“Our God is a consuming fire”. The Second Death is that experience spoken of as being when Christians are “as those escaping through the flames”. Christians will escape, but others will be consumed. This is when “everyone’s work is tested”.
The work that we do is actually another way of saying what we have become, it is difficult to separate the good entity we might be, from the good work we might do, as that entity. In other words, the outworking of God’s nature from us towards others.
Jesus died our old death so we might live His new life. For those who have not allowed Him to have dealt with their old death, their old death will still be their present death, and the Spirit will seek them out and consume them, similar to the “Passover” where the first born of Egypt were struck down because they did not recognise the blood and apply it to the entrance of their building (temple), now it will be that all [Egypt] will be struck down who have not accepted the Son of life into their life, so as to banish death from their makeup. This is “The Second Death”. [Coming after the first (spiritual) and literal physical death]. [It is appointed to man once to die, and then the judgement].
Three people in the “fiery furnace” were saved because Jesus was with them in it, and they were relationship or covenant bound to Him. But those outside of this relationship are not known by Him, and will be destroyed when He appears again. They have nothing in common with Him, nor He with them, declaring, “I never knew you”.
We are saved by faith that God “passed over” our former sins, having presented them as having been laid on Jesus, by virtue of Him taking upon Himself the burden of being human, and overcoming it and converting it back to life, making life freely available by His grace. Death and the things of death no longer have power over us to control our behaviour, because faith in Him now controls us, so we do not produce the works of death, but of life, being that we live in the life He gives us and has given us.
But if this acceptance of His death substitution for our former sins does not occur, if we reject this plainly presented forgiveness of our old lives and fail to join with Him in Life’s victory that He achieved on our behalf, for us, then we remain in the old death ridden life on which the Second Death will feed. If we feed on His body and his blood, the Second Death will find nothing left in us on which to feed, [He has nothing in (on) me] and we will join Him in immortality. Or not.
CROSSROMAN 