Psalm 90:1-12 The Last Enemy

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan.

Opening Welcome and Guest Introduction

Welcome, everybody. How's everybody doing today? Everybody good? Mark D. Yeah, a lot of thumbs up. All right, everybody. So we have a little smaller crowd today. We've got spring break going on and everything.

I guess the A crew is gone. You know, a lot of people are in Uganda. And so for whatever reason, they asked me to do the introduction. So I'd like to just blanket this entire Sunday with an apology for all of the time that you're going to have to deal with me up here saying things that are supposed to be coherent.

Yeah, no problem, man. I just wanted to do that. But no, OK, so on a serious note, so I'm Dave, Dave Bunt. And I run the worship and the music, if you haven't met me before. So I want to just welcome you guys to Recast Church.

It's good to have you guys all here. We have got a guest speaker today in Don's absence. And it's Dr. Michael Whitmer. And he is from Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. He actually taught Don when Don was in seminary and was Don's favorite professor.

Don speaks extremely highly of him. I was able to hear Don talk him up about six years ago, six, seven years ago, I think. And then he actually came and spoke on a series that I think was called Heaven is a Place on Earth.

And it was a series based on a book that he actually wrote. And I thought it was phenomenal. And he's actually written a couple books. One of them is Heaven is a Place on Earth. And I think it's a phenomenal, phenomenal book.

It blew me away. I loved it. And I want to just actually recommend it a little bit to you guys. And then he actually has a book that has come out since that he's written that's kind of a next step, really kind of reconciling the concepts of that book with the rest of how to really kind of put your life together from the ideas of the life to come with how to live your life now.

And that is called Becoming Worldly Saints. Is that correct? Awesome. And so I actually want to just suggest that to you guys, just kind of casually, because it's amazing. And I think you'll get a chance to connect with him more, because I'm sure he'll be back at some point.

He's got a wife and three kids. And he wanted to let me know, which I'm excited about, art. You're going to be excited about this. He was born in Ohio. He's lived in Ohio, right? And I was, too. So he's from Ohio, so I think that kind of got that right anyway.

Anyway, so I want to welcome up Dr. Whitmer to give his introduction on his sermon today.

Facing Death Honestly So We Can Make Much of Christ

I'm glad to be here this morning. I've been fighting a sinus drainage for the last week, so my voice, I hope it holds out. We've got mics, so we're fine. Ben Franklin said, there are two things that are certain about life, right?

Remember what they are? Two things? Death and taxes. Your taxes are coming up in two weeks, right? Today, we're going to talk about death. I hate this topic. This is awful. There's nothing about this I like.

Here's our goal for today. We want to follow scripture's lead, and we want to be honest about death, right? Praise God that when someone who knows Jesus dies, praise God their soul goes to heaven to be with Jesus.

You can't put a price on that comfort, right? Praise God for that. But the death itself still stinks, right? When we say we wouldn't wish them back, yeah, we would,.

Right?

We cry, we weep, we mourn, we miss them. So death is not actually their graduation into glory. Death actually is the reason Jesus came. So we want to be honest about death so we can make much of Christ, but then we want to talk about the hope we have in Christ.

So we're going for honesty this morning and hope. And the goal is that when we leave here, you realize this is why I'm a Christian. This is why I've given my life to Christ. And you can live now because you know the one who's conquered death.

So I want to read Psalm 90 to show you how honest scripture is about this problem. Psalm 90, a Psalm of Moses from a long time ago. We'll read the first 12 verses. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.

Before the mountains were born, oh, you brought forth the whole world. From everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You turn people back to dust saying, return to dust, you mortals. A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by or like a watch in the night.

Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death. They're like the new grass of the morning. In the morning, it springs up new, but by evening, it's dry and withered. We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.

You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to 70 years or 80 if our strength endures, yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass and we fly away.

If only we knew the power of your anger. Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due. Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Father, thank you for your honesty. Thank you that you don't sugarcoat the problems in our lives.

