How Can I Be Freed from the Fear of Death?

Freed From Slavery to the Fear of Death

Living by faith in future grace is the pathway of liberty—including liberty from slavery to the fear of death. The reason why I speak of slavery to the fear of death is because the Bible does in Hebrews 2:14–15: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, [Christ] himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”

The Disorders of Illusory Denial

Have you ever asked yourself how much addiction, personality dysfunction, and disordered lifestyle may originate in the repressed fear of death? Very few people live their daily lives with the conscious fear of death in their minds. Yet this text says that Christ came to die for people “who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” There is something profound here. The point is not that people are enslaved to a constant, conscious fear of dying but that they are enslaved to a thousand ways of avoiding this fear. They are enslaved to “the denial of death.”¹ “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32) is not an exultation of true freedom but another form of benumbing denial. Death looms as the great enemy. And we become its slaves in the illusory flight of denial until we face the enemy and triumph by faith in future grace. That’s what this article is about.

How does Christ deliver us from the fear of death and set us free to live with the kind of loving abandon that can “let goods and kindred go, / this mortal life also”?² Let’s begin with this very text, Hebrews 2:14–15, and take it a phrase at a time.

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood.

The term “children” is taken from the previous verse and refers to the spiritual offspring of Christ, the Messiah (see Isa. 8:18; 53:10). These are also the “children of God.” In other words, in sending Christ, God has the salvation of his “children” especially in view. It is true that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). But it is also true that in sending his Son he was especially gathering “the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52). God’s design was to offer Christ to the world, and to effect the salvation of his “children” (see 1 Tim. 4:10).

he himself likewise partook of the same [flesh and blood]

The Son of God, who existed before the incarnation as the eternal Word (John 1:1; Col. 2:9), took on flesh and blood and clothed his deity with humanity. He became fully man and remained fully God. It is a great mystery in many ways. But it is at the heart of our biblical faith.

that through death

The reason Christ became human was to die. As preincarnate God, he could not die for sinners. But united to flesh and blood, he could. His aim was to die. Therefore, he had to be born human. He was born to die.

that he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,

In dying, Christ defanged the devil. How? By covering all our sin (Heb. 10:12). This means that Satan has no legitimate grounds to accuse us before God: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies” (Rom. 8:33). On what grounds does he justify? Through the blood of Jesus (Rom. 5:9; Heb. 9:14). Satan’s ultimate weapon against us is our own sin. If the death of Jesus takes it away, the chief weapon that the devil has is taken out of his hand. In that sense he is rendered powerless. He cannot destroy those for whom Christ died. He cannot make a successful case for the death penalty because the Judge has acquitted us by the death of his Son!

and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

So we are free from the fear of death. God has justified us. There is only future grace in front of us. Satan cannot overturn that decree. And God means for our ultimate safety to have an immediate effect on our lives. He means for the happy ending to take away the slavery and fear of the present. If we do not need to fear our last and greatest enemy, death, then we do not need to fear anything. We can be free. Free for joy. Free for others.

Is Free-Falling Actually Freedom?

Picture two skydivers. They are both free-falling. Their speed is the same. They both seem to be free. They are not entangled in any cords. They are not restrained by any safety wires. They are as free as birds—it seems. But there is one crucial difference: Only one of them has a parachute. Does this change the sense of freedom that they enjoy? Yes. Both are free to fall with gravity, but only one of them is free not to. The other is a slave to gravity, and gravity will kill him in the end. If he can somehow deny that he has no parachute, he might be able to have an exhilarating experience. But if he realizes he is doomed, he will be enslaved through fear during his entire fall, and all the joy of this so-called freedom will vanish. He must either deny the reality (which will mean slavery to illusion), succumb to fear (which will mean slavery to terror), or be rescued by someone with a parachute. So it is in this world. Apart from Christ, we are subject to slavery all our lives through fear of death.

It is astonishing how disinterested people are in the reality of dying. Few things are more certain and universal. The possibilities for joy and misery after you die are trillions of times greater than in the few years on this earth before you die. Yet people devote almost all their energy to making this life secure and almost none to the next. The Bible compares this life to a mist that appears on a cold winter morning and then vanishes (James 4:14). That’s about two seconds. But it describes the time after death as “ages of ages” (Rev. 14:11 AT)—not just one or two ages that last a thousand years but “ages of ages”—thousands and thousands of ages. It matters infinitely what happens to you after you die.

