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And Death Shall Have No Dominion - 1

THE FAILED EXPERIMENT

One of the most fascinating discoveries in the past few centuries was the link between electricity and life. Everything--from amoebae to human beings--couldn’t live without electricity. If alive, you are charged. This is seen, perhaps, most dramatically with a heart attack. What do the medics do? They hook the person up to a defibrillator that shoots electrical currents in the body in hopes of bringing it back to the land of the living.

Of course, this bit of physiology is old hat to most of us today. But it was quite exciting for medical science when first discovered. Who knows what potential good this knowledge could bring?

In 1818, when the concept was still relatively new, a Scottish physician named Dr. Hue had a brilliant idea. If electricity was so crucial for life, could not a dead person be brought back if electricity flowed into the corpse?

It was certainly worth a try!

So Dr. Hue cut a deal with a man in the gallows, a murderer condemned to be hung. In exchange for a little money to buy some gin, beer, and beef for his last days, the criminal would donate his body to science. After all, what did he have to lose? If the experiment succeeded--he’d come back to life. (What the legal ramifications would be in such a situation, we don’t know.)

Within an hour of his execution, the dead man was lying on a marble table at the University of Glasgow. Some curious on-lookers as well as serious scholars stood about. With a vast array of boiling chemicals to produce the electricity, Dr. Hue attached a wire to the deceased’s neck, where the top of his spinal chord was exposed.

In great anticipation, Dr. Hue then turned on the current, which flowed into the body. It began to shake, shutter, and spasm. When the juice was turned off, it stopped. They then connected the wires to the chest, which began to heave, as if breathing. They then connected wires to the face, which immediately exploded into expressions of sadness, anger, and a few smiles even. They connected wires to the hand, and the corpse began pointing its index finger at the spectators, one by one. At one point, an electrically charged leg shot out and kicked an assistant hard enough to knock him to the floor.

Though wires were connected to various organs and appendages, as you could imagine, by the time the experiment was over--the dead man stayed dead. If the good doctor wanted to find a way to resurrect the dead, this wasn’t going to do the trick.

However macabre this story, it does touch on something very human: and that is, our fascination, and fear, of death. Mark Twain once said that only two things are certain, death and taxes. Given, however, the loopholes that some people find in the tax code, he might have gotten it only half right.

In contrast, as we all know, death allows no loopholes. No one escapes it, no one is immune to it. We can fight it, cheat it for awhile, even flow electric currents through it, but death always comes. Death is to life as one side of a coin is to another. I’ve never seen a one-sided coin, have you? It’s almost as if the very definition of “life” itself contains in it the notion of death. We live, we struggle day by day to eek out a living, to provide for our family, and when all is said and done--what happens? We die! And eventually the children we raise die. And the children they raise die. And on and on. What sense does it make?

The poet Lord Byron once wrote:

Here let me die: for to give birth to those
Who can but suffer many years and die,
Methinks, is merely propagating death,
And multiplying murder.

Jack Kerouac in his famous book, On the Road, expressed it like this: “Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemeteries cities beyond Long Island City.”

Just so they could be buried in one of those awful cemeteries . . . . Is that what we are all living for? In one sense, it seems so.

Death is all around us, too. It’s more prevalent than life even. It has been estimated that the dead--those who have ever lived and died--outnumber those of us who are now alive by about 14:1.

What’s worse, too, we’ve almost been hardened to death, at least on a big scale. The numbers get so staggering we don’t even think about them so much any more. A man told the story how his wife was reading to him from the newspaper about an earthquake in Iran last year that killed thousands, and when she got done, he said, “ But how did the Yankees do last night?” He wasn’t trying to be cold. It’s just that after a while such numbers start to mean nothing. In his own callous way, Joseph Stalin captured that sentiment when he said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”


And though we all face death, though we all know it’s there, something inside us just can’t be reconciled with it, at least not with our own or the death of those who know and love. It’s so painful, so tragic, so full of unanswered questions. Who of us hasn’t been hurt and pained by death? I know of no one.

And so, as human beings, we have tried--oh, have we tried!--to find a way around death. A way to beat it. And yet science--for all its great achievements--hasn’t advanced much further in undoing death than Dr. Hue and his electrical experiments did almost 200 years ago.

For now, death is the undisputed champion of the world. Death always wins every match with whoever challenges it. You might hold it off a little longer, you might snatch victory from it’s jaw once again, but . . . but sooner or later—we lose.

Or do we? Is death the last word? Must the last chapter of all our lives unfurl in a graveyard, or at the bottom of the sea, or in unmarked spot in the ground where turnips grow?

I’m here to tell you that the answer is No! Death does not have to be the final answer. Death does not have to be the last chapter in the book of your life. And it’s not because of some impending scientific breakthrough. No. It’s because of Jesus Christ and His resurrection from the dead almost two thousands years ago.

The grave, which holds the rest of us, at least for now, couldn’t hold Jesus more than three days. And the good news is that because Jesus was raised from the dead, we can be too. His resurrection offers us the promise of ours.

Wrote the apostle Paul: “Because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence” (2Co 4:14).

Yes, the same one who raised Jesus from the dead will raise us as well because death itself will be destroyed. “The last enemy to be destroyed,” wrote Paul, “is death” (1 Co 15: 26).

And this happens through Jesus Christ, who beat death and offers us a share in His victory. “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" (1 Co 15:52-55).

Where are they? They will flee at the Second Coming of Jesus:

“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Th 4:16).

Death’s victory has been snatched away by the one who says to us, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (John 11:25).

What a wonderful promise!

And that’s what we look at this week: the resurrection of Jesus. What does it offer us? What evidence is there for it? Why should we believe in it? After all, it’s one thing to believe that Jesus was crucified (the Romans crucified lots of Jews); it’s totally another to believe that He rose from the dead.

And yet, according to the Bible, Jesus did beat death, and it’s only in His victory over death that we can have ours as well. It is only in Jesus’ resurrection that we have the hope of something beyond the grave.

That’s how crucial these issues are. And that’s why we’ll be looking at them all this week. And we’ll do it in order for you to see, for yourselves, that we can have hope—a hope of something more than eternity in a grave, a hope of something beyond death, a hope of something much more certain than Dr. Hue’s failed electrical experiments.

And that’s the hope given us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.