What It Would Be Like to Die with Christ

Be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

Hebrews 12:28-29

The book of Hebrews was written to people who believed in and trusted Jesus Christ. It tells us what is true of us when we are in Christ. In chapter 12, the writer recalls the scene from Exodus 19, the giving of the Ten Commandments, and he says:

You have not come to... a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them... So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” (12:18–21)

He is telling us that the terror of entering the presence of God without a sacrifice is not our position. What is our position then if we are in Jesus Christ?

You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (12:22–24)

The contrast is not between heaven and hell, it is between standing before God without a mediator and standing before God with Jesus and His shed blood applied to our lives. With Christ, death will be entering into celebration: “One has died for all, therefore all have died” (2 Cor. 5:14). Jesus entered the death that you would have died, so that when death comes for you it will not be a passing into condemnation but an entrance into celebration.

In your own words, how would you describe the difference between these two positions?