How to Kill Death

“Hey! Listen! Hey, pal! Hey, will you look at me? All right, OK – if you eat her, you’ve got to eat the rest of us, ’cause we’re a combo pack!”

Final Space S2 E3, ‘The Grand Surrender’ (2019)

So how do you kill death?

Tricky, huh. While you give that one a ponder, let me tell you about a Netflix animated comedy space opera called Final Space.¹ I wasn’t really sure whether I was going to like it when I started watching, because it’s very silly and over-the-top in an adult-humour kind of way and that sort of thing often wears out on me quite quickly, but the thing that rescues Final Space is that it’s over-the-top about everything. The programme very much hinges on the personality of its protagonist, Gary Goodspeed, who just throws himself into absolutely everything he does with this kind of reckless wholeheartedness. One moment, he’s making a heartfelt speech about his love of cookies, the next, an equally heartfelt speech about why he’ll never abandon his friends. The way that silly and serious come so thick and fast after one another keeps the silliness from spiralling into total vacuosity, while granting a peculiar kind of access to the seriousness, sparing it the recoil-worthy cringeiness that often comes with earnest emotion. Gary’s nothing-by-halves temperament superficially seems kind of annoying, but get enough episodes in and you start to realise he’s actually this incredibly brave, loyal, and relentlessly selfless person. In a way, it’s as if the series is designed to take the viewer on the same journey as Gary’s love interest Quinn as she slowly starts to fall for him.

 

Big thanks to R062 at newgrounds.com for the epic fanart; massive credit is especially due for portraying Gary in a really different art style to the programme itself, but still so that he and even the precise scene are totally recognisable.

The third episode of the second series takes Gary and his friends (he usually calls them the Team Squad) to a planet called Serepentis, the homeworld of one of them, Ash. The people of Serepentis worship a giant snake thing called Werthrent, and it’s considered an honour to be chosen to get eaten by him. That was actually the fate that Ash was destined for herself, once upon a time. She escaped. Her sister Harp, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.

Werthrent has something the Team Squad needs – a dimensional key; I won’t confuse things by going into why they’re trying to collect the keys, but suffice it to say that it’s kind of the whole overarching plot of the series – so they march up to his lair and yell insults until he comes out to confront them. Ash demands that Werthrent return Harp to her, or else she’ll flay him with her cool dark-fire powers; Werthrent makes the genius alternative suggestion that he just eat Ash too. But Gary – who has a plan, or at least the beginning of one – persuades Werthrent, as per my opening quotation, to eat the entire rest of the Team Squad too. (I’m not sure he took that much persuading, to be fair.)

How do you kill death? Still got that one ticking over on the back burner?

Upon arriving in Werthrent’s insides, the Team Squad find that all the people he’s eaten over the years are still there, although they’re in pretty bad shape: think zombies, basically. Ash sets off to look for Harp. The others set off to look for the dimensional key. It’s in Werthrent’s heart, and when they rip it out, his insides start to fall apart. Everything’s collapsing, everything’s on fire, and Ash finds Harp just in time to discover that she too has been zombified and can’t really be considered a person any more, before the flames devour her. But Ash and the Team Squad escape the inferno and watch as Werthrent’s body disintegrates completely before them.

How do you kill death? The same way you kill a giant evil alien snake, apparently: from the inside.

“Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure, and the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude will go down, her revellers and he who exults in her.” – Isaiah 5:14

“Three things are never satisfied; four never say, Enough: Sheol, the barren womb, the land never satisfied with water, and the fire that never says, Enough.” – Proverbs 30:16

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” – Ecclesiastes 9:10

Sheol is the Hebrew term for the place where people go where they die. And, like Werthrent, it likes devouring people. It’s always hungry for more. In fact, Sheol is so insatiable that it ends up nomming everybody sooner or later. This isn’t what you’d call a desirable state of affairs – certainly not from our point of view, anyway – since it doesn’t sound like the inside of Sheol is a very fun place to be: as far as I can tell, the Old Testament basically describes it as a deep, dark pit where there’s nothing to do.²

But then along comes Jesus. And the way he confronts death and Sheol is kind of the same way the Team Squad confronted Werthrent; he gets himself eaten like everybody else. Now, there’s obviously a heck of a lot more going on at the cross than merely Jesus making his trip to the inside of Sheol via the only valid route, but since no blog post is ever going to be able to address the magnificence of every aspect of the single greatest thing that has ever happened ever, you’ll excuse me for narrowing my focus. Jesus got eaten by Sheol. And once he was on the inside, he had a couple of things on his to-do list.

