The Bee That Already Stung

On a warm afternoon in late August, a beekeeper named Margaret was checking her hives when a honeybee landed on her bare forearm. She didn't flinch. She knew something most people don't: this particular bee had already stung someone earlier that morning. And a honeybee, once it drives its barbed stinger into flesh, loses that stinger entirely. The venom sac tears away. The bee itself dies within hours. After that first sting, it has nothing left to threaten you with.

When Paul shouts across the centuries — "Where, O death, is your sting?" — he isn't asking a genuine question. He's issuing a taunt to a defeated enemy. Death came at Jesus of Nazareth on that Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem and drove its full force into Him. Every ounce of sin's consequence, every weight of the law's condemnation, was unloaded on the cross. But the moment death delivered its sting to the Son of God, it lost it.

The tomb was sealed — but so was death's power. When Jesus walked out three days later, He emerged like a man who had already been stung, and who now holds the stinger in His own hands.

For every believer who follows Christ, death still walks across our skin. We feel it in hospital corridors, at gravesides, in the slow ache of aging. But it has nothing left. The Almighty has already absorbed the blow and secured the victory. The sting is gone. What remains is nothing more than a bee — walking.