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We know we’re going to die—it’s as inevitable as buttered toast landing face-down—but Romans 6:5 asks whether that death has to mean the same thing it did before Christ.
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This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
First, with attempts to fix it by software, then we’ll amplify it. But it’s having a mind of its own, so hopefully, it will bear with us for the rest of the service. But we’re working on a plan if it continues to act up, so thanks for your continued patience on that.
There are a lot of times it feels like that soundboard is living its old, sinful life. And it’s like, come and realize the newness of life soundboard. It doesn’t work on soundboards. It doesn’t work on a lot of things, right? A lot of things don’t happen the way that we would like for them to work.
Another example would be one that we don’t think a lot about until it happens, but how, if you’re buttering a piece of toast, which side’s going to land on the ground if you drop it? The buttered side, right? So not only do you lose your toast, you have to wipe butter up off the floor, or maybe some jelly, too, right? We’ll go ahead and put some preserves on it, and then it’s a sticky, awful mess. And you think, it seems like it should be perfectly random. And therefore, if it’s perfectly random, it should land half the time heads, half the time tails, right? Half the time butter and jelly and half the time dry toast that you just pick up and cry over your toast and throw it away, and all’s good. Why not?
Well, a researcher by the name of Robert Matthews decided to actually study this and figure out, back in 1995, why this happened. And he published a journal article exploring the physics of buttered toast. Now, that whole lead-in makes it sound like it’s going to be something really complicated. But it actually is surprisingly straightforward. When we talk about dropping toast, we’re usually talking about toast that was either sitting on the table or we were getting ready to set on the table.
In other words, the toast is at average table height. What he realized is that if you look at how quickly something that’s falling can spin around, the amount of time it takes for it to reach the floor from an average table height, well, it’s about enough time for it to make a half rotation to land on the ground. The reason it’s not random how it falls is because it’s not random how we’re holding it. You don’t hold the jellied side of the toast upside down. When you’re holding it, you hold it right side up.
So the lack of randomness is because we hold it the same way. I suppose, if you were planning to drop the toast, you could intentionally randomize how you were holding it to fix that, but that doesn’t work. That ladder, maybe? Pardon? The ladder? Yeah, see, there is the actual solution. If we’d like our toast to land on the ground properly, we just need to raise our tables to about 10 feet tall or lower the floor. Yeah, or lower the floor. Either way, a sunken floor in the kitchen, it’d be good. So now you know. Now you know why the toast always lands buttered side down. Problem solved, right? No, problem not solved.
Because what we really care about isn’t why it falls on the floor, but that awful feeling when we’ve prepared something to eat, and we watch it tumbling towards the floor, and we can’t stop it. It’s inevitable, and we can’t stop it. And knowing that doesn’t stop it. Even putting a ten-foot-tall table up doesn’t stop it unless you’re going to now eat your toast according to the five-second rule, because it landed buttered side up, right? It’s still lost.
Well, here’s another thing that we know, that we can’t do anything about in our power. We’re going to die. It’s inevitably as when we lose grip on that toast, and it starts tumbling, it’s going to hit the floor and splat and make a mess, and breakfast just went away. So too, we’re tumbling. And we can try to manipulate it, but we’re only so many feet off the ground. And no matter how we try to manipulate it, when we hit the floor, splat.
Seems inevitable. And to some degree, it is inevitable. But scripture agrees conditionally, because scripture says, that’s true. God says, that’s true. You are going to die. But the key is dying the right death. Now, that might sound like a funny thing to talk about right after Easter, but it’s actually exactly what we should be talking about right after Easter.
And we’re going to see that as we turn to Romans 6, chapter 6, verse 5 tonight. So would you join me in prayer, and then we’ll dig in. Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Lord, would you help us as we contemplate what we can’t stop, that we are tumbling down, and we will hit face down? Would you help us to contemplate what your word says about that—what we can and can’t do about that? And that in that contemplation, as we meet your promises and your word, we would feel the hope that you have for us. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
So we can’t stop the toast from falling, and we can’t get it to land on the right side. But we can have the right death. Take a look at Romans 6, verse 5. For if we have been united with him in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. Notice what Paul says here. He doesn’t say, I’ve told you that Jesus has risen from the grave. Therefore, we’re just not going to talk about that D word anymore. It’s done. And so we’re going to pretend it doesn’t actually happen, and I’m going to insist it doesn’t happen. And by the way, if you have enough faith, it wouldn’t happen. Doesn’t say that. Let’s look at it again.
