Faith that Dies and Rises in Christ

We're gonna be in Hebrews chapter 11, and we're gonna read verses 32 through the end of that chapter and the first part of chapter 12 together. So if you wanna find that in your bulletin or up on the wall behind me on the screen behind me, let's join our voices together as we read God's word aloud.

And what more can I say? Time is too short for me to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets who by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained, shut the mouth of lions, quenched the raging of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, gained strength in weakness, became mighty in battle, and put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. Other people were tortured, not accepting release so that they may gain a better resurrection. Others experienced mockings and scourgings as well as bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned. They were sawn in two. They died by the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins, in goatskins, destitute, afflicted, and mistreated. The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and on mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground. All these were approved through their faith, but they did not receive what was promised since God had provided something better for us so that they would not be made perfect without us. Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of God stands forever. — Hebrews 11:32–12:1

Amen? We are in our fifth week of a series called Facing Death by Faith, which is why that song was so appropriate to this topic. And I'm proud of this congregation. I predicted at week five of this series that there'd be two people here, maybe three—that would be me and my wife Susan and maybe our son Asher. But you're all here this morning, and either you didn't know—surprise—or you've stayed with us. I mean that in joking, but I'm really proud of how you have engaged and you've tried to do the homework and you've been prayerful and thoughtful about this. This has been hard ground for us.

And so today, again, our last sermon in this series, I wanna light a candle and remember that this is a very personal series for us. Many of us have family members, good friends, people we love dearly, who we've lost. And so we'll just take a moment to honor those memories and those people.

The Hardest Fear

I think that there is one thing and one thing only that is worse than maybe your fears for yourself, your fears about getting that diagnosis and that course of treatment or that little bit of time left. There's one thing that we fear more than that: it happening to somebody we love. Ain't that true? I mean, mess with me. That's fine. Mess with people I love? Losing people we love, that is the hardest. That's the hardest for us. It's an entirely different scenario.

I think it's why I find the humor of Jim Gaffigan about his wife's brain cancer and brain surgery so surprising. So I'm going to quote this right here. He says:

It's been a crazy year for me. Crazy year. I don't know if you know, but in April, it was discovered that my wife had a brain tumor. I'm not even making this up. It was removed. She's great. No, I didn't remove it. The tumor is gone also with my ability to ever win any other argument in our marriage. It's not like I was winning a lot before, but now I'm retired and luckily my wife's not the type to bring it up. Well, once she did. She was like, "You know, I did have brain surgery," and I couldn't be like, "You know, that was last month." I joke around, but it was scary. We have five children, and there were moments when I was like, "Oh my gosh. If anything happens to my wife, these five kids are going to be put up for adoption." My wife was so amazingly strong and brave during this whole experience. For three months after the surgery, she couldn't eat solid foods, and her friends would send us the most delicious foods. She couldn't eat them. So I found myself hiding the food and secretly eating it. Am I supposed to feel shame because I'm helping my wife? No. I'm the hero here.

We need that kind of humor to talk about this. We've talked in this series. We've done three weeks about yourself and one week so far about other people. And we're gonna close the series today thinking about other people. And here's my big idea today: loving well, loving others well in light of the resurrection to come.

Christians face death, the death of a loved one with hope and with courage because Christ will return and usher in the final resurrection. And so this means three things for us. These are my points for this morning: advocating for, surrounded by, and witnessing to. Advocating for those we love in light of the future resurrection, surrounded by those we love in light of the future resurrection, and witnessing to those we love in light of the future resurrection.

Advocating for Those We Love

Advocating for—there's a day coming for most people in this room, if it hasn't already happened, where you're tapped on the shoulder and you're asked to help make medical decisions for somebody else. Nobody wants this role. This is a heavy mantle for anybody, making complicated medical decisions. But I think this is where Hebrews 11 can be really helpful for us.

I skipped over a portion here. If you're following along from verses 20 to 31, not because they're not important, but because I particularly for this series wanted to talk about this last conclusion. And we can go back later and do this other section. But I wanted to get to this because it speaks so much on death and dying. And these verses describe a whole host of people who have died. Now there are two categories here. I don't know if you noticed this as we read.

