“O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?” Paul wrote to the Corinthian brethren in the first century church. Finding victory in the grave appears improbable when this statement is viewed in isolation. The sting of death has left people smarting with pain every generation since God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden after they disregarded His command to take from the Tree of Life.

This past week death reached us in a very personal and sobering manner. Last Sunday evening my uncle succumbed to his struggle with leukemia. On Tuesday our 27-year-old nephew succumbed to the damage that a series of blood clots wreaked on his young brain. He leaves his wife of eight months, pregnant with their first child and his next of kin devastated by the loss. On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning my wife Susan and I recorded one and one half hours of on-scene footage with the Beyond Today television crew for a program entitled “Moving Beyond Tragedy” that will air in August 2011. Death seemed all around, and the pain of its sting touched us.

Uncle Andy was buried at noon on Wednesday on the crest of a hill near the family farm where we laid my grandfather Benjamin to rest some 40 years ago. I remember as a small boy watching shovels of dirt cover the coffin containing my grandfather amidst muffled sobs of friends and family. Finding victory in the grave seemed a concept foreign on that fateful day in my impressionable young life.

On Friday mourners attended the funeral of my nephew John who died a death untimely by human measure. It became an amazing testimony of a short life well lived because over 2,000 people traveled from near and far to bid farewell a man 27 years young. The sting of death was evident as those who remained paid their respects.

We laid John to rest in a small hillside cemetery overlooking the lush spring countryside of Amish farmsteads—an ironic contrast of life amidst a ceremony of death. The scene might have been a movie set in the 19th century as four able young men clad in black carried the casket from the horse drawn hearse to wooden planks placed across the top of the hand dug grave. The pallbearers carefully lowered the wooden casket into the open grave as the earth quite literally received what was once taken from it—“for dust you are, And to dust you shall return’ (Genesis 3:19).

Then the scene I remember from youth replayed with ceremonial dignity as shovels of dirt filled the empty void to the refrain of the old German hymn “Gute Nacht” [good night] sung a cappella to an equally old, slow melody dating back to 16th century Europe. Somehow it seemed painfully fitting—stoic and somber expressions staring the reality of life and death into its face until the last shovel of dirt found its place. There was a pause; a prayer; then silence as people lingered on the hillside. Paul’s question “O grave, where is your victory?” was palpable. Defeat, not victory, appeared to be the order of the day.

However, if we examine Paul’s question in context, it is not a question at all. Rather it is a powerful statement about the power and promise of life. Far from a faint-hearted acknowledgment of defeat, Paul holds out a taunting challenge to the powers of death: “So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1. Corinthians 15:54-55, KJV).

So confident is Paul in the power of the resurrection from the dead that he not only tells the Corinthians about its power to transform mortality to immortality, he also taunts the powers of death by asking them, “Where is your sting?” Why? Because he knew the power and authority of Christ through the resurrection, will destroy the “last enemy”: death.

His explanation on the details and mechanics of this promise is equally passionate and comprehensive: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ ALL shall be made alive” (1.Corinthians 15:22). The all encompassing nature of the promise of the resurrections is at once compelling and humanity’s best hope. Jesus Christ, the ancient prophets, and the apostles all join to articulate a message of hope through a series of sequential resurrections in which all really means ALL. No one, from the unborn baby who died in the womb to the grandfather of a hundred years, will be left behind.

Paul passionately counters the doubters who raise the question: “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies” (1. Corinthians 15:35-36). Paul goes on to contrast death by describing the resurrection of “those who are Christ’s at His coming” (1. Corinthians 15:23). “So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power…And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man” (1. Corinthian 15:42-43, 49).

So powerful is the promise of life bearing “the image of the heavenly Man” described by John as the very likeness of the glorified Christ (1. John 3:1-2) that Paul’s taunt to the powers of death “O grave, where is your victory” begins to make sense. Why should we let the power of the grave overwhelm us with grief when the promise of life after the resurrection is so compelling?

However, the promise extends beyond “those that are Christ’s at His coming” described by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians (1. Corinthians 15:23). The apostle John states that “the rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were finished” (Revelation 20:5). He goes on to describe a resurrection of the masses in which “small and great” alike stand before a great white throne to have books [Greek: biblia] opened to them (Revelation 20:11-12).

Far from being a resurrection to condemnation that some have made this out to be, John describes in condensed form what the prophet Ezekiel details as a resurrection to physical life for the unsaved masses to know and accept the Lord!: “Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up from your graves. I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and performed it,’ says the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:13-14).

So unwilling is God that any should perish that He has a plan to reach out in a very intimate way to all those billions that never knew Christ with the offer to put “My Spirit in You.” It is a powerful testament to a loving God unwilling that any should perish. Yes, John describes a third resurrection of the incorrigible to meet their doom called the “second death” in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:13-14). But that fate is reserved for those who knowingly reject Christ, not those who never knew or understood His message.

The power of the promised resurrections is the last and best hope for all of mankind. They provide the only rational explanation given man that allows for a God that is both perfect in mercy and perfectly just. God does nothing capriciously, and no one is left behind. God is just. God is fair.

May my nephew John Miller, rest in peace. Oh, how he shall be missed. Yet, we do not sorrow as those who have no hope. Rather, we look with confidence to the day we shall meet again through the power of a resurrection to life. Then shall come to pass the words that are written: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying; and there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).