Death, as Paul says, is "the last enemy that shall be destroyed."I Cor. 15:26. When he said this, he didn't necessarily mean that it was last because it was the biggest and most important. Nor did he say that it should be the last on our priority list of evils to be tackled.
Death can be called the last enemy—and mankind's most feared enemy—because it claims to bring to a close what the physical senses believe life to be. To the material senses, death is the logical outcome of their own limited view of life. But this sense of life as being limited in all ways can be brought to a close without dying, as Christ Jesus' ascension teaches us. He declared, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."John 8:51.
It's a false sense of what life is that appears to blind people to reality as God, eternal Life, knows it and as our spiritual sense—the pure sense that hears and bears witness to God— intuitively recognizes it to be. True being is unchanging reality, in which Life, with all its manifestations, neither declines nor dies. We may conclude, then, that the most important enemy to destroy is not death but the material sense of existence: that which fears not only its own decline and death but the decline and death of love, supply, safety, intelligence—all that is good in human experience. Only as this false sense is progressively destroyed will spiritual sense, which cannot fear death because it knows only Life, come clearly into focus. Along with this increased sense of our spirituality comes the dominion that belongs to man as God's image.