The first set of names are a group of people who by faith received a miraculous intervention. Did you notice this? Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, to name a few. And we'll put this verse up on the screen:

They conquered kingdoms and administered justice and obtained promises and shut the mouth of lions and quenched the raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, gained strength and weakness, became mighty in battle, put foreign armies to flight, women received their dead, raised to life again.

This is the list everybody wants to be on. This is the God answered our miraculous prayer list. But there's another list, and it begins with the word "others." And if you saw this in the passage, you don't want to be on the others list. These are the people who didn't get the miracles, and the prayers weren't answered in the way that they wanted. And they are—we'll put this up:

Tortured, experienced mockings and scourgings as well as bonds and imprisonment, stoned, as in with rocks, sawn in two, died by the sword, wandered around in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, wandered in deserts and mountains hiding in caves, holes in the ground.

This is the people who had what we'd call a bad death. A bad death. We know something about bad death, don't we? Some of you have been in those rooms. And you know it's not like on TV. People don't die easily. And I won't lie to you as a pastor. I've been in many rooms where death is ugly, and it's painful to watch, and it's prolonged. And I don't want to mince words with you about that. It's hard many times for a body to die, and it's a hard thing to watch. It's a really hard thing to watch. And we know about that.

We like—nobody wants that death. We want the good deaths. We want die in my sleep, painless, right? Don't we want those? Anybody with me this morning? Anybody awake here this morning? Okay. Good.

Now what's fascinating to me is that the writer of Hebrews doesn't distinguish like we do. He doesn't say bad deaths and good deaths. He doesn't see the first list as the winners and the second list as the losers. Did you notice that? He says this:

All of them were approved through their faith, but they did not receive what was promised.

All and none. Those are the two words he uses. Not some and others. So let me go back and summarize just to make sure you get this.

We tend to think of this list in two distinct categories that Hebrews just kind of busts up for us. We think of the first group, the "some" group—some got the great outcomes in this life, and everybody wants the great outcomes in life. Die in old age with all your faculties surrounded by your family. And then we think of the others who die young in tragic ways, prolonged illnesses, painful, alone. And that's how humans look at this, not the Lord. This is not how it is. There's no "some" or "others" here.

Rather, nobody escapes death. Nobody does. A good death, a bad death—those are relative categories. All who live by faith, and this is what he means in him—all who live by faith are approved of by God, not because they're great at believing, but because the object of their faith was so strong. Because Jesus is that secure foundation for our faith. You know, if your faith is in Jesus or it's on Jesus, you're part of the all. And it doesn't matter how you go, really, in the grand scheme of things, because your future is sure. And there is for you an unfulfilled promise. There's an unfulfilled promise: your resurrection. Now, we talk about Jesus' resurrection.

We talk about the resurrections of other people in the bible, but I'm talking about your resurrection. Yours. He's the only resurrection so far. He's the first fruits, the bible calls it, of a mass harvest that's about to come when he returns. All who trust in Christ will believe, but none of us have the promise fulfilled yet. Right now, when you die in Christ, if you're a Christian, you will go to an intermediate state, and it's not the end. Your body will go in the ground. Your soul will be in heaven with the Lord. But you will have a bodyless existence until Jesus returns, and there's a resurrection of all those in Christ. And you're given a resurrection body made new. That's why the writer of Hebrews calls it a better resurrection in this passage.

Some people receive their dead back to life. — Hebrews 11:35

Now we think about that in the Bible. If I say, name a person in the Bible who died and was raised again besides Jesus, most people could come up with Lazarus. There are eight of these in scripture. There's the son of the widow of Zarephath, and the Shumanite woman's son, an Israelite man, a son of a widow of Nain, Jairus' daughter, Lazarus, Tabitha, and Eutychus. All these people died and came back to life, but that's not a resurrection. It's kind of like a resuscitation because that's not the better resurrection. What we are promised is better because these people came back to life, but they had to die. They still died. All of them.

But this is what's promised as better: Jesus will return. There will be no more grave. There will be no more sickness and sadness and sin. And we'll be raised to perfected bodies in a perfected world with one another and him. That's resurrection. That's the better resurrection.