You don't paper over our sin. You don't sugarcoat death or hell. You're honest about who we are, what we've done, and where we're headed. But thank you for Jesus and the hope we have. If there's anyone here this morning who doesn't know that they know your son, may your spirit, using your word today, disturb them, rock them, break their will, and bring them to yourself.

And for those of us who do know Jesus, I pray that from having gathered together and worshiping with each other and talking with each other and hearing from your word, that we might leave here excited, exhilarated even, that we know you, and we know your son, who is life, that we have everlasting life.

And that's already begun. Thank you for the gospel. Thank you for Jesus. Please receive our prayers now as we sing them. In his name, amen. I'm glad to be back with you again. I think I was, I came and spoke soon after recast started in the old, like a strip mall.

So it's been a while. I'm following you on Facebook and seeing the concrete being poured in January, I think, which is pretty remarkable. So pray with you that it all gets built by the time you have to get out of here.

Be pretty important. Of course, I've known Don and Linda for some time and just respect them and know that Don, man of integrity who loves Jesus and loves you. And so I'm glad for you that you have a leader like that who can lead you even to reach into Uganda from Matawan.

Also want to say, if you don't have a Bible, if you raise your hand and want one, we'll get you one. You can actually take it home with you. You can drop it off or just raise your hand if you need one.

The Culture's Empty Answers About Death

All right, then we'll begin. Several years ago, there was a older woman. She had been the secretary at the seminary when I was going through school and she was dying of bone cancer. And her husband called me one night and said, you come over, I think Jan may not make it through the night.

So of course I dropped everything and raced to their condominium and Jan, she was a straight shooter. I'll never forget, I walked over to the couch where she was lying and she looked at me and she said, how do I do this?

I've never died before. Oh my goodness, what do you say? Well, Martin Luther says, someday we're all going to ask that question. And we better ask it now before death is in range because if we wait until death is on the move, it might be too late.

So this topic, there's nothing I hate more than this topic. There's nothing about death I like. The whole thing grosses me out, disgusts me, scares me. I have nothing to do with it. But I want to make much of death this morning so we can make much of Jesus.

Because if you thought about it, every religion tries to solve some problem. Islam tries to solve the problem of pride. Buddhism, the problem of suffering. Hinduism, bad karma. What's the problem the Christian faith solves?

It's death.

And if we make too little of death, we just minimize Jesus, right? Every time you, so tomorrow night, well, tonight's the women's final four, itty bitty. And now I'm hooked on women's basketball too because that was quite fun game to watch the other night.

So tonight's final four for women, tomorrow night final four for men. Whoever wins, I guarantee you in the post-game press conference, they're not going to say, oh man, of course we won. These guys are terrible.

Can't believe we had to play them. Okay, we're number one, but them, really? No, they're going to say how great they were and how, I mean, I'm from Northeast Ohio. I cheer for Cleveland, right? Our teams have stunk forever until LeBron came and now we're stinking again for who knows why.

But every time they beat the Browns, we get number one pick in the draft. So April's the best month to be a Browns fan every single year. But when they beat the Browns, they always said, oh, these guys, they're pros, right?

We didn't take this for granted, even though they probably did. They pumped up the Browns. You're Lions fans, right? You know how this feels. You always, even if you expect to win, you want to make much of your opponent so your victory looks even better.

But we don't have to pump up death. It is as bad as you think it is. But here's the point. If you ever minimize death, if you ever say death is no big deal, then neither is Jesus. So we want to maximize death so we can maximize and make much of Christ.

Now maybe you're thinking, what about Philippians 1 .21? Doesn't Paul say in Philippians 1 .21, to die is gain? Well, read the next chapter. Chapter two, verse 27. Paul says, my friend Epaphroditus was ill and almost died, but God had mercy on him and spared him.

So death is gain in Philippians 1 .21 because, praise God, if you're in Christ, your soul does go to heaven. Praise God for that. But death itself is a bad thing. Scripture calls death the last enemy.

Why Death Is the Last Enemy

So before we get to that, though, I want to just do some research on this and I want to show you, just if you don't know Jesus, how you've got nothing to say in the face of death. And we don't want to do this to make fun of what the culture is saying, but so our hearts can break and realize if you just stopped and thought about it, if you don't know Christ and you stopped and thought about death, you would realize you've got nothing.

