Let's return to John chapter 8. Last week, as you might recall, we did not finish the sermon until Sunday night. I'm pleased to report that John is doing well. I should have actually mentioned him specifically in the prayer request. John is doing much better and hopefully we'll see him again next week. So we will look for him and we're glad that he is doing well and that he was here when he ran into a crisis where he could be attended to. But if you are interested in last week, it is posted online and is also available on a cassette tape. I reprieved that sermon and it is recorded for you. And so if you are interested in that, as you recall, it was on the nature of Satan and his work. As we find it here in John chapter 8, what an interesting contrast we have today from the same chapter. And such is God's Word. John tells us in his book that there was much more that Jesus said and spoke, but there is not enough pages to write it upon. And so how we ought to treasure each and every word that we do have, knowing that each one is chosen by God intentionally for his people. And how it is that we can find so closely packed in together where Jesus is recognizing that those who rub this world work for their father who is Satan and now he will turn right around and tell us how we can have the assurance of our salvation and all in such close proximity together it is to make us marvel. John chapter 8, beginning at verse 48, if you will trace your finger down through there, reading through the end of the chapter. The Jews answered him, are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon? Jesus answered, I do not have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory, there is one who seeks it. And he is the judge, truly, truly. I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. The Jews said to him, now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham who died and the prophets died? Who do you make yourself out to be? Jesus answered, if I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my father who glorifies me of whom you say he is our God. But you have not known him. I know him, if I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad. So the Jews said to him, you are not yet 50 years old and have you seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hit himself and went out of the temple. Lord bless the reading of his word and the hearing of his people. What a remarkable passage we have. What a remarkable passage before us. I am going to be focusing primarily on verse 51. So I encourage you to look at that verse, but let's look at how we lead up into that verse. The Jews are talking now to Jesus and after he has went through the whole back and forth over who is your father, is it God or is it the devil and are you children of Abraham? They now rail an accusation at him and saying, aren't we right in saying that you are the one who has a demon? And Jesus is answering, I do not have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me. He is seeking to show them by their actions that his connection is with the father and by their dishonoring him they are showing who their father is. Then he moves down to verse 51. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. Death. George Bernard Shaw made an interesting observation when he said the statistics on death are impressive, one out of every one dies. Death is something that is an unpleasant and uncomfortable topic for most to talk about. Perhaps it's because we have some misapprehensions about death. Perhaps it's because we treasure life in the flesh far too much. Perhaps it's because we don't really honestly understand if the treasures beyond this life can measure up to what we can build for ourselves in this life. I have, as many of you have, been around death quite a bit. And sometimes it is puzzling, what is the heart of death? Is it the certainty of death or is it the uncertainty of death? I was just before I came here in the unit that I was assigned to at Fort Jackson, a young man actually, Benny Collins, returned from Iraq and two weeks later as he was running PT, physical training, running two miles or three miles or sometimes a half mile, just depending. He came in from his run and while they were still in formation, he collapsed. Benny died. I met with his wife on a number of occasions. And as we worked through that, it was tragic in the circumstances because all while he was going to Iraq, she had been prepared for the possibility that Benny might die. When he came back, however, all of those defenses and all of that preparedness was let down. And she received Benny back from Iraq, safe and sound. And the season of concern for his death had passed and Benny was home safe. But two weeks later, Benny would leave his wife a teenage daughter and he would die of something that had nothing to do with the war at all. Where do we find a sense of security in that? How can we translate that to mean anything other than tragedy? How can we interpret this to where we understand that it was a blessing as Benny was a believer? On another occasion, at Fort Stewart, as I was working to help train Georgia's National Guard, the 48th Infantry Brigade. I believe this infantry brigade was planning to go to a rotation in Iraq. As some young men were coming back from the range in a Humvee and my own son just got his Humvee license yesterday and there is nothing that it sites a young man more than having the freedom to drive a Humvee. Well, they were excited to be coming back in their Humvee, but they weren't speeding really. They were distracted talking with one another. Now, the Army is smart