This is what this means for your loved ones—those that you have lost, those that you know have had a bad death. There are people that you have lost, and there are people that you are losing right now. And you're like, this is not what we wanted. Nobody's answering the prayers right now, God. A bad death isn't the ending, y'all. It's not the end of the story. Can you take hope in that? That loss is real, but it's not ultimate. All death is temporary to believers. And this is what I want to press home: we can entrust those we love to the Lord even if we have to walk through them through difficult diagnoses, difficult treatments, really lingering painful endings because we have hope. Ideal death, bad death—it's all washed in the end. Resurrection. And that means also we can help make people make decisions. We can advocate for those we love in really hard places medically. Our medical field is really difficult to navigate. We're in a highly medicalized society. I told you last week, eighty percent of people will die in a hospital or a hospice. And so you can navigate that in hope if you're a Christian because it means the pressure's off. You don't ultimately have to get this right perfect, because the final ending isn't in your hands.

I want to commend to you a resource that we have on our list of resources. It's a book by Catherine Butler. She's a believer. It's called Beyond Life and Death, and she's a surgeon who's a believer who walks through what happens with life support. What happens in ICU? What happens to a body that's coded? What happens in CPR? What happens with cardiac arrest, cardiovascular support, artificially administered nutrition, dialysis, brain injury? She walks through all of these, and she holds up four principles biblically that we have to hold together: the sanctity of life, God's authority over life and death, mercy and compassion, and hope in Christ. It's a really great book, really helpful.

But here's my admonition for you this morning: Can you prepare yourself to advocate for those you love in light of the future resurrection? You can do this, folks. God will help you.

Surrounded by a Cloud of Witnesses

Second, surrounded by those we love while we await the final resurrection. Look at the last verse we printed here, 12:1, and I'm just going to read the first part of it.

Therefore, since we have such a large crowd of witnesses surrounding us... — Hebrews 12:1

Now, often in churches, we stop at the chapters in your bible and verses are put there, but they are not put there by Jesus. They're put there by an editor. There's no real division between the end of 11 and the beginning of 12. So we sometimes can stop at the end of 11, and therefore, we have to read the word "therefore." We're like, okay, this is something new. But listen to what is being said here. There's a cloud that's surrounding us. Now I've done a lot of Greek study on this.

I've looked at the original languages, and it's fascinating because in the original Greek, the word for cloud here means cloud. As in a white puffy thing filled with water vapor. That's what's being held in view. And what do we call it when a cloud is low on top of a mountain and surrounds you? Fog. So what is pictured for us are not just the words of a cloud of witnesses, not just some stories we can read in the Bible, but an actual cloud of witnesses like a fog surrounding us.

There are lots of passages that tell us that the dead in Christ are with the Lord, conscious with the Lord, but disembodied. Believers are with the Lord awaiting their resurrection at the end of all things. Years ago, I preached a sermon series at our church, probably twelve years ago, on the book of Revelation. We went through chapter by chapter. I'll never forget studying for this and reading this one commentator say something I'd never heard before. He said, "You know what heaven is? Heaven is really not a place. It's not up there or out there. It is another dimension of this reality."

And so the dead in Christ are present to the Lord, but they're here. They're here. They can see us. They have no direct communication with us. This isn't the movie Ghost, and we're warned not to try to have communication with them. We don't do a séance. But it does seem to affirm that they are present with us, like in another dimension, but right here, present but not accessible in a direct way.

And that one day, these two dimensions—heaven and earth—at the resurrection of all things will join together and bleed into one another and they will become one. And all things will be made new. We sing about that all the time. All things made new, including you. That's what we hope for. That's what we await.

So what does this mean? Where are my people right now? If they are in Christ, they are present to you in a spiritual way, like a fog that surrounds a hiker on the mountain. You know that wedding that you wish Grandma could be at? She's a believer. She's there. You know the baby that's born that you wish your dad could see? If he's a believer, he's present to that. We don't have to wish for that, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

Now what are those witnesses doing? They're not just witnessing, watching what we're doing. They're witnessing as in telling us something. The lives of those who have gone before us, your ancestors spiritually, your family members that have passed on the faith to you, their lives scream something to you. Can you hear them? Y'all hear what they're saying? Trust him. You can trust him. You can trust Jesus. You can entrust all of it to him.

