The Vocabulary is Changed Acts7:54-60: “And while they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, Lord Jesus, receive and accept and welcome my spirit! And falling on his knees, he cried out loudly, Lord, fix not this sin upon them [lay it not to their charge]! And when he had said this, he fell asleep [g][in death].” (Vv59--60)
7th April 2024 | | sermon source |
This was Stephen’s dying pattern (his life end on earth) just like that of our Lord Jesus Christ and it is the divine pattern of dying on earth that all true Christians’ death is supposed to follow, committing our spirit into the Hands of our Lord at our point of death and this is only possible if the Scripture and the Gospel have tutored us enough not to fear death but to see and recognize it as a pathway that leads us to our Lord God Almighty to continue our life after death with our Lord Jesus. The whole teaching of Scripture, and particularly the Words of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel, concerning life after death, deepens Christian confidence in God if we well understood the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are delighted in the words, ‘I go to prepare a place for you’, but Lord Jesus said something that surpasses even this as He also said: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you, I am going there to prepare a place for you’ as seen in John 14:2.
Lord Jesus says, in effect: ‘If 80, 90 or even 100 years of life were all you could expect to live on earth, I would encourage you to make the most of the time you spend on this earth … but in my Father’s house….’ Take again the way both Lord Jesus and New Testament use the words ‘death’ and ‘sleep’ to describe the end of our existence here on earth. To the mourners standing around the lifeless body of a little girl, Lord Jesus said: ‘The child is not dead but asleep’ as seen in Mark 5:39. He used the same word when talking of the death of Lazarus: ‘…Lazarus has fallen asleep: but I am going there to wake him up’ as seen in John 11:11. In all of these explanations, it becomes very clear that Lord Jesus saw that man’s understanding of death is grossly wrong compared to what God actually means it to be and the role God uses it to play in the affairs of man, and also seeing that in addition to this misconception of the position and function of death in the recreative dispensation of God, man also fears death so much that if he man has his way, he will even try to avoid death which is why many people fears death and fights it whenever it comes instead of peacefully and joyfully welcoming it knowing that it is a pathway in God’s recreative processes that leads to either the place where Lord Jesus promised He goes to prepare for us (in His Father’s House) or to its opposite!
Although I haven’t checked this, one commentator makes the daring assertion that in the New Testament, after Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection, it is believed that no True Christian was ever said to have died or will die; death-sleep according to our Lord Jesus Christ is safely keeping them until when He comes to resurrect them just as He came and resurrected dead Lazarus. He, this commentator claims that when man’s sin had done its utmost in nailing Christ to the tree (cross) and hiding His tortured body in a sepulcher (grave) sealed by a huge stone, man’s death-sin was still powerless to destroy the Life (God) which used His flesh. Remember the word ‘Sin unto death’, Lord Jesus proved that Death was dead –not He Lord Jesus! In other words, with His apparent death on the cross, our Lord Jesus Christ proved that He is actually LIFE that He claims while Death is the actual entity that has died, not He! Making it that Now Everything ‘in Christ’ is alive because of our Lord Jesus resurrection from death, and thus this vocabulary or Entity called Death has to be changed to fit the proven facts of our Lord Jesus’ Death and Resurrection on the Cross of Calvary. What we call ‘death’, and Lord Jesus called ‘falling asleep’, is simply the transition from one life to another –from earth’s muted colors to full glory of heaven; especially for true Christians, that is for all those who truly and sincerely believe in Him, trust in Him, rely on Him and adheres on Him and His Name! Remember that in His selection of disciples, He strongly used the word Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men for my Father’s House…to be filled with True Men instead of this counterfeit men that today fills the earth—My Father’s Garden—due to Adam and Eve’s disobedience in not following the clear true divine instructions given to them not to dabble into the forbidden fruit of the tree situated at the centre of the garden! When Adam and Eve Sinned, that is dabbled into the forbidden fruit by disobeying God’s command, it become inevitable that the earth will be peopled with a Mixture of Humans; those with the attributes of the True God and those with the attributes of the counterfeiter of God (Lucifer who is making himself God) this existence of the state of a mixture of people on earth makes it that man would no longer be able to differentiate between true man and the resembler of man which was Eve’s mistake then and even is still her mistake till date which is why you see broken homes everywhere today with the wrong people mixing with the right people on earth figured in our Lord’s parable of the Wheat and the Tares! And you remember that when His disciples asked if the tares are to be separated, He answered in the affirmative but added that the separation should not be done when both plants are still very young rather that they are better allowed to grow together until maturity when their fruits will clearly differentiate them for a better separation so that you will not mistakenly uproot a good plant thinking it is a tare or that by your process of uprooting the tare, the good plant will follow! So the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ kick-started that separation process and you saw what happened in His process of selecting disciples, when He said, have I not selected you twelve and one of you is a devil! What do you understand by that?