Letters to the Family of God

by Joe Franzone | February 5, 2025 | Pastor's Blog

Family of God - Website (600 × 282 px)

February 5, 2025

Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death.

Revelation 2:11

 

 

Lay your deadly doing down

Down at Jesus’ feet

Stand in Him and Him alone

Gloriously complete

Lay All Your Deadly Doing Down- Verse 1

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Dear friends,

 

My father and mother are dead—my father in March 2023 and my mother in May 2019. They both, by the grace of God, were believers. The unpleasantness of their death was a real thing, but the sting of their death was not. The sting of death was dealt with by the death of Jesus on the cross and His empty tomb.

 

The reality is almost two people die every second. It is crushing to think about. Therefore, when John writes of a second death, what is he saying? Don’t we only die once? (Hebrews 9:27) Isn't one death enough? Is second death something like being reborn and then dying again? What is the second death?

 

Death #1

Everyone will die once. This has been called the first death. The first death will come to everyone alive until Christ returns. The first death is the immediate separation of a person’s soul from their body. The body is buried or cremated. The soul (the unique you which makes you, you—your essence or personhood) is immediately in the presence of Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:8)

 

Death, therefore, is not natural. The Bible calls death our last enemy. (1 Corinthians 15:26) Death is God’s determined punishment of sin and His judgment. (Romans 5:12)

 

When I officiate a funeral, one of the things I must explain is what happens to Christians after they die. They are with Christ (2 Corinthians 5:8). Because of this, the fear of physical death need not be. Death is gain for the believer. (Philippians 1:20-21)

 

Jesus Christ, our risen savior, has passed through the most horrific traumatic death that any Christian will ever have to face, and He lives to make sure, as His people, we will move safely out of this world to the place He is preparing for us in the next. (John 14:2-3)

 

Death #2

The second death, or death #2, if a person is not a Christian, should be feared. The second death is the final separation of a person from God, which is death indeed. However, it is a death that keeps on happening. It kills all peace, all joy, all happiness, and all hope. As was said once, “When God is gone, all is gone.” The second death is existing without the life that makes existence worth having.

 

Question #28 of The New City Catechism can help us here.

Q: What happens after death to those not united to Christ by faith?

A:  At the day of judgment, they will receive the fearful but just sentence of condemnation pronounced against them. They will be cast out from the favorable presence of God into hell to be justly and grievously punished forever.

One of the scriptures they draw from is John 3:16-18; 36.

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.

Death #1 and #2

Because of simple faith in Christ, the second death (Death #2) cannot lay a finger on the Christian. The idea of a second chance to respond to the Gospel after our first death (Death #1) has no biblical foundation. Jesus told the parable about a rich man and Lazarus, which made this unmistakable. (Luke 16:19-31)

 

Epilogue

The  Christian response to the second death leads to not irresponsibility and idleness (1 Thessalonians 5:14; 2 Thessalonians 3:6) but rather activity. It's the clarion call to spread the Gospel, serve the Church and our neighbor, pray, watch, love, think about Jesus and His love for us on the cross, and praise God for His mercy.

 

 

God bless you. May His grace abound in our lives.

Pastor Joe