Death Without Sting

          Because of the sacrifice of the Savior, death has no sting.  Death has no victory.  Satan has no power.  We often speak of the Savior’s atonement and rightly we should.  As we speak of Christ at every opportunity, we must never lose our sense of awe and eternal gratitude of the sacrifice of the Son of God.

          --Dieter F. Uchtdorf

          Death is thought of as the universal punishment, the misfortune of all misfortunes.  No matter how bad it gets, people comfort themselves by saying, "at least I'm not dead."  At the same time, it is inevitable.  Through Jesus Christ we learn that the sting of death is swallowed up in his Atonement.  This can be true in multiple senses of the term.  If we think of death in the physical sense, the natural conclusion is that Christ swallows up the sting of death because now we know that it will be only a temporary circumstance.  Because of the Resurrection, death will not have a permanent claim on anyone.

          However, the scriptures teach additional meanings of the phrase.  For example, in the Doctrine and Covenants we read, "And the elders of the church, two or more, shall be called, and shall pray for and lay their hands upon them in my name; and if they die they shall die unto me, and if they live they shall live unto me...And it shall come to pass that those that die in me shall not taste of death, for it shall be sweet unto them;" (D&C 42:45, 47)  Have you ever thought of death as something that could be "sweet"?  Yet that is precisely what this verse was saying.  Furthermore, I don't know that Christ's power is limited by the kind of death that a person experiences.  This scripture seems to indicate that Christ removes the sting a of death from His disciples in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

          To take this thought even further, recall that often, if not always, temporal things are symbolic of spiritual things.  In terms of spiritual death, that would mean that not only does Christ give us the hope that our spiritual death, by way of the fall, can become a temporary circumstance, He can take away the sting of that death in this life.  If spiritual death means separation from God, removing death's sting would mean being united with him even in mortality.  Just as we qualified for a redemption from physical death by keeping our first estate, we qualify for the removal of the second by being faithful in mortality.  Such an idea casts light on the statement by Joseph Smith regarding whose who prove faithful, "[Christ] will manifest the Father unto him."

          Just as the Resurrection is the ultimate victory over temporal death, so is this promise the ultimate victory over spiritual death.  In the same way that the Savior thwarts physical mortality by "preserving [us] from day to day, by lending [us] breath", Christ can take away the sting of the second death inherent in each moment by the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost.

          Let us believe in Christ, that He may exercise His saving grace in us by taking away the spiritual misery of daily mortal experience through the administration of the First Comforter.