Why Nobody Wants to Hear What We Believe About Death (p5)
Let me take you back through the heart of this series for a moment.
We've been to the Ancient Near East. We've traced the story through which death was seen. We've seen how the Hebrew nation emerged into that world with a completely different story. And we've seen how that story, at its deepest level, was a protest against the central implication of the ANE cosmology: that humans don't matter.
But here's something I need to repeat because its too important to miss.
When Israel's earliest Scriptures were written (the Torah), there was no fully developed doctrine of resurrection or heaven. The Torah's focus is mostly the here and now: covenant, land, descendants, justice, and God's presence among his people. Death leads to Sheol—the realm of the dead—not to a clearly described heaven. Only in Israel's later writings does the concept of resurrection and life beyond death begin to emerge as fully developed ideas. There are hints of these, of course. Job is a perfect example. Or Abraham reasoning that God would raise Isaac from the dead. (Heb. 11:19) But these are mere hints. Not fully developed doctrines. And that matters because it means that the early biblical view of death did not include a clear picture of bodily resurrection and heaven. Instead, the entire concept centered on one core idea:
That humans could rest.
And in a world where only the gods got to rest, where humans were slave labor in life and tormented shadows in death, the proposition that humans got to rest was not a minor theological footnote.
It was a revolution.
Think about what that meant to people saturated in ANE cosmology. The gods rested. Humans labored. Humans suffered. Even in death, humans continued in a diminished, dusty, joyless existence and their loved ones left alive had to manage their death with rituals that had to be done properly, or else...
Israel didn’t appear out of nowhere with a totally different view. It did take time for it to develop. But as it did, one clear idea came into focus that separated Israel’s view of death from its ANE neighbors: In Israel, when people died, they rested.
And they rested precisely because YHWH was not like other gods. He didn’t make humans as slave labor. He made them with dignity, purpose and companionship. And he imbued them with tzelem Elohim (image of God). Which meant humans were royalty. Rulers. Not slaves. In death, then, they get something only the gods were entitled to: rest. Because humans matter as much as the gods matter.
The ANE world would have found this view deeply counter-cultural. It was the most audacious cosmological claim imaginable. Not a theology of heaven. Not a developed doctrine of resurrection. Just this: our dead rest. They are held. Their pain is over. They are not condemned to suffer in the dust. Because they are not slave labor. They are image bearers. And image bearers are treated with dignity.
We rush past this too quickly. We leap straight from "the dead are unconscious" to "but the good news is resurrection!" as though the sleep itself is just an unfortunate waiting room before we get to the good part. But the sleep was the good part. In its original context it was the most liberating thing a human being had ever been told about death.
But here's something else Israel understood that we have largely forgotten.
When someone died, the Hebrews practiced silence.
But why? They possessed one of the ancient world's most distinctive visions of death and hope. But when death entered someone's home—when the loss was fresh and the grief was raw—Israel's instinct was not to explain.
It was to sit.
The opening chapters of Job capture this beautifully. His friends sat with him in silence for seven days. Ironically, they did their best ministry before they said a single word. That instinct survives in Jewish tradition even today. During shiva, visitors don't rush to fill the silence, to explain, to dump cliche’s and platitudes to try and “fix” or make sense of whats happening. They are simply silent.
I say this as a pastor who has heard too many stories of funerals turned into evangelistic campaigns. Church members whose elders used the graveside as a platform to push SDA theology to a roomful of grieving, bewildered non-Adventist family members. Every single one of those stories ends the same way. The family felt exploited. The truth was rejected not because it was wrong but because it was weaponised. Because it arrived not as comfort but as agenda.
Ancient Israel understood something that we keep forgetting.
No cosmology, no matter how beautiful, can remove the sting of death.
Death is an intruder. An enemy. A venom. It hurts regardless of how you frame it. And when that pain is fresh and present in someone's life, the most profound thing we can offer is not a theological treatise. It is the silence of companionship. Showing up. Sitting on the floor with someone. Saying nothing. Holding space for their pain.
In doing so we prove with our actions what our theology claims with its words: that people matter. That they are not targets. Not contacts. Not evangelistic opportunities. They are human beings in pain, and we honour their pain by being present in it without agenda.
This is crucial because when death enters someone's life, there are always two dimensions that need to be held at the same time.
There is the emotional dimension.
This dimension doesn’t need a sermon. It needs presence. Silence.
And then, there is the cosmological dimension.
This refers to the deep existential questions that surface sooner or later.
What happens when we die? Does it mean anything that she was here? Will I see him again? Is this all there is? These questions don't always come at the funeral. They come weeks later, months later, sometimes years later, when the dust settles and the person is left alone with the weight of what they've lost.
To the emotional dimension, Israel offers silence and presence.
To the cosmological dimension, Israel offers a whole new way of being human.
We need to hold both. And we need to know which one the moment is asking for.
Now, lets bring all this into 2026.
White Noise, the 2022 adaptation of Don DeLillo's postmodern novel, is a movie that captures the contemporary secular struggle with death in a really clear way. One of the central characters, a woman named Babette, is consumed by an anxiety so overwhelming it destabilises her entire life. Her fear is not ghosts or demons or judgment. Her fear is nothingness. That she will one day die and what awaits is... well… nothing.
