All good stories have suspense. The best storytellers know how to prepare you for something exciting but then make you wait for it on the edge of your seat. And it turns out God is an incredible storyteller and a master of suspense. Throughout the entire Old Testament, through countless lifetimes and ages of Israel’s sin-infested history, there lingered a promise of restoration from God, a promise that generations waited for. That promise would not be fulfilled until the time of Christ. But Hebrews 11:13 tells us that all the Old Testament believers, from Abraham to Moses to David to the prophets, knew the days of the Messiah were coming, and they rejoiced with anticipation.
Throughout that whole cohesive story, one theme unites those various righteous characters: they responded to the word of God with faith. They treasured his holy Scriptures, believed his promises of a Messiah that would conquer evil, and waited for his coming with faithful obedience. And apparently, as Jesus seems to say, though their bodies all decayed, they never tasted death!
We may be just as confused as the Jewish crowds and ask, "what could that possibly mean?" Jesus answers with the implication that bodily death is not the death he’s talking about—in fact it's a rather insignificant event in the grand scheme of things. True death is the soul’s separation from God. But those faithful believers who obeyed God’s word never tasted that death; they will live eternally with their Father.
The story continues into our age, and some of the suspense still remains. We look behind to Christ’s first coming and ahead to his second, and like Abraham and the prophets, we rejoice with anticipation. Unlike the Jews who didn’t believe, rather than taking scattered snippets of Scripture here and there, we understand the whole of the narrative and see God’s glory in it all. And like Jesus, we obey the Father’s word and glorify him in everything. After all, that’s what faithful Abraham did!
