God’s Word for You
2 Timothy 1:9b-10 Death is dead
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, June 3, 2026
and the grace given to us in Christ Jesus even before ancient times, 10 and now has revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, the one who destroyed death and who shone light on life and immortality through the gospel.
In verse 9, we pondered the “why” of salvation. Now we consider the “how.” The time of God’s grace for us is shown to us as God pulls back the curtain of his inmost heart to show us that this happened “even before ancient times”—and by this he means that we were chosen in eternity, before creation, to be his own dear children. We read about this in the previous verses with a portion of the Formula of Concord.
“And now,” Paul goes on to say, “now God has revealed the one who destroyed death.” The destruction of death was carried out by Christ. Death and the devil never had a chance, but they never understood what they were getting into. Together, death and the devil thought that they had Christ like a snake winding its way up to a hypnotized bird. They drew closer and closer, and closer still, and Jesus did nothing, and they saw their chance and they struck, and he let them do it. Death swallowed him up while the devil rocked back on his heels and laughed. But he forgot something. The devil had been thrown out of heaven because he didn’t believe what God said, and now he had forgotten that God promised that this very thing would happen: “You will strike his heel.” But there was more to the prophecy than that. There was also: “He will crush your head.” The devil choked on his laugh when death was destroyed by Christ. Just when old Death and that rascal the devil thought that they had him, the Son of God, fair and square (so to speak) and in the grave, Jesus did what he had done when the crowd had tried to kill him at Nazareth. He just walked away.
Here I want to share something from an Apocryphal book. It doesn’t have any bearing on our salvation or on our faith, and it’s one of the sillier stories in the Apocrypha, but I’d like to tell the tale. In the little book called “Bel and the Dragon” somebody wrote a couple of fictional stories about the prophet Daniel. They’re just stories, made up and nonsense, but sometimes even graffiti makes a good point. In the second part of the book, there is a dragon or some kind of lizard that the people of Babylon are supposedly worshiping as a god. The king says to Daniel, “See, we’re not worshiping a dead thing like an idol, but a real, living god!” (1:24). But Daniel promises to kill the thing “without sword or club.” Then he cooks up a batch of pitch (tar), hair, and fat, and boils them together and makes them into something like cakes or patties. The dragon eats them, and his stomach burst open (1:27).
This is what Christ did to death, letting himself be swallowed, and then blowing the thing up. The moment Death swallowed Christ, it was done for. Death was dead.
By the time the angel rolled away the stone from the tomb, Jesus was already gone. He had already descended into hell to lift up his fingers and blow a raspberry at Satan. “I won. You lost. All of the terrors in the prophets belong to you now, Satan. Every single bit of suffering will be yours, forever. Others will have some of it too, and your angels with them, but you get it all.” And as for death? Death “was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14). After the resurrection on the Last Day, nobody will ever die, ever again, and death will be done with for all eternity. For some will rise to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting contempt (Daniel 12:2), but nobody will die ever again.
How? Christ went to the cross. God reconciled the world to himself in Christ, and he does not count man’s sins against them (2 Corinthians 5:19). It’s as simple as that. He let himself be put to death for our sakes, and he rose from the dead because death has no hold over him any more than the devil has any hold over him (John 14:30).
The empty tomb has a special place in this whole plan of salvation, carried out for us. All who believe in the risen Savior, who trust in his atonement on the cross, are forgiven. And we are forgiven not because we have done anything at all, but because Christ did everything.
This was done for the advantage of man. Just as creation was done for man’s benefit, so also salvation was done to rescue us, so that we would continue to belong to the Lord. For “the highest heavens belong to the LORD, but the earth he has given to man” (Psalm 115:16), but only for our time of grace. In the resurrection, “it is we who extol the LORD, both now and forevermore. Praise the Lord!” (Psalm 115:18).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.