For if we have been united with him in his death, we are united with him in his death. Death became inevitable with sin. We go back to Genesis 3, and we think about those first sins. Death became an inevitability. Every human being’s start of the tumble off the table began in Genesis 3. When we’re born, we’ve already started the tumble towards the ground with the right rotation to hit flat face down. It’s over at some point. Some of us have longer, some of us have shorter, and frankly, we don’t know which of us has which, right? We don’t know how long we have, but we know that death comes.
And Paul here doesn’t deny that. He says, well, but you’ve been united in death with Jesus. It’s different than saying that we won’t die. What does it mean to be united in death with him? Well, it means that we aren’t doing this alone—that’s the starting point. Jesus died, but Jesus didn’t deserve to die. Jesus was not on the spiral off the table. It’s profoundly different if you intentionally drop the toast so it hits the floor because you’re doing an experiment, or you want to analyze the toast—the intentionality of it, right? That toast didn’t do anything wrong. Your grip didn’t do anything wrong. It still hits the floor.
Jesus puts himself into the spiral for us. And so, when Paul says that we’re united in his death, it’s not, well, it was really unfortunate that he died, but he was going to die anyway, and somehow now we kind of do the same thing. No, the thing that we’re united in is a death that didn’t need to be. We who, because of our own actions, were already spiraling, are united in the death of someone who wasn’t spiraling. We’re going to face physical death like he did. But the crucial thing in being united into someone’s death who didn’t in any way merit it, is that his death changes ours. It’s not the same.
Another one of those inevitable feeling things is when you drop something down the drain, right? You’re holding on to something small, a little part or something, and you think, it usually ends up being in this manner for me. I usually have the thought, I shouldn’t be so close to the drain. And before I can correct, I watch this little screw or something fall out of my hand and go down the drain. And we can all hear this in slow motion, no. Nothing can be done, right? Unless you happen to put a little filter trap in the drain first, right? And if there’s a trap there, if there’s something to catch it there, it’s not going to go down. You pull it up, and you pat yourself on the back. Oh, I’m so glad I thought of that.
Well, when we think about it, in our normal human experience, I can’t promise to you tonight that you’re never going to experience death, right? Before your lifetime ends, Jesus returns. Praise God for that, and that would be the exception. But for the vast majority of Christians throughout history, Christians are still going to experience physical death. It’s still going to come. The question is, what are we falling into? Are we falling into the complete destruction of the drain, where we’re separated from God eternally, or is there hope for something better? There’s something that’s going to catch us.
Death pulls us down, but being united in Jesus’ death puts something in the way of being pulled down. It doesn’t mean we’re not going down at all, but it means it’s not the end of the story. It’d be easier if we just didn’t die, right? We could just… That’s not what the Apostle talks about here. It’s not what scripture talks about. It’s not what Jesus promised his disciples.
Instead, he says, you can be united in my death. I will take the brunt of it. I don’t deserve it. I will do it. I’m going to change what happens to you. It doesn’t mean everything goes exactly how we wish in the interim, but something profound changes. Notably, here, Paul is talking about where we really locate our death because we think of it as when we stop breathing, or when our heart quits beating, or when our brain isn’t doing anything, right? Physical death. And Paul says, but actually, what really matters is the death that you’ve already… You’re already dead. You are spiritually dead.
We’ll see more of this next week. Jim’s going to take us into the next part of Romans 6. I know it’s going to be wonderful. I’m looking forward to that. So we’ll fully unpack that. But the part we want to emphasize right now is Paul saying, you’re really even looking at the wrong thing. You’re thinking that God’s blessing and the promise of eternal life means that you’ll never face physical death. But our Savior did. But it’s something more.
Fascinating, if somewhat of a train wreck scene to watch. The last few years, one of the tech CEOs—self-made, he didn’t quite make it to billionaire, but he’s like hundreds of millionaire, lots of expendable money. Brian Johnson sold his business, then another, and now has made his full-time work not to die. He started a movement he calls Don’t Die. And he said, you know, the problem with philosophies like Christianity is that they deal with your soul, but you still physically die. How about you just don’t die? Wouldn’t that be better?