enough not to put radios and CD players in their military vehicles because they know where the eyes of the driver will be if you have that sort of entertainment complex in your vehicle. But instead, they're very bare and they're very plain, but you put four young men coming back from firing weapons at a range and there's lots to talk about. And the driver began to pull off of the road a little and his wheels went down toward a ditch and he rolled his Humvee. The young man in the back was not wearing his seatbelt, so the Humvee threw him out and he rolled and it rolled over the top of him. When I went to the emergency room he had just been declared dead and they cleared the room and I stayed with him there in the room for a while and I looked at him and he was 20 or 21 at most. Perfect health with his entire life before him and yet there he lay and he was dead. And I puzzled myself that night and I sat and I run my hands and I held my head in my hands and I asked God questions. And I wondered why, why is it that death seems to come so randomly and so spontaneously and so unpredictably to those you least expect it to visit on? We expect to live a long life and isn't it most of our hope that we would die in our sleep without pain and without even seeing it coming that we would live our days fully to the very end and then in our sleep pass away into eternity. Often times death doesn't come on our schedule, it seems to always be lurking there in the shadows, it seems to always be stalking us and we always are wondering if it's just around the next corner. Some of us have had these uncomfortable experiences with people who are struggling to hang on to life. My own uncle who passed away just not too long ago and I, again, thank many of you for your expressions of sympathy. And those last days as his heart continued to try to beat and is he hung on to life, his suffering was great. And we wonder why, why such suffering and the life of a believer and the hour of their death? Accepting those who die suddenly and unexpectedly, the rest of us are left to contemplate our own mortality each and every day of our lives, aren't we? The uniqueness of being human above all other creatures that God has created is that we know we are mortal. We know that we will die and each day of our life is often spent considering our own mortality and how fragile life is. Sometimes we can't help but wonder what dying will be like. Will it be painful? Will it be long? Will it be quick? Will it be frightening? Will things grow dark? Will we hear voices when we can't see or will we see and not be able to hear? What will it be like? Sometimes we're afraid. Rarely, rarely do we feel death is justified. It always seems to be unfair. It always seems to come at a time that it just doesn't seem right. First Corinthians 15, 26, death is our enemy. It is the last enemy to be defeated. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Death is not natural for us. It's not part of the way God created. It's part of the curse. It was not part of creation when God looked and He said, it is good. It was part of the curse. It was after man's fall that God said, and you shall die. He said, you eat of the tree and you shall surely die. It was part of the lie of Satan when He said, surely you will not die. So foreign was death. So foreign was our determination of our own life to our understanding in the garden that Satan could get away with such a lie. What was death? What was it to cease to exist? Death is our enemy. It is not natural. It is not easy for us. It's foreign to us. It comes upon us as a hostile act to take away our life. It's the expression of divine anger and judgment and it causes fear and it should because it was part of the curse. Francis Bacon remarks that men fear death as children fear the dark and he is right. We fear death. We stay concerned about death because no matter what our spiritual nature, all of us saved or unsaved alike experience physical death. Like a man that has terminal cancer. Adam didn't physically perish on the very same day that he sinned, but he carried death in him because he became mortal. From dust he came to dust he shall return. Conflict comes to a place where personal insults against Jesus now is being replaced by inquiry and dialogue. They've insulted Jesus and they've called him a Samaritan. They said you've got a demon and Jesus sort of brushes that aside and now he begins to come back and refocus on what his purpose and what his mission is and that is to prescribe and to announce God's answer for man's mortal fear. Death, the stealing away of our life, the loss of hope, the loss of life, Jesus has come to free the prisoners to liberate the captives. Truly, truly, I say to you if anyone keeps my word he will never see death. If anyone keeps my word we have here a condition and a promise, don't we? The first is the condition. If anyone keeps my word what does it mean to keep his word? If we want to live we have to keep his word. To keep his word is to believe it, to hope in it, to live his word, to live an obedience to his word. Jesus said I have kept the father's word and now he says anyone who keeps my word a true disciple receives the gospel, obeys the gospel in love, holds fast to the gospel as his only comfort in life. It's like hearing verses receiving would be the same as a young woman who hears one who is courting her say I love you but yet when she agrees to marry him and receives him, it's much the same as one who hears the gospel but to receive it, to keep it is like receiving the proposition of marriage. It is to enter into it to become a part of it, to live