ALSO the epistle to Smyrna’s church touches all churches, and in every church each child of God; every soul, that died in blessedness, standing in living fellowship with the Savior.
Struggle here, too, is the starting-point. With nerveless peace there is no advance. Here, too, it must be a wrestling as with fears of death. But when you overcome therein, then who has ears to hear let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches: He that overcometh, shall not be hurt of the second death (Rev. 2, 11).
Thus there is a second death, which comes after the first death. And what makes the hero and the heroine is: to look beyond the first death to the second death, and to know assuredly that one also passes through the second death unhurt.
The first and second death have each their own proportions. They are not two similar deaths. These two deaths are not alike; not of like tendency; not of like terror; not of like deathly oppression.
On the contrary, they diverge so far apart and are so utterly unlike one another, that he who in Jesus has deeply and seriously grasped the nature of the second death, scarcely sees in the first any more a Death at all. and almost derides that first death, saying: Death, dead Death, where is thy blunted sting!
Then you experience what Jesus said you would experience, when He said: “Fear not the tyrant who can kill your body, but rather fear Him, Who is able to destroy both your soul and your body in hell” (Matt. 10, 28).
FOR this are these two deaths. A form of representation, which is borrowed directly from Jesus’ own preaching. There is the first death, when on the deathbed or scaffold the soul is separated from your body. And there is a second death, when the obdurate and hardened sinner, finally, after the resurrection of the flesh, with soul and body becomes a prey to that bitter destruction, which Jesus Himself portrayed as a fire, that is never extinguished and as a worm in the heart, which never dies. “There,” as Jesus declared, “shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Altogether in agreement with this you read in Revelation 21, 8, that “the fearful,” they who from fear of the world deny their Savior; that “the unbelievers,” they who did not convert themselves; and that “the abominable,” they who are the reprobates who commit murder and adultery, who lie and deceive, will altogether have their part not in Paradise, but in the lake: that this lake burns with fire and brimstone, not merely with fire, but also with brimstone, to express the deadly stifling of the same, and then follows: and this is the second death.
And the promise to Smyrna’s church and to all churches and to every soul in Christ in those churches (for it reads: let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches) is, that a soul that overcame, shall not even be hurt by the second death.
That he shall not become a prey of the second death, is self-evident. That did not need to be demonstrated. But there is written something altogether different: No hair of them shall be injured. No seam of their garment shall be singed. This second death shall not even graze them, nor approach them astride.
THERE is among people in spiritual sense, the individual and the community, and herein lies the difference between the first and the second death. You are something apart, a man by yourself, a proper person, an individual, and as such you die away from this world by the first death.
But you are also a man among men; a member of humanity; a leaf on the tree of your race, a part of the whole, living in a human fellowship. And upon this human fellowship comes the second death.
The difference becomes evident.
As individual, as man apart every one dies in his turn, every one on his own occasion. The one in another hour from the other. Every one in his time.
But the second death comes upon all who shall succumb under it at once, at the same time: in one selfsame moment; altogether; upon all in common in one dreadful hour.
The first death is before the judgment; to the second death the judgment precedes; and only when the judgment shall have been consummated, does the second death obtain power.
In the first death soul and body are torn asunder; in the second death soul and body are reunited, and corruption comes upon both.
There is indeed also an individual judgment, beat upon beat in the conscience after every sin, which affected one more strongly; and there is also an individual judgment for every one, who in clear consciousness, knowing that he is dying, goes into death. Yet, this is not the judgment.
The judgment comes upon all together, upon the race, upon the fellowship. So there is twofold birth and origin, the first when God created and formed Adam. That was the birth of your race. The life given to humanity. And there is the second birth when God formed you in your mother’s womb. The life of your person; the rise of your ego.
Hence our twofold sin.
The sin in which we stand together before God, what humanity made itself bold to undertake against God. And alongside of this, yet rooting in this, the sin consciously committed by our ego.
And therefore over against this twofold born life, and over against this twofold sin, there stands also twofold death. Forsooth in reversed order. In advance the first death, when our ego, our person departs from this life, and after that, presently, the second death, which comes upon all together, upon the fellowship, upon what sprang from and remained of one mind with the fallen ancestor of the whole race.
OVER against this stands the twofold deliverance, the twofold redemption, the twofold reconciliation.
“Christ is a propitiation, not alone for our (personal) sin, but also for the sin of the whole world,” says the holy apostle John (1, 2, 2). Thus Reconciler of the sin which the oneling, which the individual committed, and of the sin which the community, which the race, which humanity, which the whole world together sinned.
Therefore there is also twofold regeneration.
First the regeneration of the individual, of the person, of yourself as oneling and as a being standing by yourself, that you were a child of the world, and now became a child of God.
But alongside of this there is also the regeneration of your race; the rise of a new fellowship; and that is the body of Christ, the assembly of the just made perfect, the new humanity under Christ as Head.
Now for a time there is in you the new man, the whiles the old man still works his aftermath. And so for a time there is the new humanity in Christ, the whiles the old fellowship on earth still works its aftermath.
And only death makes an end of this.
By the first death, in your personal dying, you die unto the old man of sin; and as a sanctified child of God you enter upon eternity.
And by the second death the new humanity is blessed and the unsaved go forever into perdition.
AND so you understand Jesus’ promise to Smyrna’s church, and in her to every soul that overcomes.
There would be no struggle and no battle, and thus also no overcoming, if the new man in you by regeneration were at once done with the old man. Only because such is not the case, the struggle ensues; and as reborn Christian, you must overcome what of the old man remained in you.
And so likewise there would externally be no struggle, if already here on earth the body of Christ were gathered apart and stood outside of the world. But such is not the case. The body of Christ on earth remains in fellowship with the unregenerated world. Hence they who are of the world do battle against everything that is of Christ. Thus Christianity must do battle against the old association. The new race against the old. And also in this struggle God’s child must overcome.
Thus he that overcometh means: he who by his new man overcame the old man in his heart, and, together with Christendom, laid low the old world in the life of nation and society.
He who has thus struggled and thus overcome, when it comes to an end with him, faces these two deaths. The death of the individual and the death of the fellowship. The first and the second death.
Jesus turns this first dying for him into a “dying unto sin and into an entering upon eternal life.” But thus having died and having entered upon eternal life is as yet only his provisional blessedness. Also when they who have fallen asleep rejoice before the throne, they always yet await the decisive moment at which Christ shall return to this world, the judgment shall follow, the second death shall enter in, and the realm of glory shall unfold itself in its full splendor.
Thus they stand not merely facing yet Jesus’ return and coming glory, but also awaiting the judgment and the second death. That is to say the death of their race, the death of the old world. Of that race, of that world, of that fellowship, to which they themselves have belonged.
This does not go on outside of them.
Does not Scripture say distinctly, that the blessed also shall appear before the judgment seat of Christ? Not in any terror of the judgment, it is true. Rather to receive the crown. But yet they come in touch with it.
And then they shall see the second death approach and come upon the fearful, the unbelievers, the abominable, upon the world, to which they themselves once belonged. In which they have sinned and lived along with the rest.
And with respect to this, Jesus removes from His believers, who died in Him, every uncertainty, every anxiety and all terror.
“Thou shalt see the reward of the wicked, but it shall not come nigh thee.”
When before your eyes the second death shall come upon your old world, that second death shall not even from afar off harm you. He not only shall not drag you away as prey, but shall not even hurt you.
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