I know that Google and Apple think they got the cloud. We got the cloud, y'all. Surrounded but not abandoned.

Wrestling with Those Who've Passed

And one last note. I know there's a pain like no other when you think of family members and friends who have died, and you're like, I don't think that person was a believer. I just want to say something really briefly about that. Some generations before us, in particular, the greatest generation, the World War Two generation, who for many of us were parents or grandparents or great-grandparents, they were taught, they were raised that you never discuss two things in polite society: politics and religion. They were not trained to articulate their faith. And so when we think of people who've gone before us who've passed away, I just want to say one thing that I would offer up to you: entrust them to the Lord. You don't know. Nobody ultimately knows where another person is.

We know according to the character of God throughout the Bible, he is gracious and merciful. He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. And I want to encourage you, if it's a hardship for you, if you're wrestling with not knowing where they're at, I want to encourage you just to place them in the Lord's hands and entrust him.

Join the Cloud

That's why I want to emphasize this last point as well: witnessing to those we love while we await the resurrection to come. It is time, y'all, to join the cloud. Not the Apple cloud, not the Google cloud, the cloud of witnesses. And this is a call for those of you who are a believer. Don't wait until you join that cloud when you die.

Because we know Jesus, because we know the resurrection of Jesus, because we know of a future resurrection for ourselves in Jesus, because we know all this is coming, can you be a witness today? It's time. It's time to open your mouth. It's time to use your words. It's time to act like Jesus is real in your work and with your roommate and with your family.

You know, there's no real cost in this country to identifying yourself with Jesus except for embarrassment, people making fun of you. Really? That's nothing. And we have a connection with the suffering church through the Luke alliance. We hear about people who are really suffering for their faith. You're not suffering for your faith in this country. So it's time to talk, y'all.

There's a way to talk that's not preachy or pushing it down somebody's throat, but there's a way to be real about what you believe. The Bible tells us to be prepared to give a reason for the hope that we have, and you have a hope. It's time to talk. It's time to bring somebody to church. It's time to open up your life and your home to people who don't know him. We're surrounded by people who have de-churched, who've walked away. It's time to start witnessing too.

A Word of Hope

By way of conclusion, as we await this coming resurrection, I want to leave you with one word of hope. D.A. Carson is a retired professor from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He's written over 20 books and was part of founding the Gospel Coalition. But he had to retire from public life because of Parkinson's. He was very open about this. Parkinson's made life and public ministry harder and harder. He finally disappeared from public view. But even as he grappled with the diagnosis, I love how he talked about it because he kept saying, "Hey, guys, I'm not suffering from anything that a good general resurrection won't fix."

That's the confidence that I had in walking through my dad's death. Several years ago, we watched my dad go from this bright, full of life, charismatic, super intelligent man. And we watched as a disease that we couldn't name took him away from us chapter by chapter—mental decline, speech decline. There were days that he knew who I was, days he didn't know. And the disease sometimes rendered him unresponsive and sort of lost somewhere in there. It was so hard to watch.

But the great hope of every Christian, and for me in particular, is that my dad was not suffering anything that a good general resurrection can't fix. As I watched him, my hope as we released him to the Lord in his death is that one day in the new heavens and new earth, I'm gonna see him with my own eyes. He's gonna remember everything and know everything—whole, complete. No more forgetting, just remembering.

Brothers and sisters, you face a big loss ahead. I am not gonna lie to you. Unless Jesus returns in the next year or months or whatever, we all will cross this threshold. And whether it's a good death for you or a bad death for you, it's kind of a wash because all who put their hope in Jesus will be resurrected. Even though none of us have received that promise yet fulfilled, all of us, your faith will be rewarded with resurrection.

The gospel promises a better resurrection, a faithful Savior, a future that makes present suffering bearable. And future and present advocacy for those you love and witnessing to those you love possible. No matter what you face, it's nothing that a good general resurrection can't fix.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me?

Such hard words for us, Father. It is hard to live in this world and see what we see and hold on to faith and remember that You're real, and that You're good, and that You love. Father, I pray particularly for those who are walking through loss today. Pray that You would be with us and surround us and encourage us. Thank You that Jesus is such a trustworthy Savior. We pray this in His name. Amen.