In the Scriptures, being dead is sometimes used metaphorically. While modern Christians understand death as referring to being inert or unresponsive or unable, we would be remiss if we didn’t take into consideration the aspects of Corruption and Alienation.

Some quick commentary.

Death as Alienation

The parable of the prodigal son:

But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry. - Luke 15

…Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found. - Luke 15

This scene has the son, finally broken, going back to his father after squandering his inheritance and seeking to be a mere servant. Upon his return, the father exclaims twice in a parallelism that the young man was dead (which is to say, lost) and now alive (found). This is death-as-alienation.

This understanding of death-as-alienation, especially as it relates to Gentiles, still coheres well with what Paul writes in Ephesians 2:

Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh—who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands— that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God

Finally, in Romans 6, Paul is in the middle of arguing that just because we are under grace does not mean we have a license to sin and emphasizes our unity in Christ, sharing in His death, burial, and resurrection:

For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.

Here the idea that death is a metaphor for inability doesn’t really make sense here, as it should be obvious to any earnest Christian that still struggles with sin. What’s more, it is a command, not a description (“reckon yourselves…”). In fact, sin can still reign in your mortal body, and we’re called to beware and not submit to it, so it’s not like we are “dead” to it in the sense of being unable to commit or even be beset by it.

To be dead to sin means to be alienated from it, and if we live our lives according to the pattern of Christ, we’re to treat our sin (and the sins that the world or the Devil try to entice us with) as being utterly foreign to us. We still use this sort of phrasing today: “Oh that guy? Yeah, based on what he did to my family, he’s dead to me”.

Death as Corruption

Regarding death-as-corruption, we can take a look at an earlier passage in Ephesians 2:

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

And in Job 17 we see our titular protagonist say this during his pain-filled speech:

‘The light is near,’ they say, in the face of darkness.
If I wait for the grave as my house,
If I make my bed in the darkness,
If I say to corruption, ‘You are my father,’
And to the worm, ‘You are my mother and my sister,’
Where then is my hope?
As for my hope, who can see it?
Will they go down to the gates of Sheol?
Shall we have rest together in the dust?”

As you can see, there’s a lot packed in here with all these symbols and metaphors for death, but it’s not inability to do something that’s the driving thrust, but rather corruption, hopelessness, darkness (which itself can also refer to confusion or lack of insight/wisdom); an “End of the Line” sort of connotation, if you will.

Peter’s speech in Acts 2, which references Psalm 16 (see also Acts 13), has this:

Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses.

Some Christians put forward the idea of the Fall of Man in which the fall marred or corrupted the image of God in us, and I think it’s an accurate and useful understanding of what the original writers and readers of Scripture thought about. In the same way that death corrupts the flesh and degrades it into a deformed image of what it once was, so too did spiritual death mar and deform the image of God in us.

But praise be to God that Christ did not see corruption–he conquered Death, was not left in Hades, and instead offers salvation to all men, a part of that blessed gift being the capacity to slowly restore of that marred image (or ‘icon’ as some call it) by the grace and power of God (i.e. - to be conformed to the image of His Son!)

Finally Galatians 6, in which Paul contrasts everlasting life with the corruption (see also 1 Cor 15:42):

For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.

Lazarus and Premature Optimization

Occasionally I’ll hear sermons or tidbits in YouTube videos referencing the miracle of Lazarus’ coming back to life as a sign or metaphor that exemplifies salvation, particularly the belief that Lazarus, being dead, cannot even ask for help and Jesus unilaterally commands and brings him back.

I’ve thought this too for a long time. Undergirding this line of thinking is the idea that God is in control of salvation, and salvation can only come from Him. Man can do nothing to merit it. This is well and good. What isn’t good, however, is the all too common “glitch” in our mental matrix of prematurely optimizing for some thing. It could be optimizing for “God’s glory” or “the Trinity” or “God-centered theology over man-exalting theology” or some other thing that we hold in high esteem. However, prematurely doing so, as in going into the text(s) and treating them as prooftexts to “honor” those things (for lack of a better word), is not good exegesis.

Back to Lazarus. One main point of this miracle is to show that the Father did indeed send Jesus (“Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. And I know that You always hear Me, but because of the people who are standing by I said this, that they may believe that You sent Me”).

The other main point is found earlier in the chapter where Martha tells Jesus that her brother would rise again on the last day, as was a typical Jewish expectation of that era regarding the Resurrection. Our Lord then tells her: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

This is not about soteriology, but rather about revealing that Christ is the True Resurrection and the Life. Yes, the event as Martha knew it was far off, but the very embodiment and giver of life was in her midst at that moment! It’s yet another case of Jesus both fulfilling prophecy/the law, but also recontextualizing and reclarifying it in the new covenant.

And if we zoom even further out, we can see this in light of John’s M.O. for writing his gospel:

And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name. – John 20

All this to say, the “glitch” of premature optimization is an all too common thing I see, even within myself! We love God and want to give Him glory. We hold humility and the death of our pride/egos as a lifelong endeavor. This is good! However, it can cause us to optimize for something that sometimes just isn’t there in the text or is beyond the socio-religio-political context of the story, passage, book.

While this is already an issue becaues of our human nature, a more risible form of this occurs when someone is ideologically possessed and can only see things through a certain lens. Rather than clarity and wisdom, the goal is the perpetuation and preservation of their Ideology or Paradigm. This too was something that afflicted me when I was a new believer in high school.

I’ll elaborate more on this for another post, but I hope for now this is something I hope this affords you at least some bits of clarity and helps!