The Life And Death Of Death - [Revelation 20:14]

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If you have a Bible, please take it and turn to Psalm 16, or Psalm chapter 16.
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Psalm 16, written by David, but certainly verse 10 has great pertinence to the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Psalm 16.
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Psalm 16. Therefore, my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices.
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My flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your
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Holy One see corruption. You make known to me the path of life.
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In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
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Well, let's pray. Our great
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God and Father, today of all days, we rejoice.
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As we think of our risen Savior, the prophecy fulfilled,
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His glorious mission fulfilled. Father, we with saints around the world would say,
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He is risen. He is risen indeed today. It is true every day, but nevertheless, today is the day we mark that event.
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Father, we know that we have, even this week, even as we look forward to this day, even as the world recognized
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Good Friday and the crucifixion on Friday, we have failed you in many ways this week.
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We've fallen short in thoughts, in deed. Lord, our ways are not your ways.
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We see your perfection, and even in our best moments, we know that we fall short of that.
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But Father, our thankfulness is not rooted in our performance.
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It's not rooted in our failures. It is rooted in your grace as exhibited in the life, death, and resurrection of our
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Lord Jesus Christ. Father, we would pray today that you would wash us, that you would remind us anew of your mercy, of your kindness, of your faithfulness, of your indeed loving kindness toward those whom you have called, whom you have regenerated, whom you have drawn to the
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Lord Jesus Christ, whom you have given new hearts, new affections. Father, we praise you and thank you.
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For the saints around the world, we rejoice that there is a church universal that today rejoices, regardless of their circumstances.
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We would pray for our brothers and sisters under oppression.
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We think about countries like Ukraine, where Christians are huddled, are worried about physical attacks.
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The saints throughout Asia who must meet surreptitiously.
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The saints in Africa who are often persecuted for their faith. Father, we are free and we rejoice in that freedom, but we would pray for our brothers and sisters that they might one day enjoy that freedom.
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Lord, as we worship you today, we would pray that the things that we do would glorify you as we sing, as we pray, as we listen to your word, as we read your word, as we preach your word.
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Even as we give whatever we do today, we pray that it would redound to your glory.
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Father, we pray these things that Jesus might be magnified. In Jesus name, amen.
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You may be seated. Well, as I consider what
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I might preach this morning, I wanted to do something a little different.
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And I thought about our culture and about how it glorifies death.
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We see even now that Hollywood is glorifying death in its movies.
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Murder is on the rise throughout our country. And, of course, there have been upwards of 70 million abortions since Roe v.
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Wade passed in 1973. Our culture seems to be obsessed with death and violence.
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Why is that? Well, John writes, because the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
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Satan so loves death and violence and suffering.
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And that's reflected in how our world views it. It's an illness, a sickness, a disease, but it is flat out sin.
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It's wickedness. And there is one remedy, one cure, and that is the
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Lord Jesus Christ. It is a blessed cure for sure. I would invite you to open your
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Bibles to Revelation 20. And just so you understand, this morning we are going to be reading a lot of Scripture.
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This is one where Pastor Mike would say, get your WD -40 ready and spray it along the spine of your
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Bibles, because we're going to be turning to a lot of passages. Revelation chapter 20, and I'm going to read verses 11 to 15 to just kind of set the context.
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And the context is this, basically. Jesus is sovereign. Jesus is in control.
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No matter what it looks like, He is in control.
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Verse 11 of Revelation chapter 20. Then I saw a great white throne, and Him who was seated on it.
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From His presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them.
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And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne.
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And books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life.
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And the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it.
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Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done.
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And listen, here's the verse I'm really focused on this morning, verse 14. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.
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This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
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That lake of fire is hell. It's eternal death, it's eternal hell, where the wrath of God is poured out on the unrighteous forever and ever.
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And this morning, this resurrection Sunday morning, we're going to trace, as it were, the life and death of death.
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I've done a lot of funerals over the last several years, and I thought
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I would like to do death's funeral. So that's what we're going to do.
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I'm tired of death. I'd like to bury him. And I want us to see this morning that God is not only in control of death, but that for believers,
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Jesus has removed the fear of death. And ultimately, he will remove death from our presence forever.
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In heaven, we will never know again the presence of death. We will never fear its sting again.
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And I have seven elements of death's obituary. If I were doing his funeral, it would go something like this.
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And the fact that death is going to die is directly tied to what we celebrate today, the resurrection of our
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Lord Jesus Christ. Because he lives, death will die. First step in our obituary, death's warning.