You're empty.

So every time anyone in the culture, and sometimes even Christians who should know better, every time the subject of death comes up, what do you always hear? Death is natural. Death is normal. It's just part of the circle of life, right?

So here's a quote from this famous book on death, Tuesdays with Maury. Mitch Albom, who lives near Detroit, I guess covering Detroit sports for a while, he realized, I'm qualified to talk about death.

So he interviewed his friend, Maury Schwartz, who was dying of ALS. And Oprah made this her book of the month club once, and so it was really, in the culture, a really popular book. Here's what Maury Schwartz says.

Death is as natural as life. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we're human, we're something above nature. We're not.

Everything that gets born dies. All right, that's a pretty, that's the go-to answer in the culture. Death is normal. It's natural. All right, even if that was true, how much would that really help? If you go home today and find that someone has burglarized your home and set it on fire, and you call 911, and the operator says, yeah, we've been getting a lot of calls like this lately from Attawan.

We think burglary and arson are the new normal. Normal? I don't care how normal it is. Get somebody out here. My house is on fire. Or if you're in an airplane, let's say coming back from Uganda, and you hear this noise and something sputters and goes out, and another noise sputters and goes out a few minutes later, and the pilot comes on and says, attention, we've just lost all of our engines.

Prepare for impact. But by the way, this happens all the time in Asia.

I don't care.

That doesn't help me at all, right? If this is true, if death is natural, then nothing can be done about it. It's just natural. If death is natural, nothing ought to be done about it, because it's natural.

But that's not what the Bible says. In fact, some Christians now are trying to... There's some forms of science which say that human death is natural because of natural selection. You have to die to get ahead.

And so some Christians influenced by that say, well, how do we make sense of Scripture then, which says death is a consequence of Adam's sin? And they say, well, maybe we can separate natural physical death from spiritual death.

Maybe we were always going to die because we're human, but now, because of sin, it just stings. It just hurts. Let me just tell you, if you separate physical and spiritual death like that, first of all, the Bible does not.

And secondly, tell me then how Jesus' physical death and the physical blood that we sang about this morning gives you spiritual life. This is a dead end. You can't do this. We don't separate. You can distinguish physical and spiritual death, but you cannot separate them and have any hope in Christ.

So we hear that death is natural. Then we hear other reasons why maybe death isn't so bad. Another quote from Tuesdays with Maury.

He says,.

As long as we can love each other and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were there.

Death ends a life, not a relationship. You've heard that before too, right? You hang on. You remain. You linger in the memories of those who loved you. Again, that's encouraging. But how much does that help?

When's the last time you actually thought about your great-great-grandparents? I think never, right? So if this is all you got, once you die in a generation or two, you're out of mind, out of sight, out of existence.

We also hear other things. Well, maybe you have to die to give meaning to life. You have to have closure to have value, to have meaning. Like tonight and tomorrow night, the championship basketball games, if they never end, if the clock never expires, you can't tell who won.

You go to a performance, if the song or the play never ends, you don't know when to clap. If this sermon never ends, and maybe you're feeling like that soon, but you don't know when you're actually allowed to go.

So you do have to have closure to have meaning. But here's the thing. You don't have to die to have closure. We believe in closure in the return of Christ. The Bible ends with, come, Lord Jesus. If you have to die to have meaning, then imagine when Christ returns and restores all things, and we're living with him here on this restored earth without death.

We're going to walk around with our head down, pulling our hair, saying, what does my unending life even mean? No, you don't have to die to have closure. We also hear that death makes room for others.

This is from Steve Jobs' famous Stanford commencement speech. You've probably heard about it, seen it on YouTube.

He said,.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you, Stanford graduates. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

How much did that help Steve as he was dying of cancer? Someone said, Steve, remember what you said to Stanford graduates? This is life's change agent. It's clearing out the old to make way for the new.

Someone else is going to get your job. They'll be able to provide for their family.

It's all good.

That doesn't help at all right now. And then lastly, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who gave us those five stages of grief,.

