Death is not only God’s last enemy; it is our last enemy too. The last enemy is not sin, the law, or the flesh; it is death. In the eyes of God nothing is as abominable as death. Not even sin is as abominable as death. God hates death even more than sin. Sin is against what God does, but death insults what God is. Sin opposes God’s righteousness, but death insults God’s very being. Suppose a little boy plays in the mud and becomes very dirty. No matter how dirty he may be, we still will love him and be willing to play with him. However, suppose the little boy dies and is laid out in a coffin. Although he may be fully clean, we will not want to be with him. Instead, we will flee, not because he is dirty, but because he is dead.
I am troubled by the fact that so many Christians fear uncleanness, but are not concerned about deadness. But, to repeat, God hates death more than sin. In typology, if a person was contaminated by an unclean thing, he could be cleansed rather easily and in a short period of time. But if he touched any dead thing, it took him a longer period of time, at least seven days, to be made clean. This indicates that in the eyes of God death is more serious than sin.
It is better to make a mistake in functioning in the meetings than to be dead and not make any mistakes at all. To be wrong is not as serious as to be dead. If you do not function, you may be right, but you are right in a dead way. I would rather see you livingly wrong than dead right. I do not encourage you to make mistakes. But sometimes it is better to be more concerned about being living than about your being right. We need to recognize the symptoms of deadness to know whether we are dead or alive.
In the Gospel of John the Lord Jesus does not give yes-or-no answers to the questions addressed to Him. For example, the Samaritan woman said, “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men must worship” (John 4:20). She was asking the Lord Jesus concerning the proper place of worship. Was it in the mountain in Samaria or in Jerusalem? The Lord Jesus answered, “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and reality; for the Father seeks such to worship Him” (John 4:23). The Lord Jesus seemed to be saying, “Worshipping God is a matter of life, and life is in the spirit. It is not a question of worshipping God on this mountain or in Jerusalem. The hour has come to worship God in the spirit.”
We find another example in John 9. Seeing a man blind from birth, the Lord’s disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” (John 9:2). The Lord replied, “Neither has this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be manifested in him” (v. 3). In John, the book of life, there are no yes-or-no answers; instead, there is life.
In John 7 the Lord’s brothers in the flesh suggested that He go up to Jerusalem (vv. 3-4). The Lord said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always ready.…You go up to the feast; I am not going up to this feast, because My time has not yet fully come” (vv. 6, 8). However, verse 10 says, “But when His brothers had gone up to the feast, then He also went up, not publicly, but as in secret.” Here we see that the Lord answered and acted according to life.
We are all familiar with the record of Lazarus in John 11. When Lazarus’ sisters sent the Lord the news that Lazarus was ill and asked Him to come, He refused. Having heard that Lazarus was sick, “He remained then two days in the place where He was” (v. 6). When the disciples expected the Lord Jesus to go to Lazarus, He did not go. But when they had made up their minds not to go, the Lord said, “Let us go into Judea again” (v. 7). In all these cases we see that what the Lord Jesus did was always a matter of life.
In Genesis 2 there are two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil are also a matter of yes or no. Yes and no, right and wrong, good and evil, these come from the source of the tree of knowledge. We need to forget about the concept of yes or no and stay in our spirit. This is the way to be freed from death. The way to be freed from death is not a matter of doing certain things; it is to stay in the spirit. If we stay in the spirit, we shall walk and behave according to the spirit. We shall have our whole being according to the spirit, and we shall think, express ourselves, and do everything in the spirit. Then there will be no death. This is the way to be freed from death and to overcome the last enemy.
Any death that still remains in our being is an abomination in the eyes of God, and we must eliminate it. We must escape from the base of death in the flesh into our spirit, where Christ, our life, is. We need to stay in the spirit and behave according to the spirit. If we do this, we shall be free from death.