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I try to think of a way of saying it. I'm personifying him, death, because Revelation does.
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Now, it's not actually a person, but it's the personification of death. I try to come up with something that would kind of be a,
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I guess you could call it a foreshadowing when I say death's warning, a foreshadowing, a prophecy, that kind of thing.
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Genesis 2, verses 15 to 17. And again, we're going to be going,
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I mean, think about it. We've already gone from Revelation to Genesis, and we're going to go back to Revelation eventually. Genesis 2, verses 15 to 17.
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The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
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And the Lord God commanded the man, that is to say Adam, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.
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For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. Now, there are some things that you only learn by experience.
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I mean, what is pain? You can talk about pain, but you don't really know what it is until you get what?
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Pain. Until you suffer. You know, you tell your kids, Don't put your hand in the fire because it's going to burn you.
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And what do they do? Eventually, they're going to get too close to the burner or whatever, they're going to hurt themselves. Then they go,
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Okay, I understand now. If you could only learn some things by experience, what experience did
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Adam have at this point? None. So God says, On the day you eat of that tree, you will surely die.
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Adam doesn't really know what death is. I mean, you think about it this way. He'd never had a disagreement with his wife because she hadn't even been created yet.
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He had no idea. You know, God says, Be fruitful and multiply. He has no idea what kids are like.
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No children around. Never been one. Adam didn't know what death was, but he knew this.
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It was bad. It was a punishment. There was going to be a punishment that was going to end
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Adam's life if he ate that tree. So that's death's warning. We're going to move quickly this morning.
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Number two, death's birth. Not, you know, in a hospital somewhere.
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It's actually in the Garden of Eden. Death's birth. The birth of death.
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Genesis 3, verses 17 and 19. And to Adam he said,
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Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.
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Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
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Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. Here's the key, verse 19.
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By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.
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For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
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To dust you shall return. Adam was formed by God out of the dust, and he would return to it.
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This is ultimately the birth of death. In Romans 5, verse 12, we read this,
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Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man. This is it. This is the event. Adam doesn't believe
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God, Adam partakes of the fruit, and Adam dies, and death through sin.
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So in other words, death came about through sin. You could say that sin was the father of death, essentially.
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And so death spread to all men because all sinned.
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Our universal condition as we come into this world is spiritual deadness, but ultimately we're going to physically die.
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Our confession says this, Our first parents by this sin fell from their original righteousness and communion with God.
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Imagine walking and talking with the pre -incarnate Christ, being with Him in the garden.
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It goes on to say, And we in them, whereby death came upon all, all becoming dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.
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Okay, so one, the warning of death, or death's warning. Two, death's birth. Three, death's first victory.
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His first victory. Genesis 4 .8. We're kind of doing a jet tour of Genesis here.
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Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother
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Abel and killed him. The first death recorded for us in Scripture, the first murder.
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Some will say, How do you know that he was the first human being to die? Couldn't there have been other ones? If you think about Genesis, what's its purpose?
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Genesis, basically first things, right? This is the beginning. Moses, by the power and inspiration of the
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Holy Spirit, gives us many such firsts. I mean, you can find the first polygamist.
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You can find a lot of the firsts. Not a lot of good firsts, but a lot of sinful firsts.
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And this is the first death and the first murder. And we can also infer that Abel was the first murder victim by the words of Jesus in Matthew 23, 35, where he describes the righteous
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Abel. And basically, the picture he paints as he's describing, or as he's talking of the
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Pharisees, is one where that was the first murder, and then there's been a train of martyrs right up until the present day.
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So that's number three. Death's first victory is Abel. His first victim, you could say.
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Number four, death's continuing success. You know, again, if we're thinking about it as a funeral, as an obituary, we'd go,
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You know what? He had a good track record. By good, I mean bad. Death's continuing success.
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I mean, if he were a businessman, we'd say he had quite a career. Genesis 5 is known as the chapter of death.
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From 5 .5 to 5 .31, from Adam to Lamech, only two escaped death.
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Enoch, who's said to just be taken, he's translated, he's taken by God.
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And then Noah is the only other person mentioned in chapter 5 who doesn't die. But that's because it's not his time yet.
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He's got more to do. Otherwise, the constant refrain of Genesis 5 is what?
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And he died. Talks about so -and -so, how long he lived, his lineage, and then, and he died.
