The three works of the devil. 3 - Death

The third work of the devil is death.

In Hebrews 2:14 we hear that the devil is the one who has the power of death. That is to say, not death merely in its physical aspect, but the death whose hidden sting is sin. This is what death must mean for those under God's judgement. And so the passage from Hebrews goes on to talk about those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

So, the devil's work is, by the terrible sign of death, to obliterate human hope. The power of death is the dread it produces in us. Our contemporaries imagine that death can be a peaceful, natural affair. They kid themselves that non-being might be not so bad after all; and that, with our technology, we can somehow manage death: fit it into our busy schedules somehow. But that is somehow a mask for the reality of it; it is one way of coping with the fear that all human societies and in fact all human individuals have to face. Another coping mechanism is the frenetic activity of our lives which gives us thankfully not one second to contemplate anything beyond the instant.

The serpent in the garden was I guess partly right: on that terrible day Adam and Eve did not surely die. There was a stay of execution. But Adam's curse was that after his life of toil on the earth he would become gardening mulch: you shall return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return (Gen 3:19). As Paul explains it in Romans 5, in Adam began the rule of death which spread from the one man to us all.