Life and the Psychology of Death

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Nate Devlin. August 16, 2026. Romans 5:12-21.

Summary

All summer we have looked at the Bible and mental health. The Bible distinguishes the physical brain from the immaterial mind. If there is a physiological issue with your brain, receive help from medical professionals. But much of our thinking is immaterial, and the inner man is affected by what I called the noetic effects of sin: sin darkens our minds and affects our thinking. That has to be addressed by the Spirit of God and the Word of God, and there are no medical professionals who can address that particular issue. Today we consider the psychology of death. Death is ubiquitous, its consequences are inescapable, and it shapes how we think about life, relationships, and even God.

The presence of death has led many to conclude that even God is dead. If God is dead, nothing is permanent, and we either eat, drink, and go our merry way, or shrivel into fear over the impermanence of all things. A psychology of death among a people can only produce a culture of death. Pope John Paul II saw this in his encyclical The Gospel of Life: the eclipse of the sense of God “encourages a ‘culture of death’, creating and consolidating actual ‘structures of sin’ which go against life.” And Carl Trueman, a Reformed theologian at Grove City College, writes in The Desecration of Man that “as death is by turns denied, trivialized, and medicalized, something holy is being dismantled, and our humanity is reduced.”

Here is the big idea: this culture of death is overcome by the life of Christ. “If many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many” (Romans 5:15). Christ has conquered death and offers you life by grace, received by faith. And we must put on the mind of Christ, because the culture of death keeps working on our minds.

How does it work? First, death isolates and divides. Francis Schaeffer traced this separation theme in Genesis in Space and Time: sin separates man from God, man from himself (the “double-minded man, unstable in all his ways” of James 1:5-8), man from man, and man from nature (Frankenstein’s monsters). Death works to separate you from God, his Word, and his body. Every time the alarm goes off on Sunday morning and you feel the temptation to sleep in, that is death talking, saying you do not have to worry about it, you can go next week. If you follow the Robert Murray McCheyne Bible reading, as I do, you read Judges 19 within the last week or so. It is the worst chapter in Scripture, a culture of death. We read it and think, thank God that is locked up in the past, nothing like that ever happens today. That would be a lie. As the bodies of babies are carved up into parts and shipped hither and yon all over our country, with millions of babies being aborted, we are not that far off from Judges 19. We live in a culture of death.

Second, it produces what is called online “blackpilling,” the conviction that effort is useless and nothing can be fixed. It is one reason I am grateful for the CREC: Christ wins. Third, it makes us afraid of what Henry Cloud calls necessary endings. Some things need to die, and we need not fear that, because we have resurrection life. Maybe God is calling you to die to something. Lay it down and he will raise it up.

So how do we cultivate a culture of life? It begins with the announcement of good news: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4-5); “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). In the McCheyne reading I was recently in Acts 23, where Paul on trial declares, “it is with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial.” It means union with Christ as the head of your life; life is all that Christ has mastered. It means learning from the farmers: the church is commissioned to grow things, and as Wendell Berry, Joel Salatin, and Eugene Peterson have taught me, there is life in the dirt. It means confronting the culture of death. Seth Gruber writes in The Last Stand that “the early church fathers did not negotiate with evil. They confronted it, exposed it, and drove it back with truth.” And it means dying to yourself and stepping out in resurrection faith. Jesus raised the little girl in Luke 8, and Peter, who saw it, had the imagination to say in Acts 9, “Tabitha, arise.”

Death is not a Christian habit of mind. Marilynne Robinson writes in The Givenness of Things that “contemporary America is full of fear,” and that “fear is not a Christian habit of mind.” As children we learn to say, “I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23). I have been moved by men and women in our church who have taken on that imagination and overcome the specter of death, coming to this place in grief in firm belief of resurrection life. That is Christ’s gift to each of you: to receive life, to hope in life, and to live.

Key texts: Romans 5:12-21; Romans 1:18-32; Genesis 3; James 1:5-8; Judges 19; John 1:4-5; John 14:6; Acts 23:6; Luke 8:49-56; Acts 9:36-42; Psalm 23:4; Matthew 28:20

For reflection

• Where do you see death shaping your thinking: in isolation from God or his people, in a divided mind, or in a blackpilled despair about the world?
• Is there something God is calling you to let die so that he can raise up life, and what keeps you holding on?
• What would it look like for you, and for our church, to cultivate life this season: announcing good news, obeying Christ as head, patient growing, confronting death, taking a resurrection risk?