She said,.

When people die, they very simply shed their body. Much as a butterfly comes out of its cocoon. Remember the five? There's first denial, anger, bargaining,.

Depression,.

Acceptance. I think she's hung up on denial. You hear that, right? That death is like, it's a relief and you're like a butterfly now. So when someone dies, remember when you used to have newspapers and someone famous died, they have a comic the next day with clouds.

So if someone was a golfer, now they're hitting all the celestial fairways. If someone is a musician, now they're jamming in heaven's band. If someone was annoying, now they're really a pain in the neck.

Right?

You die, you go to heaven, and you do whatever you did on earth, just better. We're just making stuff up now. We got nothing. So here's that, that's five things you hear from the culture. If you stopped and actually thought about it, you realize there's nothing there.

If you don't know Jesus, you got absolutely nothing that helps a lick in the face of death. So let's say what scripture says. First of all, I like how the Bible is honest. It does not sugarcoat this.

It says,.

Death is our enemy. Death is the first enemy. Death is the first negative thing that appears in the Bible. In Genesis chapter 2 and verse 17, God says to Adam and Eve, if you eat from this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die.

That's the first negative thing, you will die. And then chapter 3, when they ate of it, yes, now you are going to die. So death is the first enemy in the Bible. It's also the last enemy. Paul calls it this.

In 1 Corinthians 15, 26, he says death is the last enemy, and it literally is. If you look at the end of your Bible in Revelation chapter 20, in verse 10 of Revelation 20, the devil is thrown into the lake of fire.

Four verses later, death is thrown in. Death is literally the last enemy to go. It lingers even after the devil is gone. And death is the enemy in the middle. We read in the introduction today, Psalm 90 verses 5 through 10, where Moses wrings his hands over death.

And says,.

We live here 70 years, we have this rank 80, but that's it. We're like fresh grass in the morning, but it goes so fast. I turn 50 in January. And maybe this is my midlife crisis sermon actually, because it's cheaper than getting a Camaro or something.

But wow, like 50. I don't feel like I should be that old. But it goes just that fast. And if you're a kid, you can't understand this, but trust me, the older you get, life just picks up speed. And it's just that fast.

Where did it go? Notice in Psalm 92,.

Moses says,.

At death we fly away. Flying away in Scripture is not like we sing it in gospel bluegrass quartets. It's a bad thing. Praise God that when we die, our soul goes to Jesus. But we're Christians, doggone it.

We don't pray to go to heaven. We pray for heaven to come to earth. We pray for the return of Christ. Maranatha means come, Lord Jesus. We believe in the three R's, right? If you're a Christian, the return of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the restoration of all things.

That's what Christians hope for. In fact, there's only one book of the Bible that calls death a friend. A good thing. Can you guess which book that is? Ecclesiastes? Sounds close. You're close.

Job.

Maybe if you're Job, death is sweet death. Come, just make it stop. But again, the whole, Scripture could not be more clear from the start to the finish. Death is bad. Scripture also is honest and tells us where death comes from.

1 Corinthians 15, 56 says, the sting of death is sin. So death is horrible. Death is terrible. But what makes death bad, really bad, the sting of it is sin. Because if death is as horrible as I think it is, it is tough to confess and admit that somehow I deserve it.

I don't want to think that I deserve to die and go to hell. I like to think I'm a pretty nice guy and God must be so glad that I chose Him. And I'm on His team. But Scripture says, in myself, by myself, I actually deserve to die.

And unless I admit that, I can't tell you why the cross. Think about it. If desperate situations call for extreme measures, then an extreme measure is a sign that you might be in a desperate situation.

So if I'm driving down the highway and a police car flashes its lights behind me, my wife will turn to me in her disapproving voice and say, what did you do? If a lot of police cars join the chase and they surround us and a TV helicopter is overhead shining its light right on us, she'd get a bit more accusatory.

What did you do?

If a fighter jet joins the chase, dropping bombs, ripping up the pavement at our car, she's going to scream like some lady in an action movie.

What did you do?