And so everything he does now, he takes constant medical tests as a seemingly healthy 40-something person, gets up at the exact same moment every day, goes to bed at the same time, eats the same things on a very restricted diet. He has even experimented—he took blood plasma from one of his sons and received transfusions to see if he got younger. Blood plasma injected into himself, trying to help. He’s tried all these things to see if he can halt and reverse aging.
He believes he will just live until the 25th century, talking to future generations as someone still alive from the 21st. I was reading some of this, and it’s fascinating. But everything he talks about is about not dying. He doesn’t mention a beautiful day in the park or a wonderful time with friends. Instead, he analyzes whether spending time with friends improves bio-pointers to possibly increase his chances of living longer.
He has cast aside the things he liked to eat and only eats what he can measure in terms of its effect on his biology. Everything has become about not dying. And it’s striking—you see pictures of him, and you can see it. If anything, he’s aging faster than a normal person. He looks older than his age. And before he started this philosophy, he wasn’t like that. He’s obviously a brilliant, talented person with lots of resources, but he’s wasting his life trying to avoid the one thing he cannot avoid: death.
He can tweet about it, pay for medical tests, but he is still going to die. You don’t need a time machine to know that. He’s going to die. This doesn’t get fixed by a taller table. We can’t make the table tall enough. We are still going to splat on the ground. There’s no escaping it. So the only question is, what are we going to do as we spiral? We can claw at our mortality and rage against it, apply medical science, but we can’t actually stop it. We can delay it, but not stop it.
Paul offers something better. He points us to our Lord. 1 Corinthians 15 says, “You fool, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies.” And what you sow is not the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps a wheat or something else. But God gives a body as he has designed, and to each seed, he gives its own body. Not all flesh is the same—men have one kind, animals another, birds another, fish another. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is of one degree, and the splendor of earthly bodies is of another. The sun has one degree of splendor, the moon another, and the stars another. The stars differ in splendor.
So, will it be with the resurrection of the dead? What is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown in a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
Choosing the right death leads to the right life. Brian Johnson, for his part, believes that the right life is having a manipulated body that keeps functioning somehow, tweaking it with all sorts of bio-hacks. Our bodies are just computers; we’ll just hack it until it works. But the virus is too insidious. Humanity has never been defeated by human ingenuity, and it won’t be. If we focus all efforts on trying to manage death with human ideas—guess what? We won’t live the right life.
The Bible says, “Don’t die.” That sounds crazy—how about just so you don’t? But it’s not—because what Jesus calls us to is to die to ourselves right now. To admit, I am doomed to death by sin. This is the path I am on, I can’t stop it, but Jesus, allow me to die to my sin right now so that, united with you in your death, out of death comes life. Paul uses the metaphor of seeds. I have a packet of seeds for the cosmos that grow in our garden outside the church. They’ve been sitting there for years, essentially dead. I could plant that seed, but it might die in the frost. I could keep it in a preserved container, safe from death, but ultimately, it will die anyway. You can’t avoid the seed dying; the only problem is, it never fulfills its purpose. It becomes merely a wasted thing.
When we live our lives—whether in extreme ways or just seeking happiness and pleasure—thinking we can pretend death won’t come, we’re mistaken. The question is, do I want to go into the ground so Christ can bring out something new? Paul says, it’s an analogy, but we already know this. When planting seeds, we know they aren’t the same once buried, but they grow into something beautiful and different. That’s what we are.
When buried in baptism and in Christ, the old self goes away, but not completely—unless something better comes out. That is still us, and it can happen now. We can surrender even the worst parts—the sin eating us away—and start anew. It doesn’t mean our bodies will be perfect immediately, but the reality of the inevitable face-down splat can be changed. It’s no longer inevitable, no longer even possible in the same way because Christ has provided the promise of resurrection.
Commentators have noted that in the time of the New Testament, the image of slavery to sin was common. If you were a Gentile slave and escaped, and then converted to Judaism, rabbis taught that you were a new person—you were a free person because you no longer belonged to that master. When Paul uses slave imagery for our sin, this is the picture. That when we say, “Jesus, kill my old nature,” and become his, that slavery is legally removed.
