John 5:24 (ESV)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”
The Walking Dead. World War Z. Call of Duty: Zombies.
For the last several years, the Zombie genre has been at the top of the charts. Whether it’s a movie, a multi-year tv series, or a video game, the topic of the undead has drawn tens of millions into the audience and made hundreds of millions for the creators. Why the fascination with all things dead? Perhaps one reason is the desire to avoid death altogether, or perhaps just an unhealthy fascination with its reality. But is that fascination really bad?
A writer at Time Magazine wrote that, “…if there is no such thing as a time without bad news, there’s a specific cast to the bad news of today. Often, it’s about systemic collapse, or the threat of it: pandemics, global financial crises, climate change and rising sea levels, the threat of mass-casualty terrorist events. In one way or another, we’re constantly asked to envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports. It’s disturbing; in some way it all comes down to generating fear by selling fear. But it does sell.” We can look on with disgust, or we can consider this not-so-new fad for what it is: An opportunity.
Jesus makes it perfectly clear that when you become a Believer, you pass “from death to life.” Your body is alive without Christ, but your soul is dead. The stark spiritual reality is that most of the people you will see today out in the general public are in fact, the walking dead, spiritually speaking. They may laugh, smile, work, play, make some money, start a family, and go on a vacation…but without Christ, they are merely marking time in an eternal graveyard. It’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? It’s the bad news that makes the Good News so great.
Regarding today’s passage, Adam Clarke, a nineteenth-century British theologian, wrote that, “Death is the country where every Christless soul lives. The man who knows not God lives a dying life, or a living death; but he who believes in the Son of God passes over from the empire of death, to the empire of life.” In other words, Jesus came to turn spiritual zombies into Living Children of God. This is a reality that we must convey in an evangelistic conversation, but it is also one that only the power of Holy Spirit can lead someone to fully embrace. We are commanded to share the word of the Lord (Rom. 10:17) so that people will hear Christ’s words…but the believing is between them and their Creator.