In a heartwrenching scene, she stumbles mid tears while confessing, “I just can’t believe that were all marching toward nonexistence. All of us. It haunts me… It just wont go away.”
Some might shrug Babette off as a mere hypersensetive, neurotic person who just needs a bit of therapy and medication. But others might argue that in fact, she is the only normal one in the story. That everyone else is so distracted by consumerism and amusement that they are incapable of processing the implications of a worldview that says we exist by accident, that the universe is indifferent to us, and that when we die we cross a threshold into infinite nothingness, as though we had never even been here. And it is only the anxious mind of Babette that sees through the distracting veneers of shopping malls that everyone else is so ensnared by.
I met a Babette in real life some years ago. I was a pastor in Perth, Western Australia when a young lady in the church put me in touch with her secular friend. She had no religious background. No spiritual tradition to hold onto. And in her thirties she was haunted by a thought she couldn't shake. "How can someone as alive as me someday die and that's it? There's nothing else? It's like I was never here?"
These stories represent the prevailing death anxiety of a secular, disenchanted world. It’s not ghosts, and seanses, and demons they fear.
It is meaninglessness.
Nothingness.
Non-existence.
Secular philosophy tries to help. It offers what Christian philosopher William Lane Craig often calls "whistling in the graveyard"—carefully reasoned arguments that death gives life its meaning, that finitude makes each moment more precious, and that mortality is not something to fear. Self-described atheist and physicist Brian Cox is a perfect example. He argues that we do not need eternity for life to be meaningful because the beauty and wonder of this life are enough.
These arguments may satisfy the privileged who have everything they need in this life. But for the marginalised, the suffering, the ones whose lives have been defined by abject poverty, injustice and disease — these philosophies are tone-deaf. They whisper, you don't really matter. That the universe is under no obligation to care about your suffering. That if you were born privileged you get the best out of life. If you were born in the slums you get the worst. And thats just the way it is.
The ancient ANE said the same thing with different words. Cruel gods. Expendable humans. Death as the final confirmation of a meaningless existence.
And to both — to the ancient version and the modern version — the Hebrew story speaks with prophetic protest.
So how do we share this in our metamodern age?
When it comes to the specifics on how to make this practical for secular mission, you might be asking questions like:
A coworker finds comfort believing his late son is watching over him from heaven. Do you correct that? When? How?
Your neighbour doesn't believe in God or an afterlife. He's quietly terrified of dying. How do you talk about death with him without sounding preachy?
You explained what Adventists believe about death and the person looked horrified. What did you do wrong — and how do you recover?
Your de-churched friend is into crystals and new age ideas about energy continuing after death. How do you engage that without being dismissive or defensive?
A secular friend is curious about death and has been reading lots of different philosophies and religions. How can you share the biblical view in a way that isn't defensive or off putting?
I'm going deep into the specifics like these in my upcoming workshop, The State of the Dead Reimagined, register below if you haven't already. But let me give you an overview.
The way we speak of this perspective in our world is not by being “doctrine provers”. It's by being storytellers.
Storytellers who can offer a world drowning in meaninglessness a different cosmology. A different story about who they are and why they're here. Not accidents. Not biological events in an indifferent cosmos. Not cogs in empire's machinery. But image bearers. Royalty. Made for beauty and love and relational integrity. People whose existence is imbued with a significance so profound that even death cannot erase it.
When we lead with that story — when we enter the conversation not as people with a doctrine to prove but as people with a bigger, more beautiful, more human story to tell — something shifts. The conversation stops being about which view of death is theologically accurate. It becomes about something the secular person is already aching for. A reason to matter. A reason to believe that nothingness is not where our story ends.
Is there room to talk about the afterlife, about ghosts and soul sleep and end-time events?
Absolutely.
As culture continues to shift and search for answers, as the activity of the enemy intensifies toward the end, people will need solid ground to stand on. In the ANE, Israel's view of the dead liberated people from anxiety-inducing systems that elites used to control the masses. In our day, the truth does the same. But ghosts and demons need not be the opening move for a generation whose anxieties are existential, not religious.
We can expand our approach without discarding our foundations. We can offer more, not less.
I believe the Adventist doctrine of death is one of the most extraordinary truths in all of Scripture.
It carries within it a vision of human dignity, cosmic significance, and the character of a God who refuses to let meaninglessness have the final word. It was radical in the ANE. It is radical now. And our contemporary post-religious world has never needed it more.
We just have to learn to say it in a way our secular friends can actually hear.
That's what the workshop is for.
Register for Death Reimagined — Live July 30th at 7pm EST
Details and early bird pricing at the link below. Recording included for all registrants.
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Footnote: Strictly speaking, the Torah does not present a fully developed theology of death as "rest." Its primary emphasis is covenant life in the present, with relatively little reflection on the state of the dead beyond references to Sheol and being "gathered to one's people." The explicit language of death as sleep and rest emerges more clearly in Israel's later Scriptures (e.g., Job, Psalms, Daniel). My argument is therefore a biblical-theological one rather than a purely historical one: the Torah introduces the revolutionary idea that God shares his own rest with humanity through the Sabbath, and Israel's later reflection naturally extends that theme by describing death itself with the language of rest and sleep.