This question of what happens when we die has a sobering, wakening effect on our minds. It forces us to ask whether our faith is real, substantial, and biblical. It forces us to deal with whether our faith is an objective, external reality outside ourselves—namely, in God—or whether our “faith” is a mere subjective experience of feelings and thoughts inside ourselves that function as an emotional cushion to soften the bumps of life and give us a network of friends. Facing eternity has an amazing effect of sobering us out of religious delusions. It helps keep God as the center of our lives by testing whether we are more in love with this world than we are with God himself. Does the thought of dying give us more pain at losing friends than it gives us joy at gaining Christ? Thinking of death helps us prove whether we are prizing God.

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Courage to Live and Die by Faith in Future Grace

But when the future grace of dying in Christ takes hold of you, it frees you from fear and gives you courage to live the most radical, self-sacrificing life of love. The person who can truly say, with the apostle Paul, “To die is gain,” will be able to say, like no one else, “To live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). But if we can’t say, “To die is gain—to die is future grace!” then we will probably say, in one degree or another, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry,” which means we will be enslaved to our own private, earthly comforts. That’s all we will have to look forward to. So we will feel the compulsion to deny the truth of dying and to maximize the kind of pleasures we can get now without God. Therefore, being sure of what happens when we die as Christians is indispensable for a life of joyful, loving sacrifice and for not losing heart through the pain and the diminishing health of this life.

Carl Lundquist was the president of Bethel College and Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for twenty-eight years. He retired in 1982. I worked under his leadership for six of those years and then we served on a prayer commission together near the end of his life. He was a relentlessly gracious Christian leader. In 1988, doctors told him he had a rare form of cancer called mycosis fungoides, a variant of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma that invades the skin over the entire body. He was seventy-two years old and in seemingly robust health. But on February 27, 1991, he died after a heartrending deterioration of his skin. He wrote a final letter to his friends about the day he heard the news of his cancer:

That day in the hospital room, I picked up my Bible when the doctor had left. I turned to the joy verses of Philippians, thinking one might stand out. But what leaped from the page was Paul’s testimony in chapter one, “I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed but will have sufficient courage so that now, as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” And I discovered that a verse I had lived by in good health also was a verse that I could live by in ill health. To live—Christ; to die—gain. But by life or by death, it’s all right either way. . . . So I simply trust that the Great Physician in His own way will carry out for me His will which I know alone is good and acceptable and perfect. By life or by death. Hallelujah!

That trust in the good will of the Great Physician is what I mean by faith in future grace. Carl Lundquist lived by it in those next three years of misery, and it freed him for remarkable service, while his “outer nature was wasting away.”

Thinking of death helps us prove whether we are prizing God.

How Paul Coped with Wasting Away

The apostle Paul wrestled as much as anybody with the temptation to lose heart because of the wasting away of his body. He strengthened his heart with truth about the future grace of dying. And he wrote it down so that we might follow him. In 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:10, Paul shows the Corinthians why he does not lose heart in spite of all his afflictions (2 Cor. 4:8–12) and especially in view of the fact that he knows he is dying: “We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16).

He can’t see the way he used to (there were no glasses). He can’t hear the way he used to (there were no hearing aids). He doesn’t recover from beatings the way he used to (there were no antibiotics). His strength, walking from town to town, doesn’t hold up the way it used to. He sees the wrinkles in his face and neck. His memory is not as good. His joints get stiff when he sits still. He knows that he, like everybody else, is dying. And he admits that this is a threat to his faith, joy, and courage.

But he doesn’t lose heart. Why?

The first part of his answer is in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” He doesn’t lose heart because his inner man is being renewed. How? The renewing of his heart comes from something very strange: It comes from looking at what he can’t see: “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). This is Paul’s way of not losing heart: looking at what you can’t see. What did he see?

A few verses later in 2 Corinthians 5:7, he says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” This doesn’t mean that he leaps into the dark without evidence of what’s there. It means that, for now, the most precious and important realities in the world are beyond our physical senses. We “look” at these unseen things through the gospel. By the grace of God, we see what Paul calls “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). We strengthen our hearts—we renew our courage—by fixing our gaze on the invisible, objective truth that we see in the testimony of those who saw Christ face-to-face.

This article is adapted from Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God by John Piper.

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