Think about what God did to save us. God did not hand us a brochure as if we were just uninformed. He did not stage an intervention as if we were just a little bit stubborn. God answered our need with the cross.

If the death of God himself was required for you and I to be saved, what did we do? I hate to admit, it's hard to admit, but I'm a human being in God's image. I have a value that's priceless, but I'm also a rebel.

I'm a sinner.

I would kill God if I had the chance, and we know that because when he gave us a chance, we took it. When we sing that song, we hear our voice among the mockers, crucify him, crucify him. If I don't admit that I'm that bad, I can't tell you why Jesus died.

Now, as hard as it is to admit, it's actually a relief to know the problem, right? If death and hell is this bad, it's a relief to know why. Just like when my kids were really little and they would have, you know, Dave, you have ear infections yet?

Baby, first one? They'd stay up all night crying, and my wife would take them to the doctor. The last thing she wanted to hear, the last thing she wanted to hear was, we don't know why he's crying. Just cut it out, maybe.

In six months, he'll stop. No, she was so glad to hear, okay, that's an ear infection, and you've got to be careful with the antibiotics, I know, but take this and, yeah, thank you. We need to sleep. We need him to stop feeling pain.

So it's a relief to know the problem is me because now we've isolated the problem because if death was natural, nothing could be done about it. If death was natural, nothing ought to be done about it.

But if death is unnatural, if death is the consequence of your and my rebellion against God, hey, there's hope for that. So let's talk about the hope we have in Scripture. I want to first mention just the importance of hope.

In 1 Corinthians 13, 13, we're told the three top Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.

Great.

But don't forget, hope made the cut. It's one of the top three. We take this for granted, I think, because we're just, a lot of us have had pretty comfortable lives, and we think things are just, we're happy.

But if you don't have hope, I mean, think of the poor Syrians. As their country is just falling apart, they don't have hope. If you don't think of a downtown inner city Detroit over the last 20-some years, when you lose hope, you can't go on.

You remember that story, maybe 10 years ago now, there's these four football players, one of them had played for the Lions, and they were out fishing in the Florida Keys, and they had anchored the boat, and after a few hours, they started up the boat and gunned the motor and forgot to pull up the anchor, and the boat capsized.

And these four physically fit football players, for the next few hours, climbed up on the overturned hull, the wave would come and wash them off, and they'd climb back up, and the wave would come and wash them off, and after about five or six hours, one of them just took off his life jacket and sank beneath the waves.

He just gave up.

And one by one, over the next day or so, the two others did as well, and they found one alive, huddled on the overturned hull with the life preserver on, and this fellow wrote a book called Not Without Hope.

You can be physically fine, but if your spirit loses hope, you just quit. So think about death again. I'd like to think of death as the dominant destroyer. It destroys everything in its path, and it's dominant.

There's nothing you can do to fight it. Think about how we treat death. Death is so awful, it's always the go-to analogy for really bad stuff. If you're public speaking, and you trip up and embarrass yourself, you say, oh, I was so humiliated.

I what? I nearly died. Or if you're in great pain, oh, I just wish I was dead. Or if your team is from Detroit or Cleveland, oh, we're getting killed out there. When things are really ugly, you always reach to death for the go-to, for this is how bad it is.

What would you compare death to? It's as bad as it gets. We cannot beat death, right? We can't even cheat it for long.

But here's the gospel.

We know someone who has. Jesus has come, and he is the God-man, and he had to be the God-man to pay our debt, because think of it. We rebelled against God. We owed him a debt we could not pay, because any good thing you would do for God after that fact, that's a good thing you already owe him anyway.

You can't do makeup work. You can't earn extra credit with God. We're stuck. We owed the debt, but we couldn't pay it. Only a perfect man, only the God-man, whose life is of infinite value, could pay the debt on our behalf.

And so scripture says in 2 Corinthians 5 .21, He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness. Here's how this worked. Jesus bore our guilt in our place, and so he died.

I used to think that the cross is what saves us. The resurrection is merely God's greatest miracle that proves the cross worked.

Right?