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And ultimately, Enoch and Elijah are the only men recorded for us in all the
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Old Testament who escape death, who do not die. The New Testament puts it this way in Romans 6 .23,
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for the wages of sin is death. We're all sinners, and so we all get what is coming.
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Death. With every sin, the judgment of God, like a meter in a taxi, or like the meter at your gas pump, just keeps going and going and going.
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The difference between death or sin and the gas pump is, you never know what the gas pump's going to stop at.
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You always know what the end result of sin is, and it's death. It keeps spinning and spinning and spinning, and then it stops, death.
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In fact, as a result of Adam's fall, we all die physically, but like Adam and Eve, we are born spiritually dead.
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We're incapable of obeying God. We're incapable of understanding the Word of God, and we're incapable of pleasing
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God. And Jesus made it plain that this is true in John 6 .44 when he said,
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No one can come to me. No one has the ability. Nobody has the capacity. And literally, the word means power.
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No one has the power to come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. That's number four, death's continuing success.
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Number five, death's apparent failure. Death's apparent failure.
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What is it that death was always wanting to do? And again, we're talking about him as if he were a person. We could say this is
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Satan's agent, Satan's tool. What is it that death failed to do?
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Well, it failed to claim its most wanted target, Jesus. And that's kind of one of the themes of the
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Old Testament. There are many times in the Old Testament where either the nation of Israel or David's line seemed to be in mortal peril.
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Just some examples. In slavery in Egypt, looks like they're doomed.
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The Babylonian captivity. The Assyrian captivity. The Philistines who sought to absorb the
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Jews. There are many such instances. I mean, the whole book of Ruth. It seems like the line of Jesus is going to be interrupted.
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Time and time again, God intervenes to prevent the ultimate calamity.
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The ultimate what would be victory for Satan. And even when
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Jesus was born, what did King Herod do? He ordered all male children in the region of Bethlehem put to death because he was afraid of the prophecy.
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Afraid of this prophecy in Matthew 2 verse 6. And you,
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O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah are by no means least among the rulers of Judah.
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For from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel. Herod didn't like that.
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He was worried he was going to get overthrown by whoever this child was. That's true from a human perspective, but from kind of a spiritual perspective,
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Satan is determined to put an end to the seed of Eve. This long promised
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Messiah. But for all the effort from the murder of Abel, who could have been the one, right?
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As far as Satan knew. To the murder of many infant boys in Bethlehem.
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Death never claimed the life of the Messiah. Or did he?
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We come to number 6. Death's ultimate failure. Death's ultimate failure.
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It followed death's apparent greatest victory, right? The crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus actually did physically die.
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We know this because Luke the physician records it for us in Luke chapter 23.
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Please turn there because this is a little bit lengthy. And this is on Friday. Good Friday as we call it.
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Good Friday because it was the day Jesus Christ laid down his life for the sheep.
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Luke 23 verses 44 to 56. It was now about the 6th hour.
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And there was darkness over the whole land until the 9th hour. While the sun's light failed.
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Why did the sun's light fail? This is the judgment. This is a sign of judgment.
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And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said,
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Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And having said this, he breathed his last.
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Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, Certainly this man was innocent.
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And all the crowds that had assembled for this spectacle. Imagine that.
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Crowds gathering around to watch Jesus be crucified. When they saw what had taken place, in other words, when they saw the darkness, when they saw all this calamity happening, returned home beating their breasts.
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And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.
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Now there was a man named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man who had not consented to their decision and action.
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And he was looking for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.
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Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone where no one had ever yet been laid.
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It was the day of preparation and the Sabbath was beginning. The women who had come with him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how his body was laid.
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Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the
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Sabbath, they rested according to the commandment. See, on Friday, he's crucified.
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The Sabbath, Saturday, he's in the tomb, he's left alone. Why? Because they're not going to do work,
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Joseph and these women, are not going to do any work on the
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Sabbath. Now certainly, Satan must have been pleased.
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Again, as we consider Genesis 3 .15, this curse that God pronounces on Satan.
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Listen, I will put enmity between you and the woman who will be named
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Eve here shortly, and between your offspring, everyone who doesn't believe, and her offspring, meaning all believers, but also primarily the
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Lord Jesus Christ. He, talking about this
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Messiah, this forthcoming descendant from Eve, this offspring of Eve, he shall bruise your head and you,
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Satan, shall bruise his heel. What do you suppose
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Satan is thinking at the moment where Jesus dies, where he's buried in the grave? Do you think he's thinking,
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I have bruised his heel? I think it's more like this.
