There is an old saying that goes:

There are two things in life that are inevitable for everyone: Death and taxes.

While I can’t say that I’m a big fan of taxes, I’ll set that conversation aside for now and instead, based on my reading of Romans 6 this morning, I want to think and share some thoughts specifically about death.

Or more to the point, specifically about what comes next after death.

Some people believe that is the end. Once you die your physical death, that’s it. Nothing more. Fade to black and that is the end.

But we believe that there is more. Much more. In fact, that is certainly not the end, but just a beginning of an eternal life that we have already started. Yes, we will die a physical death, just as that old saying tells us. No one can avoid it.

In reality, our eternal life in Christ doesn’t actually start at the point of death. Instead, Paul says that we are baptized into Jesus’s death and raised to life in him. What does he mean by that?

It means that eternal life, a life lived to God, before God, for God and his glory, begins now. At the point that we are baptized and raised again from the water. At the point that we receive the Holy Spirit. That is the point at which eternal life begins, and we are raised to an eternal life, a life that will have no end.

Therefore, there is no need to imagine that we must wait for our physical death to begin our eternal life. There is no need because our eternal life has already begun. Yes, there will come a point at which we will pass from the physical to the spiritual, but the spiritual has already begun. We are alive in Christ already!

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

Romans 6:8-10

So in a similar way that Christ resurrected from the dead, God has also made our spirits alive by giving us the Holy Spirit. By giving us the Holy Spirit, we experience a resurrection, a new life in Christ. So, just as death no longer has mastery over Christ, death no longer has mastery over us.

And so there are all sorts of implications for this truth, this new reality that we are living.

What would we do if we lived as though we did not fear death? What would we give up now so that not only would we live forever, but also that many others would live forever? How would I live if I was no longer a slave to the consequences of death? What would change?

It is hard for us to truly understand the answers to these questions. Death is a physical reality in our world that, aside from God and his intervention in our lives, creates dramatic effects in how we live our lives.

But it is God who has given us life and the life that he gives is also a reality for those who place their faith in Christ. That reality should also have a dramatic effect on how we live. Will those effects truly become a reality in our lives? Or will we continue to simply live by sight, considering only the physical life and death that we live today?