Death Has Been Swallowed Up

Paul celebrates: 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?' This is taunt-song. Death has been defeated.

I'm a palliative care nurse. I sit with dying people regularly. I see fear about death, pain from disease, grief about leaving. But I also see something else: people who know Jesus facing death with strange peace. Not because they're not scared. Because they know something death doesn't know—that death isn't the end.

I don't preach at patients. But I sit with them in that peace. Paul's taunting of death is their taunting of death. Death came with its worst. It couldn't keep Jesus. It can't keep us. We will die. But death won't have the final word.