In the days of the slave trade, a master would still be hunting, but in God’s economy, the person is no longer bound—it’s already been made that way through Christ’s death and resurrection. Our failures and sin still hunt us down, but we no longer belong to them. Those who chase after physical immortality are falling into the same error we do as Christians—believing that our bodies are all we have, and that we must keep them going forever. But the truth is, we will die.
And the key, Paul says, is that because we die with Jesus, we are also united in his life. When Jesus rises, we rise. Because he’s risen, we might not experience it yet, but it’s already true. If we trust Jesus, we will rise. That’s the promise, even when the disciples were behind locked doors after Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus came and stood among them and showed his hands and sides. They rejoiced because death wasn’t the final story. That’s the promise for us.
Death isn’t the end. God takes what we die and brings us to life. A few weeks ago, we had a late frost—like the whole spring has been. It’s been too hot and too cold, like that time in March when there was a cold snap after warm weather. The flowering trees, the peaches—everything was vulnerable. The peaches, in particular, are very good here, and I was nervous about what might happen. I love peaches—those wonderful Calhoun County peaches.
If a cold freeze hits during a bloom, the peaches won’t produce much fruit, or any. You can’t predict the weather on March 1; you just hope for the best. But just like the toast, I can tell you regardless of which side it lands on, it’s not going to be the best once it hits the ground. Still, if someone planted a peach seed, and it grew into a healthy tree, and that tree produced peaches, when it went into the ground and died, it was going to be a peach tree. You’d expect it to produce peaches.
We shouldn’t be surprised that God’s planting is similar. He is going to restore us. He’s the first fruit, and because we see the beauty and goodness in Jesus’ resurrection, even before we see the other fruits, we already know what they will be like. Jesus is not going to make some hologram of us. He’s going to resurrect us, physically, bodily, true. Death is unavoidable—truth and reality. But it doesn’t have to mean destruction—hope is still alive. It’s not the end of the story.
Because God promises the resurrection, and uses banquet imagery in Revelation, what he’s ultimately telling us is that he made us like this—to be restored. Not just in Genesis 3, but in Genesis 2: it was very good. The spiritual focus now, in this life, is what someone like Brian Johnson mocks—our physical bodies. But in reality, salvation and resurrection are about what genuinely restores the physical: Jesus. All the efforts to stay alive, even with all their failures, point to the fact that only Jesus can truly fix what is broken.
The logical necessity of Romans 6 is that because we die with Jesus, when we are united to him, we are also pulled back with him when he rises. He has risen, and so we will rise as well. Trust in Jesus, and you will rise. It’s already true. Just as the disciples in John 20 rejoiced when Jesus appeared to them in the locked room, we too look forward to the day when we will see our Lord face to face.
Jesus told his disciples to look beyond imagining some distant, other realm, and to focus on what he said—they will be like him, in resurrected bodies. And that promise is for us, too. When we are buried in baptism with Christ, we die to ourselves but are also united in his life. If we cling solely to this life, we miss the hope. But if we surrender, trusting Jesus in his death and resurrection, we find life.
What do you think the resurrection body will be like? Will it be like Jesus’ body, capable of doing extra things, like passing through walls, or eating with us, or touching? Scripture doesn’t clearly define all that. I can’t promise we all will run through walls. But I can tell you that it’s not something entirely different. When you plant a seed, it’s not entirely different either—you expect it to grow, and it does. That’s what’s comforting.
When God promises resurrection, he pictures a restored, perfect creation. When he invites us into his kingdom, he shows us banquets and paradise. He wants us to see that he made us good, and he’s restoring what was broken—starting with the cross and empty grave. And so, the focus is on trusting him, on dying to ourselves, and on believing in his promise—that death and decay are not the final word. The hope is that he will make all things new, and we will be made new too.
Let us pray. Father, we thank you that even though we face pain and death, death does not have the final word. You invite all who call on your name to not just be united in death, but to be united in the life of our Savior. As we face our lives and the lives of those around us—grief, sorrow, and pain—remind us that this is not the end. The first fruits have been shown, and they declare that you take what you have made and you restore it. That is the true answer to death—that being united in your death, we also are united in your life. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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