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God, you said he was going to crush my head. I crushed his head. He's dead.
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Now he had failed in some ways. He tempted Jesus in the wilderness. That didn't work.
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He sought to discourage him by the betrayal of Judas, or I'm sorry, by the betrayal of Judas, the abandonment of his best friends, the denial by Peter, but now
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Satan had his moment. Jesus was dead. He was buried. The only challenge was keeping him in the grave, right?
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Jesus had said he was going to raise him on the third day. The only challenge was keeping him in the grave, but how tough was that going to be?
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Death up to this point had never lost, never lost anybody.
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Everyone who had died, who had ever raised from the dead? Oh, we could point to Lazarus. Lazarus is kind of an exception for a couple of reasons.
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One is Jesus had called him forth, but Lazarus wasn't crucified. He died because he was sick.
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Jesus alone being the second person of the Trinity could raise him from the dead. There's no
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Jesus to raise Jesus, but Satan was missing the major point.
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This was God's plan. Not Satan's plan. It was God's plan. Isaiah 53, verse 10.
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Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. It was the will of the triune
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God to crush the man Christ Jesus. John 2, 19.
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Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, talking about his body, and in three days
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I will raise it up. John 10, 17 and 18.
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For this reason the Father loves me because I lay down my life, voluntarily lay down my life, that I may take it up again.
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No one takes it from me. Satan can't do it. The Romans can't do it. The Jewish Pharisees and authorities can't do it.
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But I lay it down of my own accord. What did he even say in Luke? He surrendered his spirit.
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Nobody took it from him. He goes on to say, I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again.
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This charge I have received from my Father. The Father's commanded me to do it and I'm going to do it.
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Psalm 16 .10, as we read earlier. The psalmist wrote that God would not let the
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Holy One see corruption. He wasn't going to let Him stay in the tomb long enough for His body to rot.
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So this is death's failure. And now we're going to see number 7, the death of death or death's death.
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I actually said it. It's harder than it sounds. As we've said,
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Jesus was dead. His body was wrapped. He's in the tomb. He's got some of the traditional spices and ointments and they go back to finish it on Sunday morning.
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There's a stone in front of the tomb. There are guards in front of the tomb. No matter what,
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Jesus is not leaving that tomb. It's just not going to happen.
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There's nobody who can move the rock by himself. Certainly not from the inside.
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And it's guarded. Matthew records it in Matthew 27 verses 62 to 66.
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The next day, that is the day after or that is after the day of preparation.
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So now we're talking about Sunday or I'm sorry, Saturday still. The chief priests and the
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Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, Sir, we remember how that imposter talking about Jesus said while he was still alive, after three days
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I will rise. Therefore, order the tomb to be made secure until the third day.
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Lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people he has risen from the dead.
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And the last fraud will be worse than the first. In other words, the religious authorities say we know what
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Jesus said. We're fully aware of that. We don't think he's going to do it, but his disciples might dig him up.
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They might find a way to get him out of there and make it sound like he's actually done what he said he was going to do.
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Pilate said to them, you have a guard of soldiers. Go make it as secure as you can.
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I saw this meme last night and said that might be the funniest little snippet in all of scripture.
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Go make it as secure as you can. Like, good luck with that. So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.
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I saw another meme. I mean, I'm full of memes this morning. It was a meme of a guard, and I can identify with this.
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You know, one of the easiest jobs I ever had, sorry, was sometimes we would have to do overtime for inmates who were in the jail but were in the hospital.
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They got sent to the hospital. And so there they are, handcuffed to the bed, sometimes very ill, almost to the point of death, and we had to sit there with them to make sure they don't go anywhere.
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Easy money. Right? And that same way, in this meme, they show this guard, and he's like getting this order to go stand in front of the tomb, you know, that's sealed with a stone, and he says what?
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Easy money. Right? This is going to be the easiest overtime I've ever worked. No one has ever left a tomb without supernatural assistance.
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Well, this is supernatural as well. Luke 24, verses 1 to 8.
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But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared.
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They're going to go finish the job. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb.
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But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel.
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And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead?
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He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the
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Son of Man must be delivered in the hands of sinful men. Exactly what happened. Judas betrays
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Him. He's arrested. He's falsely tried. Then, and be crucified, which
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He was. And on the third day rise. And they remembered
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His words. It's amazing as we consider all the times that Jesus told them what was going to happen and they didn't get it.
