GOD HAS CONDEMNED US TO BE IMMORTAL By Saint Justin Popovich

“So when the corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”  O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?”  The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law.  But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”  (I Cor. 15:54-57)

These words of St. Paul reverberate throughout the universe with great clarity.  Jesus, the Son of God, came into our midst to defeat mankind’s greatest enemy, death.  Prior to His arrival men have rebelled against God over the centuries again and again. Yet in spite of this, God in His profound love for us had conceived in His mind a scheme to offer us eternal life.  We blaspheme God and yet He offers us in return His embracing love.  We insult God and yet He returns our insults with His blessings.  In fact, mankind had such enmity in its heart for God that we crucified Him.  But God in return never showed such profound love as when He allowed Himself to be crucified for our sins and offered us eternal life by being resurrected from the dead.  We humans find it hard to comprehend that an omnipotent God could conceive a plan to come to the earth in the form of our humanity, as the incarnate Son of God, in order to free us from the clutches of death.  Because of Jesus Christ, death is no more. The immortality of Jesus Christ has transformed us into beings that are no longer subject to death and corruption.  Because of Jesus we are now sons and daughters of God’s eternal Kingdom.*


Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the nature of mankind has been irrevocably changed and has taken on the mantel of immortality as a free gift from the Lord of Love.  If we commit our lives faithfully to the resurrected Lord, we now live beyond the realm of death.  

Until the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, death had become second nature to human beings.  Until the advent of Jesus Christ there were two things that we humans understood birth and death and there was nothing beyond this.  Mankind had become used to death as something natural. But after the resurrection of Jesus all things changed: immortality now has become second nature to man.  Maybe there are many people in the Christian Church today who do not comprehend this reality of Holy Orthodoxy, but immortality should be looked upon as something natural at the conclusion of our physical life in this world. In Christ death has now become something unnatural to us.  Just as before the resurrection of Christ it was natural for man to be mortal, so after His Resurrection it has now become natural for man to be immortal.  Remember my dear people in the living Christ that Jesus Christ is the antidote of death.

“But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope.  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.” (1 Thess. 4: 13-14) 

“Do not love the world or the things in the world.  If anyone loves the world- the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life - is not of the Father but is of the world.  And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.” (1 John 2:15-17)