement. Peter echoes the same reality in Acts reminding us that David is dead and buried and that he did not ascend into the heavens. Then Jesus adds something else. That a day is coming when all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth. Once you hear him say that. You can't help but notice where he places the dead. In the graves waiting for resurrection. A resurrection only makes sense if the dead are actually dead. Solomon teaches in Ecclesiastes the dead know nothing, describing the grave as a place without knowledge, activity, or wisdom. David said in Psalms 146 that man's plans perish the day he dies. Scripture keeps circling back to the same pattern. Genesis says man became a living soul, not that he received an immortal soul. Ezekiel says, the soul who sins shall die. Paul says in Romans, the wages of sin is death, but eternal life is a gift. Death is earned, but eternal life is something given, not something already possessed. James speaks of something of saving a soul from death, and Paul tells Timothy that God alone possesses immortality. And that's why Jesus keeps saying he will raise people up at the last day. The evidence of scripture is not escape from death, it's resurrection from death. By the time you reach this point in the story, something else starts falling into place. The more you follow God's plan through scripture, the more you begin noticing that it unfolds according to his timing. He has an order to it, a progression, a pattern. But the counterfeit changes that order by teaching immediate reward or punishment the moment a person dies. That's why Paul's statement in First Corinthians becomes so important when he says, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. Think about what that means. Without the resurrection, Paul says they have perished. And the closer you follow the Bible's timeline, the more the picture comes into focus. Once you allow Scripture to establish God's order instead of bringing another system into the text. The counterfeit begins collapsing under its own weight. By this point, Scripture has said the same thing again and again. But then another question comes to mind, yeah. Did Jesus ever actually show us what he meant when he talked about death? will consider the death of Lazarus. Jesus said, Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up. When the disciples misunderstood him, Jesus simply said, Lazarus is dead. Once again Jesus is using the same picture. Death followed by awakening. By now the contrast has become hard to ignore. One system begins with God's words. You shall surely die. The other system begins with the serpent's words, You shall not surely die. And the more you follow those two statements through scripture, the more you realize that everything else in our world flows through them. That's why the Bible never describes death as a doorway into another life. It describes death as an enemy. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the last enemy that will be destroyed is death. You know, that's a pretty remarkable statement because nobody calls a doorway an enemy. The Christian hope has always been resurrection. By now, Scripture has taken us back to the same place so many times that the picture starts becoming hard to miss. Scripture keeps returning to the same reality. At death, every man, woman, and child who has ever lived enters the grave. They sleep, waiting for the appointed time of their resurrection to be judged based on how they chose to live. There is no saints to pray to, no Mary in heaven, no other intercessor but Christ. And once that settles in, you begin to understand why Scripture keeps pointing us to Christ alone. And why it keeps placing so much hope in resurrection. That's where the entire plan of God is headed. What I keep coming back to is how this truth ought to shape the way we see the things that happen in life. Because once you know the dead are asleep, waiting in the grave until God's appointed time. It changes how you understand everything else. Suddenly the strange moments that sometimes catch us off guard, a dream that feels unusually vivid, a vision we can't quite explain, an experience that seems to reach beyond the ordinary. are no longer left to define reality for us. Instead, they have to be weighed against what God has already revealed. Experience should never be permitted to speak with more authority than scripture. All through this message, we've been listening to two voices. God's testimony and the serpent's. In the last message we spent time with that first challenge as God indeed said. Today we've been walking through the 2nd. You shall not surely die. Two lies. Two attacks on God's truth. And it seems every day, every one of us has to decide which voice we are going to trust. The one we inherited without thinking or the one God preserved in His word. Maybe that's why this whole subject matters so much. The serpent's lie was not just about convincing people they do not really die. It quietly buried the very hope God intended mankind to hold on to. Because if death is not really death, then resurrection stops being God's great act of restoration. The scripture never lets us lose sight of that hope. From the very beginning, while another voice tried to deny death, God was already preserving the only real hope beyond it. Resurrection The lie hides that hope. Scripture protects it. And through all of this we are coming to know the kind of God who refuses to leave mankind without the promise of being called from the grave. Because God never reveals truth simply to satisfy curiosity. He reveals it so that we can choose. So brethren, as we bring this to a close. All of us need to make that same decision Joshua made. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
CLS/aws+/