it, a transformation from one life to another, from one walk to another and just as a young lady would change her name to identify with this new relationship so we as Christians are changed in a identification with a new relationship. He had taught them that he is the bread of life. He had taught them that he was the living water. He had taught them that he was the light of the world and he had called them to come to him, to believe in him, to believe that he was the living bread, to believe that he was the living water, to believe that he was the light of the world. Their hope, their guidance and their constant presence with them to come to him as to believe, convert, conversion, change, a turning towards Christ as conversion. What is conversion? Is it just a continuing to stride along and maintain the same pace and direction that we've always been, conversion means change, to move from one place to another, from one thing to another thing, from one confession to another confession, from one hope to another hope. Conversion is change, it is turning towards Christ, it is a receiving and resting on Christ alone. On Christ alone, remember this teaching follows right on the heels of where Jesus has made clear that there is no place of neutrality for a human, for all peoples. You either have God as your father or you have the devil as your father, there is no other place to be. And so we are being called to convert not from a place of ambiguity or a place of neutrality, but from having the devil as a father to having God as our father. What's the promise? The promise is that those who keep his word will never see death. But that's a curiosity to us, isn't it? Because at the very beginning that Nye state and affirm that we all will see death, won't we? We will all die. Life is 100% fatal for all who are born. We will die. How are we to understand then he will never see death? Separation from the love of God is how we understand it. The one who keeps his word will never ultimately be separated from the love of God. And the separation from the love of God is the experiencing of the fullness of his wrath which is brought down in judgment upon those who are disobedient to him and who have walked away from the offer of salvation. So here Jesus is referring not to the physical death because he himself would experience physical death. He himself would die physically. He's saying here that even though the disciples, even though the prophets, even though the saints have all died, that there is a death that we will not see. What is this death that we will not see? In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul goes to great lengths to explain how our resurrection hope is being raised to life in Christ Jesus. Physical death can be terribly presented to us or experienced by us. It could be through a fatal car accident. It might be through a long bout with a sickness or terminal sickness or cancer. We may struggle with heart disease or we may struggle with infosima or you can pick your ailment, you can pick your tragic way of dying. We may experience those things even as believers. But once these bodies have died, we understand that death has lost its sting. Its sting is sin and sin is what condemns us. And so there is a separation in our minds between the physical perishing and the soul. Often when you go to a funeral home, we say almost instinctually, especially when there are children there, oh honey or sweetheart, that's not uncle or aunt or grandma, whomever. They are with the Lord, that's just their body. We understand that at the time of death there is a separation between the soul and that which is material, the body. We understand that that separation is true and we affirm it anytime we go out, else can we explain to someone that the person lying there is but the flesh and just the body of the person that they knew. The uncle or the aunt or the grandmother or the father or the mother or the brother or the sister, they are gone, they are not there. It's not them that we are putting in the ground, it's just a body that we are putting in there. The outer tent as the scriptures describe it. Physical death, the death of the body is the separation of the body and the soul, James, chapter 2, verse 26. The body apart from the spirit is dead. When the spirit leaves the body, the body is dead. Go back into the ezekiel and the valley of dry bones. The prophet Ezekiel saw as God pulled the bodies together, the bones came together, and the tissue came onto the bodies. They were perfectly formed bodies but there was no life in them until God breathed the spirit into them. Then they were alive. That which has no spirit is dead. Stephen in Acts chapter 7, as he was being stone, said that he called out to the Lord, received my spirit. Lord do not hold the sin against them and then he fell asleep. The first matter that has to be considered then is, can we understand in order to receive? The Jews that were speaking to Jesus, did you pick up? I tried to emphasize in the reading the subtle change they made in quoting Jesus. Jesus says to them, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. But if you trace your finger down to verse 52, then when they repeat it, they say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death. To understand the difference between seeing and tasting, to see means to behold or to gaze upon death, to taste means to eat or to take in, to experience, to become a part of. You are what you eat. And here they are saying that they don't understand the thrust of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is saying that there is a judgment that