There are no perfectly clean victories. Except this one. For the grave will give up her dead. All of her dead. Though death has claimed 100% of humanity, it will retain 0% of humanity. There could be no more complete defeat, no more colossal calamity.
The history of warfare has provided some shocking defeats. There’s the infamous battle of Cannae, of course, in which Hannibal routed the Roman forces, despite being significantly outnumbered. There’s the battle of Agincourt in which the English had a force just one-third the size of the French, yet inflicted vastly more casualties. There’s the utter destruction of the Spanish Armada in which the English navy and the wind and waves conspired to crush the Spanish forces. For every great military victory, there is a shocking defeat.
But the greatest is still to come. The last enemy to fall will be the one who suffers the greatest defeat in all of history, a defeat so great it is beyond our ability to even imagine or enumerate it.
In his letter to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul describes this enemy and its downfall: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” In this portion of his letter he is consoling Christians about the reality of their eventual demise and assuring them that the grave is not the end, for just as Jesus rose, so will all his people. In fact, so will all people, whether they belong to Jesus or have remained obstinately distant from him.
To this point in history, death has claimed 100% percent of humanity. Every single person who has ever been born has also died. Despite human progress, despite advances in science and medicine, despite groundbreaking new technologies, the mortality rate continues at a tight 100%. We hear often of billionaires who are obsessed with extending their lifespans and of transhumanists who are attempting to upload consciousness to the cloud where a person could supposedly live on indefinitely. But we all know that it’s nothing but nonsense, nothing but a big distraction from the reality that death will claim us in the end. Even if we could double or triple the length of our days, death will eventually come calling and that will be that.