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Well, on that morning, they got it. They understood. As Luke would write in the book of Acts, Acts 2 .24,
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God raised Him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for Him to be held by it.
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Death had a grasp of Jesus Christ, but could not hold
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Him. Did not have the power to hold Him. There's some bad news for death as you can imagine by death's death.
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1 Corinthians 15 .26, as I read earlier, the last enemy to be destroyed is death.
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Do you think of death as your enemy? I hate death. I hate disease.
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I hate everything that causes death. I mean, I've said it before, but it's true. I see dead squirrels and I think, what?
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Not, yay, another varmint gone. I think, I hate death. Oh, long for the day where nothing and no one dies.
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Death is destroyed by the victorious resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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Back to 1 Corinthians 15, verses 54 -57, when the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory.
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Oh, death, where is your victory? Oh, death, where is your sting? Mocking death, all -powerful death, who ruled from Adam until Moses, and was really undefeated until Jesus Christ, but now utterly defeated.
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The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ, our
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Lord, or through our Lord Jesus Christ. Whose victory is it?
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The victory of our Lord. Who removed the sting of death? Our Jesus, who gives us victory over sin and death, our
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Savior. He conquered sin, Satan, and the grave. Revelation 1, verses 12 -18, 1, verses 12 -18,
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Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe, and with a golden sash around his chest.
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The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.
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In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two -edged sword, and his face was like the sun, shining in full strength.
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When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead, but he laid his right hand on me, saying,
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Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one.
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I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades."
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What do keys represent? Absolute control. The right to shut in, the right to exclude, the right to lock up.
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He is in absolute control of death and Hades. So then it's no surprise in Revelation 20, when we read this in verse 14, then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.
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This is the second death, the lake of fire. Having absolute control over death,
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Jesus, as it were, bundles death up, throws him into the lake of fire, destroying death and all his power forever.
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One writer says of death and Hades, that they became personified as inseparable companions, two voracious and insatiable monsters who have swallowed all past generations and now meet the same fate as the prey they have devoured.
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Death of death. By an act of the first Adam, our representative, death was born.
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By the act, by the full life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the second
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Adam, death was doomed. Because Adam failed in the garden,
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Adam, our representative, took us all down with him. In Adam, we all plunged into death.
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In effect, Adam breathed life into death and all who remain in Adam, which is to say, all who don't come to Christ will go to everlasting destruction, that is to say, the lake of fire.
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But because he passed, Jesus passed his test, because he was tempted as we are and never failed, because he perfectly obeyed the will of the
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Father, all who are in Christ, the second Adam, will never know the second death, will never know the lake of fire.
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And here's what I would say to you this morning, if you're trusting in Christ, he is all you need. His life of obedience is credited to you.
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That's the righteousness you need for heaven. His death paid the price for your sins.
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His resurrection is the evidence that he is the faithful and true son of God.
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He conquered death for us. We need not fear death. It has no power over us now.
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Spurgeon said this, as to death, you know how our Lord vanquished him.
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By death, by his death, he conquered death. When his hands were nailed, they became potent to fight with the grave.
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When his feet were fastened to the wood, they began to trample on the sepulcher. When the death pangs began to thrill through every nerve of the
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Redeemer's body, then his arrow shot through the loins of death. And when his anguished soul was ready to take its speedy flights and leave his blessed corpse, then did the tyrant, that is to say death, sustain a mortal wound.
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Our Lord's entrance into the tomb was the taking possession of his enemy's stronghold.
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His sleep within the sepulcher's stony walls was the transformation of the prison into a couch of rest.
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But especially in the resurrection, because he could not be held by the bonds of death, neither could his soul be kept in Hades, he rose again in glory.
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Then did he become the death of death and hell's destruction.
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He is risen indeed. Let's pray. Our Father in Heaven, Lord, we so hate death.
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Those that we watch suffer and die.
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And Father, it is such a painful experience.
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Lord, that's the fruit of the first Adam. That's the result of Adam's failure in the garden.
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But Your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the second Adam, truly God and truly man, did not fail.
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He was victorious over temptation. He never sinned.
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He died. He died on our behalf. He voluntarily laid down His life that He might rise again victoriously on that third day, conquering death for all those who would trust in Him.
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Lord, if there are any here today, any listening to me today, who have not yet believed on the
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Lord Jesus Christ, who have not yet fled to Him, giving up entirely any thought of their own goodness or righteousness, but trusting in Him, Father, I pray that Your Spirit would cause them to be born again.