Delivered Unto Death

The apostle Paul wrote, “We which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh” (2 Corinthians 4:11, KJV).

When Paul said, “We which live,” he was echoing Jesus’s words from Revelation 1:18: “I am he who lives...” Paul was speaking here of Christians, those who trust in Christ and have his life abiding in them. However, Paul actually was telling us we also have been handed over to death.

That’s right. Just as the Father handed his Son over to death, he likewise hands over all who are in Christ. God leads each of us by the hand to the very gates of death and says, “Here, death, take this one too. Do what you will with him!” At that point, God’s hand is no longer one of protection. Rather, it ushers us into the very jaws of death.

You ask why God would do this. He does it for the same reason he gave over his own Son to death. He knows that death, pain, and sorrow can no longer swallow us up or destroy us because we have within us the life of Christ himself!

God knows there is no risk for us, just as there wasn’t for Jesus. He has a plan of victory for us, just as he had for his own Son; but this victory can only be accomplished in us through death.

Paul warned, “If you have the resurrection life of Christ in you, God is going to plunge you into death every day of your life.” The apostle added, “As it is written, ‘For your sake we are killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.’” (Romans 8:36, NKJV). The Greek meaning here is, “Every day, we are handed over to death.” In short, Paul was saying, “Every day, I face a new death situation.”

Please understand that Paul was not speaking of physical death here but of a kind of death that happens to us daily in our walk with Christ. When he testified, “I die daily” (see 1 Corinthians 15:31), he was referring to tribulation, distress, persecution, peril, trouble of all kinds.

Paul was saying, in essence, “We who have the Christ-life in us are constantly being given over to one death situation after another. Every day, some new test is thrust upon us. But we have the life of God’s Son within us.”