will take place, that results in condemnation and spiritual death, and that Christians will not see that, so horrible is it that Christians will not see that death. We will not be a part of that. They can't understand the separation between the spirit and the body. And so they answer back, are you saying that you will never taste death? They can't understand that the transition from the physical to the spiritual and the eternal from the transient to the eternal is something that can be done through Christ. Death is not the indistruction, it's transition for us. For the body is dust, for the soul, it's eternity. Death is the severing of life from the present, but not from the eternal. Death is not the same for all, all experience physical death, but some following that experience hell. Romans 6.23, for the wages of sin is death. The wages of sin is death, Ezekiel 18.4 in verse 20. The soul who sins is the one who will die. There is a sense in which we use the word death to describe condemnation and lostness. There is a death where the immortal soul is cast away. It's cast away from anything good. It's cast away from anything that is blessed. It is eternal aloneness because the soul is immortal. For the believer and the unbeliever alike. There is always life after this, but for some that life is death. Eternal death, aloneness, suffering without any hope of annihilation. A suffering that is eternal where flame burns the body but it does not consume it. And calling out for help there are no ears to hear. How blessed is our condition when we know when we pray our God hears us. How tormented must be the soul that calls out for God, but there is no ear to hear. For all eternity alone and suffering with no compassion and no hope and no way to end it, no way to take your own life, no way to transition to can help any more or any less than this. An immortal soul, suffering and alone, forever. This is separation from God. This is what we heard our Lord say on the cross when He said, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me for each of us deserved condemnation. And that condemnation and that wrath of God was poured out upon Christ on the cross. And in those in that very moment, He experienced something He had never known. And that was a separation from God, an aloneness being forsaken by God because in judgment and wrath God turned His face away from Christ on the cross where He would not gaze upon sin. And Christ was made sin for us. And so He experienced the separation, He experienced the aloneness, He experienced the torment of one who undergoes the judgment and the wrath of God. But the gift of God, Roman 623, tells us, while the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life. So on the one hand, there is death for those who are in sin and on the other there is life for those who are in Christ. That separation due to our sin was taken by Jesus. And so we do not have to undergo that separation. Now, those who trust Him simply say, oh, death, where is thy sting, o grave, where is thy victory? For the believer, physical death is a separation. It is union with God. The assurance that comes is also at the very beginning. Jesus is truly, truly, truly. I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. There is a tombstone in Germany that I took a picture of when I was stationed there. It is a big tombstone, and on there it is printed, God spoke the big amen. Now, I have since then asked a couple of folks from Germany, and they say it is not all that uncommon to see that. God spoke the big amen. Now, I chuckled at that, and I took a picture of it as a novelty item, but as I was going through here, I was reminded just the spirit in which that was engraved upon the stone. Truly, truly. It is the same thing when it says, amen, amen. To say, amen, amen is our assurance. It is our certainty. The big amen. The word truly, truly, was used in the scriptures in 127 times. 76 times, it is at the beginning. And when it is at the beginning, it is showing God speaking. When it is at the end, it is our affirming what God has spoken. 48 times, it is at the end, meaning we agree with what God has said. God prefaces this with the saying, truly, truly saying this is true, and it is certain. And he affirms it twice, truly, truly. Jesus is saying to us, this is as certain as anything can be because it is my word. Truly, truly, I say to you, anyone who obeys and abides in me. Anyone who keeps my word will not see death. God spoke the big amen. Means that that person who was laid to rest there had sure confidence that the promises of Christ were true because God spoke that amen. God said, truly, truly. And so therefore, their salvation is certain in Christ. That's confidence because God spoke it. What an epithet to have on your tombstone that I am saved because my confidence is that Christ has said it. Jesus said, Amen to all but that all who sin or slaves to sin. He said, truly, truly, and all men that unless you eat the flesh and drink of his blood, you shall not see salvation. He said, truly, truly, and all men, whoever hears and believes has crossed from death to life. And here, truly, truly, and all men, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. What an assurance we have that what we cling to is not some vacant or idle hope, but it is something that is assured by God Himself. It is the sure confidence and faith we have that Christ has loved us and has died for us and that we are called to be His disciples and to follow Him so that we might know that passing from this life through the portal of physical death brings us into eternal life and spirit with Him.