The confidence in facing death comes from our union with Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. As the God-man, Christ’s victories become our victories through faith. When the shepherds bowed before the babe lying in a manger, they weren’t bowing to a mere earthly king who would scourge their physical enemies. Even though they may not have anticipated the fullness of the resurrection and ascension, the little town of Bethlehem was ground zero for death’s inevitable demise. To defeat death, God passed through its shadows. Born of a virgin, the spotless lamb walked the paths of righteousness that lead right into the mouth of death where he blasted off the gates of hades (Acts 2:27). Where he went, so we are empowered to follow—through death into life.

In my first year as a youth pastor, my mentor told me that ministry is just helping people die. These words bounced in my head as I paced the empty hallway to room 472. All the precise and prepared answers learned in seminary can easily fly out the window when it’s just you, a dying saint, and your Bible. Have you stood beside a perishing soul? What you say next—what I had to say next—exposes our theology. In those moments, we come uncomfortably aware of the depth of our faith.
Do we believe what we believe we believe?
Will that Christian close their eyes in this life and truly awake in paradise? Do we really expect to see them again? If we haven’t settled these questions in our own conscience, our shepherding from this life to the next will confuse rather than comfort.
Death is ugly. And the Christian has a complicated relationship with it. In one sense, death reminds us of the horror and consequences of sin (Rom. 6:23). On the other hand, dying is, as Charles Spurgeon said in his comments on Psalm 23, the porch to heaven. To reach those green pastures—to be with Jesus in paradise—we must traverse the valley of the shadow of death.
So, in a believer’s final moments, do you expound on the punishment wrought by death or the shining sea waiting beyond? One may produce fear, the other hope, but both are true. I want to offer an attitude that gets the best of both. The attitude Paul assumed, and the attitude displayed by Christ—mockery. Paul mocked death on the basis of Christ’s resurrection:
“When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”“O death, where is your victory?O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 15:54–57).
Mocking death reveals a confidence in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. The slayer of death began his triumph in the manger and continues his victory march until he will plunge the final enemy into the lake of fire (1 Cor. 15:24–26, Rev. 20:14).
Though Dead, Yet History Speaks
Reading church history brings us into conversation with those who’ve gone before us into death.
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The creeds emerged from the gospel’s encounter with a broader cultural context, through missionary expansion. The development of doctrine, as Alister McGrath notes, was “partly on account of the need to interact with a language and a conceptual framework not designed with the specific needs of Christian theology in mind.” Doctrine and creeds arise from the need to explain and defend the gospel message in the face of intellectual and religious challenges, such as polytheism, Gnosticism, or dualism.

It can no longer be taken for granted that Christianity’s historic creeds have enduring significance beyond being mere relics of the past. As we walk among the smoldering ruins of Western Christendom, we’re likely to encounter fragments of these creeds, perhaps even in complete form. They are somewhat familiar, but we feel no organic connection with them.
As evangelical Christians, we believe the creeds. We sometimes recite them to remind ourselves we do. But their power is fading. We may feel embarrassed when we collectively recite them, not because we no longer believe them but because we believe them in a different way.
For many, the creeds are no longer self-evident, together with many other religious beliefs that used to hold society together at its seams. People who reject them no longer strike us as irrational or out of the ordinary. We’ve demoted the creeds to the status of hypotheses.
But against the prevailing cultural winds and despite their contextual nature, the creeds must retain a central position in the church’s life.
Outgrowing the Creeds
Charles Taylor explained the subtle change in our rapport with our own beliefs in terms of what he calls “secularity 3”—a change in the mode of believing. In a global world, it’s almost impossible to hold one’s religious opinions as self-evident. The presence of a bewildering diversity of indigenous theologies, particularly in parts of the world where the church is growing quickly, makes the historic creeds seem small indeed.
A double movement has been slowly rendering the creeds irrelevant.
1. Rise of Historical Consciousness
In the West, the past is no longer seen as a depository of eternal truths but as a merely antiquarian interest. Leopold von Ranke’s famous 1824 statement is relevant here: “To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high office this work does not aspire: it wants only to show what actually happened.” But what actually happened has no direct bearing on eternal and necessary truths of reason, which cannot be supported by history’s contingent truths.
The effect of historicization is captured by Robin G. Collingwood’s comments on Johann Gottfried Herder, the first intellectual to describe historical consciousness: “Herder, as far as I know, was the first thinker to recognize in a systematic way that . . . human nature is not uniform but diversified. Human nature was not a datum but a problem.”
The natural is ultimately temporal—it can only be recognized in time, longitudinally, never just synchronically. Time and history are the photographic developers that reveal natural patterns. Debasing the past leads to questioning one’s sense of what is natural in the same way considering very closely the shape of a word defamiliarizes it, rendering it strange and arbitrary. Slicing time carves out the space in which we discover a huge variety of beliefs. A cross-section of history reveals disparate details without any clear means of relating them.
2. Global Dissipation of Truth
While the longitudinal approach of the historical consciousness detaches nature from the past and makes it a problem instead of a datum, the lateral vision of a globalizing approach relativizes nature to various contexts. Truth becomes local, and while other local truths may be interesting, they’re often of no value outside their original contexts.
This bears directly on the creeds, as African American theologian James Cone indicates: “I respect what happened at Nicea and Chalcedon and the theological input of the Church Fathers on Christology. . . . But the homoousia question is not a black question.”
Cone complains about a uniformizing tendency in Christian theology that’s also recognized by W. A. Dyrness and Oscar Garcia-Johnson: “The inherent problem with ‘Christendom’ was its ability to impose a uniformity that ignored or suppressed alternative points of view. . . . At the very least, it sometimes proposed theological formulations that were difficult to put into other cultural frameworks, where, for example, there had been no previous conversations about ‘persons’ and ‘substance.’”
To the extent creeds operate with so-called metaphysical language—and some creeds are more metaphysical than others (e.g., compare the Apostles’ Creed with Chalcedon or the Athanasian Creed)—they’re less interesting outside their original contexts. Each context, both across history and across the globe, presents unique challenges and questions.
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Leviticus is a book of hope, not in running from God but in running to Him, where He redemptively points us to the unblemished Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. By His stripes we are healed.

For it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.Leviticus 17:11, NKJV
Whenever I read the opening chapters of Leviticus I am taken aback by all the different sacrificial offerings (burnt, peace, grain, guilt, sin), the frequency with which they are to be made, and the detail in which they are presented. I am much relieved to be ministering on this side of the cross.
Leviticus gives us an idea of the insidiousness and pervasiveness of sin. No one is untouched by it. Sin is a stain to life, our awareness brought to the fore in the presence of the holy God. As with Isaiah, the closer we draw near to God the more acutely aware we become of our sin and sinfulness, and of our abject helplessness to do anything about it (Isa. 6:5).
What particularly strikes me in the descriptions of these sacrifices is all the attention given to unintentional sins (Lev. 4-5), those sins of which we are unaware and may commit inadvertently or by omission. It brings to mind the expression that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
When it comes to sin in our lives, we tend to think of willful sins, those sins we commit or omit with intention. The psalmist has this in mind when he says, “Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression” (Psa. 19:13).
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