“For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” – 1 Corinthians 15:25-26

There is an enemy that has never lost a fight.

It has walked into both fortified palaces and shacks and claimed every human life – great emperors, kings, queens and philosophers.

Its name is death.

And for centuries, it seemed unbeatable.

But something happened on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem that changed everything.

In our meditation today, the Apostle Paul makes a staggering declaration: “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”Notice the word must.

This is not a hope. It is not a prayer. It is a divine certainty written into the fabric of creation. Christ must reign.

And He will not lay down that reign until every enemy – every one – has been crushed beneath His feet.

We must understand what kind of king we are talking about.

The imagery of enemies being placed under the feet comes straight from the ancient world.

When a conquering king defeated his enemies, he would place his foot on the neck of the fallen. It was the ultimate symbol of total, irreversible victory.

And when death – that ancient, undefeated enemy – is finally placed beneath His feet, we will stand beside Him, clothed in immortality, and wonder why we were ever afraid.

This is what Christ is doing – not symbolically, but actually – right now, and progressively, until the last enemy falls.

And what are these enemies? Sin was first.

The cross dealt with sin’s power and penalty decisively.

As we saw previously, all the forces that Ephesians 6 calls “principalities and powers” have been subdued under His sovereign reign.

The church participates in this conquest every time it stands firm in faith, proclaims the gospel, and refuses to bow to the spirit of the age.

We are not spectators!

We are soldiers in a war that has already been won.

But Paul saves the most personal enemy for last. Death.

Not merely the concept of death. Your death. My death.

The death of everyone we have ever loved and lost.

Paul calls it the last enemy not because it is the weakest, but because it is the final frontier of Christ’s complete victory.

Everything else will be dealt with first.

And then, when the trumpet sounds and the dead in Christ rise, death itself will be thrown into the lake of fire.

It will be destroyed – the Greek word means utterly abolished, rendered completely inoperative.

Here is what this means for every believer sitting with you in that pew today: you will not ultimately lose to death.

You may walk through it.

You may walk through grief, and fear, and the cold shadow of a terminal diagnosis.

But you will not be held by it.

Because the One who holds the keys to death and Hades has already walked out of the tomb with those keys in His hand.

Paul tells us in this same chapter of Corinthians that the body that is buried is perishable, but the body that is raised is imperishable.

It is raised in glory. It is raised in power.

It is a body like Christ’s own resurrected body – not subject to decay, not subject to disease, not subject to death.

This is your inheritance. This is what is waiting on the other side of the last breath.

So let the fear of death lose its grip on you today.

It does not have the final word. Christ does.

He is reigning now. He will reign then.

And when death – that ancient, undefeated enemy – is finally placed beneath His feet, we will stand beside Him, clothed in immortality, and wonder why we were ever afraid.

The last enemy is already defeated. It just hasn’t received the news yet.