1 John 8:51--"Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep
my saying, he shall never see death." 11:25, 26--"Jesus said unto
her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?"
What Jesus means here is not that the believer shall not pass
through the experience that we call death, but that in reality it
is not death, at least, not in the sense in which it is death to
the unbeliever. Jesus has taken the sting out of death. How sharply
the contrast between death and the experience through which the
believer passes is presented in 1 Thess. 4:13, 14--"But I would
not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are
asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For
if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also
which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him." Jesus "died"--He
tasted the awfulness of death; the believer in Him "falls asleep."
Cf. John 11:11--"Our friend Lazarus sleepeth." We have no ground
in these words for the modern doctrine of soul-sleeping. Christ
did not mean to say that the soul is unconscious between the time
of death and the resurrection. For, when the disciples did not
understand His _figurative_ language, He told them _plainly,_
"Lazarus is dead" (11:11-15). What Jesus meant was that death is
something like that which takes place when we go to sleep. What
takes place when we go to sleep? Surely the current of life does not
cease, but flows on, and when we awake we feel better and stronger
than before. There is a shutting out of all the scenes of the world
and time. Just so it is in the case of the believer's death. Three
ideas are contained in the word "sleep": continued existence,--for
the mind is active even though the body is still; repose--we lose
our hold on and forget the things of the world; wakening--we always
think of sleep as followed by awakening.
The word "see" in John 8:51 means that the believer shall not gaze
at death protractedly, steadily, exhaustively. Death is not the
objective of his gaze. The believer's outlook is that of life not
death. The death of the body is to be reckoned no more as death
than the life of the body is life (1 Tim. 5:6). The believer's back
is turned upon death; he faces and gazes upon life. The temporary
separation of the soul and body does not even interrupt, much less
impair, the eternal life given by Jesus.