If Jesus had not risen from the dead, we'd still be saved. We just wouldn't know it. We wouldn't have assurance. But that's not what the Bible says. In Romans 4 .25, Paul says, Jesus was raised for our justification or our acceptance with God.

1 Corinthians 15 .17, Paul says, If Jesus has not been raised, then you are still in your sins. So if someone ever asks you, which is more important, the cross or the resurrection? Trick question. You need both, or you cannot be saved.

So Jesus bore our sin, became guilty, and so he died. If he had remained dead, he would have remained guilty, and so would you, and so would I. But the Father raised him from the dead. He vindicated him.

He exonerated him. He released him from that guilt. So Jesus died as our substitute. He died in our place, but he was raised as our representative to establish our place. Jesus drug sin and death down with him into the grave.

And when he arose, he left it in the dust. When the women came to the tomb Easter morning, they found it was death that had died in the night. This is why we're Christians. This is why we've given our life to Christ.

And by the way, just a word about the resurrection. It's physical. A lot of Christians think of the resurrection as spiritual somehow. We think that the goal of the Christian life is to die and go to heaven, and praise God you go to heaven.

But when you go to heaven, that's the first leg of a journey that's round trip. We believe in the return of Christ and the resurrection, and that's for your body. This body, the body you have right now, this body will rise again.

If your resurrection body is too different from this body right now sitting in chairs, then you will not have been redeemed, you will have been replaced. And that's not the Christian hope. It's for the redemption of these bodies.

So there's a real tension when someone dies and goes to heaven, we can say they've gone home. They've gone home to be with the Lord. But it's complicated. Jesus is who we are to live forever with. So when you go to be with Jesus, you are going home.

But the earth is where we are to live forever with him. So think of a college student who's away at school, and while they're away, their parents move to a different city, different house. If you ask this student, are you going home for the holidays?

Are you going home for Christmas? They'll probably say, yeah, but it's complicated. I am going home because it's my parents,.

But you know what?

It's not my house. Not my town. I don't know anybody there. So kind of like that. Praise God when we die, our souls are going home to be with Jesus. But the Christian hope is even better than that. We believe, based on scripture, that Jesus will bring back with him, and this can happen at any moment, when he returns, he will bring back with him the souls of everyone who's died in him, who's put their faith in him.

He will resurrect their bodies and put them back together. And we will live forever with them here. So when my kids were young, I didn't say, ask Jesus to forgive your sins so you can go to heaven when you die.

I said, ask Jesus to forgive your sin so you can live with Jesus here forever with all of your family, all of your friends who put their faith in Christ. That's something a kid can actually relate to.

And it's actually true. The Christian hope is for all of creation to be restored. So if that's true, how do we join Christ's victory? In scripture, death is often referred to as an ocean. So in Job chapter 38, Job 38, 16,.

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? 1 Samuel 22, verse 5,. The waves of death swirled about me.

The torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. And then Revelation 21, 3, Revelation 21, 1 says,. On the new earth there'll be no more sea. I think, again, that's a picture of death. It doesn't mean there won't be any water, like we'll have dolphins on the new world.

But no more evil, no more death. So in scripture, death is often pictured as an ocean. And think about, well, even today, but in that ancient world too, the ocean was this dark, foreboding place. People went out in shifts.

They didn't always come back. It felt like a great analogy for death. Well, if you're ever lost at sea, how do you survive? You're tempted to frantically thrash out and try to get to shore, but that's how you wear yourself out and you drown.

If you're ever lost at sea, the only hope you have is to relax, practice the prone float, wait for hope to come. And that's how we defeat death as well. We rest in Christ. We can't beat death. We can't cheat it.

But if Jesus has, we join his victory. We put all of our weight in him. So when I was a kid, my parents taught me this bedtime prayer. Maybe you did too. Now I lay me down to sleep. Pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I die before I wake, pray the Lord my soul to take.

That's a great prayer.

That really is. Every night when we lay our body on the mattress, that's great practice. Just as we transfer all of our weight to that mattress, so spiritually we transfer all of ourselves to Jesus. We rely, we depend, we lie on him just like we lie on that bed.