WHY DIDN'T JESUS DIE OF OLD AGE?   PART FIVE

“I have finished the work which You have given Me to do.” (John 17:4)

Jesus spoke those words shortly before He was seized by Satan's tools, and just hours before Satan would have Him murdered.

Satan deluded himself that he had won his battle against God, but Jesus' murder would be the lid on the coffin of Satan's ambition.

The death of Jesus shredded Satan's hope of remaining as ruler of the planet, and finally thwarted Satan's attempt to permanently destroy human beings.  The death of the Human, Jesus, was God's triumph over the spirit being named Satan. It was now just a matter of time before the God, Jesus, returned to earth and restored to humans the freedom which Satan had stolen from them.

One of the Gods had become a Human and risked His life in order to make it possible for humans to live forever.  This Human, Jesus, for several decades, had experienced the pain of being human, then He had allowed Himself to be seized by a merciless regime and murdered by the seed of Satan.

His death was unnecessarily brutal. That was due to Satan's incandescent hatred of Jesus, and Satan's sick desire to inflict as much pain and humiliation on the Human Jesus as possible.

But, again, Satan played into God's hand.

Because God wanted the death of Jesus to be a spectacle that would attract attention.  If Satan had not been so blinded by unreasoning hatred, he could have had Jesus quietly murdered in a Roman barracks, and no one would have known what had happened to Him.

And if Jesus had just disappeared quietly, His whole life would have been wasted.

Because without His spectacular death, His resurrection would not have been noticed. Or if noticed, not believed. Who would believe a story about someone being raised from the dead, when there was not the slightest proof that they had even died?

So by having Jesus publicly murdered, Satan bumbled his way, again, into doing what God wanted.

The public spectacle of His death ruled out any speculation that Jesus had not really died. The Roman regime itself witnessed to His death.

And then some more incompetent bumbling by Satan. He arranged for the Roman regime to place guards over the place where Jesus was buried:

“And on the next day, which was after the Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered to Pilate, saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while He was living, After three days I will rise again. Then command that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say to the people, He has risen from the dead. So the last error will be worse than the first. Pilate said to them, You have a watch. Go and make it as secure as you can. And going they made the tomb secure, sealing the stone along with the guard.” (Matthew 27:62-66)

Again, if Satan had been half-way smart, he would not have put an official guard on Jesus' tomb. Because having a guard in place was exactly what God wanted.

If there had not been a guard, Satan could later claim, when it was discovered that Jesus was not in the tomb, that the disciples had taken the body away in secret.

Which in fact is what Satan did later claim, but the presence of the official guard made that claim impossible. Another failure for Satan and his tools. In his time as ruler of this planet, Satan and his chosen tools have transformed incompetent bumbling into an art form.

All this is why Jesus had to be murdered in His prime and in public. So that His death, and subsequent resurrection, could testify to the truth of everything He had said before He had been murdered. And His spectacular death, and subsequent resurrection, would bring attention to His work.

Of course, without His death, His work would have been a waste of time, because His work was explaining how humans could live forever. But without His death humans couldn't live forever anyway. So all His work was performed in the confident expectation that He would die, and die without sin.

His work was to explain to humans what God was offering them, and then to explain to them how they could, if they so chose, accept the offer.

The ruling establishment of that time of course, Satan's chosen seed, did everything it could to prevent Jesus from doing His work.  Because the work of Jesus would eventually lead to the unraveling and destruction of everything Satan and his tools had built up since the time of Nimrod.  But Satan and his establishment failed, and Jesus completed His work.

The essential task was that Jesus die, and thus allow humans to live. Once that task was accomplished, the actual process of giving eternal life to humans could proceed at the appropriate pace.

The basis of human belief in the possibility of living forever relies solely on God being true to His word. And that God is true to His word was proved by the death of Jesus.

God said that humans had to die if they sinned, and the only way around that, was if the God who created humans died in their place as a ransom for their life. That happened, but at an unfathomable risk for the Gods – They would lose everything They had together if the God become Human did not defeat Satan in his own battleground.

But Satan was defeated. Jesus died, and God’s word was thereafter a solid and unbreakable foundation on which humans could build in trust.

In human terms, being true to a statement or commitment is called law. A statement, which we could call a rule or a law, is made and agreed to, and that becomes the basis of behaviour. Either correct behaviour in keeping the rule, or incorrect behaviour in breaking it. And in human society, order depends completely on the keeping of agreed laws.

And not only order. In human society, individual freedom also depends on everyone keeping agreed laws.

So, far from being a negative, law is the basis of human security and well-being.

And in the matter of humans being able to live forever, law, in this case God’s statement, commitment, law, however you want to call it, is the way and method of becoming eternal.

Satan, of course, detests law. Because law is founded on being true to one’s word, and by nature Satan is anti-truth – he’s a convicted liar. So one of Satan’s sidelines is undermining law. Which he does quite successfully, but his success, like all his accomplishments, is of no significance. Because all Satan’s work will shortly crumble to dust.