First off, like Ash, he was there to rescue someone – or rather many someones – he cared about, who’d already been eaten. “For it was for this that the gospel was preached also to dead people,” wrote the apostle Peter in the fourth chapter of his first letter, “so that while on the one hand they might be judged – after the manner of human beings – in flesh, they might on the other hand live in spirit, after the manner of God.”³ In the Old Testament, everybody goes to Sheol, namely is judged in flesh, after the manner of children of Adam born dead in sin – there’s no question of any alternative – and yet we know that those who have had faith in God throughout history have a share in the world to come.⁴ This is how. Jesus went and preached the gospel to the faithful dead, and when they believed it, they were made alive in spirit, exactly the same way the rest of us were when we believed it. And if you’re alive in spirit, you’ve got no business being in Sheol: Sheol’s for dead people. If you’re alive in spirit, after the manner of God, you can be with him where he is.

So while Ash wasn’t able to rescue Harp from Werthrent, Jesus rescued a whole host of captives from Sheol and led them up to heaven with him. But consider what that meant: Jesus went right into the heart of dead-people-land and made people alive. “You killed the Author of life,” Peter preached in Acts 3, “whom God raised from the dead.” Well, of course he did. You can’t have the Author of life hanging out in Sheol. The whole point of Sheol is to accommodate dead people. How can it possibly apply its usual processes to a person who has life in himself and gives of that life to whom he will?⁵ And then, off the back of that – well, what kind of a defeat is it for Sheol, what kind of a fatal blow to its very essence, if its whole job is to be the ultimate repository of the inevitably dead, and then this guy shows up who not only gets out of there with his own everlasting life secure, but takes a whole bunch of formerly dead folks with him?

 

Repository of dead. Too amusingly appropriate a stock photo not to adorn this post with.

Jesus killed death from the inside. He broke it. He struck a fatal blow to what made it function. If you will, he ripped out its heart and triggered its destruction. Admittedly, upon that happening, Sheol didn’t disintegrate quite as immediately as Werthrent did, but one day, just like him, it’s going to meet its end in flames, as we know from Revelation 20: “Then Death and Hades [which is Greek for Sheol, to be clear] were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.” How about that, huh: at the end of the age, death gets chucked into an even more ultimate version of death – one from which there isn’t any chance of rescue. But not, of course, before Jesus victory-marched right out of there with a parade of all the chosen saints whose deaths had preceded his resurrection.

So now, following that, it’s no longer the case that Sheol, sooner or later, gobbles everybody up to spend forever in its deep, dark insides. If you’re alive in spirit, you’ve got no business being in Sheol, because Sheol’s for dead people. Your fleshly body’ll end up dead, sure, but who cares? The spiritual body you’ll get in its place will be way better,⁶ and, being alive after the manner of God, you’ll get to be with him where he is.

And that’s made possible because Jesus himself died. Because he entered Sheol, he was able to strike the fatal blow against it from the inside. He took life into the heart of death and unleashed it. How do you kill death? Turns out you kill it with life.

The Team Squad’s victory over Werthrent was pretty good – they did destroy him from the inside – but it would have been even better if they’d been able to rescue Harp and maybe some of the other zombies who’d been eaten by him too. When Jesus won his victory over death, by contrast, he didn’t only destroy it from the inside; he rescued everybody who will believe in him. The Author of life died in order that death might die – in order that death might die, and in order that we who were once dead in spirit might live.

Footnotes

¹ Or you could just go and watch it for yourself: https://www.netflix.com/title/80174479.

² There’s actually a bit more nuance to it than that, but I already talked about that in my post ‘What the Hell’ (under June 2019 in my blog archive if you’re interested), so I won’t go over it all again here.

³ I’m generally using the ESV this post because I’m lazy, but I translated that one myself, basically because I feel as if the ESV’s rendering of νεκροῖς as ‘to those who are dead’, while not wrong, is trying a bit too hard to imply that they weren’t dead when it was preached to them. νεκροῖς, I should clarify, just means ‘to dead people’.

⁴ Try Hebrews 11, for instance.

⁵ I here allude to John 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+5&version=ESVUK. While you’re there, take a look at verses 25-29. Reckon any of that jazz pertains to what I’ve been chatting about in this post? I’m too tired to reach a conclusion on that right now.

⁶ Just check out 1 Corinthians 15: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK.