The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View …

LIFE BEGINS AT DEATH

While most of us would probably opt for a long life on this earth, assuming reasonably good health, maybe even a 100 years, none of us would choose to be here forever. Even though we all know our years are limited, and we would have it no other way, life being what it is, we nonetheless give little thought to the inevitable, death. While it would be morbid to be preoccupied with thoughts of death, it may also indicate an imbalance in our humanness if we give little or no thought to it. If life is seen in terms of God’s purpose for us, we can only conclude that He is the author of death as well as of birth. When we come to realize that God cannot do with us all that He intends unless we die, we can then put death in proper perspective.


While the best of human thought through the ages has extolled long life as a blessing from God, the believer can conclude that death at any age is better than life as we know it in this world. We all want to live to a ripe old age, which is both natural and appropriate, but those who die while yet young are still better off, unless indeed life in this world is the only life there is. That a high percentage of people in the so-called “Christian world” either do not believe in life after death or have no opinion about it points to the hopelessness of our modern age.

My thesis herein is a daring one for our incredulous world: life really begins at death. We do of course have life in this world, but it only anticipates the glorious life that comes with death. This life is but preparatory and prefatory; the life to come is the main event. While life here is to be an exciting and meaningful adventure, it cannot compare to what is yet to be revealed. So, I am affirming as a believer that instead of death marking the end of life it is really the beginning of life. I also believe that apart from this view of death there is no way to make sense of this world. If there is life beyond death in which the tragedies and injustices of this world are set right, then we have an answer for our kind of world. If this world is all there is and death marks the end of reality, then Shakespeare was right in describing life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The most impelling Scripture on life beyond death is what Jesus said to the thief on the cross: “Today thou shalt be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43). The certainty with which Jesus spoke is impressive. When the brigand sued for mercy, asking Jesus to remember him when he came in his kingdom, Jesus did not speak obliquely or pass him off with “I’ll see what I can do for you.” Today, he told the penitent man, you will be with me in paradise. Men mean business in their hour of death. While the thief at first joined the other one in reviling Jesus, according to both Matthew and Mark, he at last recognized the one he mocked as his Savior. He received assurance that on that very day, the day of his agonizing death, he would be in the paradise of God. Life really began for the thief on the day of his death.

When that Scripture is coupled with Lk. 23:46, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,” we have overpowering evidence for life beyond death. Jesus was fully confident that life would continue in the presence of God and that the penitent thief would be with him. From cruel crosses on Calvary’s brow they moved on into the paradise of God, and on the same day. If we consider Jesus a reliable witness, we have all the evidence we need that life really begins at death.

Since our Lord came into this world from the paradise of God, we can accept with vigorous assurance his testimony about returning to the paradise of God. And what marvelous assurance there is in these words: “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (Jn. 14:2-3). This informative passage not only assures us that there is life beyond death, but it makes death a great adventure. Death becomes non-death if death is made to mean the end of life. It is rather the beginning of life, for it is the occasion of our being ushered into the Father’s house, which here means heaven. This makes death a milestone, a welcome one, in our continuing fellowship with God. When death is seen as something like walking from one room into another, it ceases to be something dreadful. If we believe the promises of Scripture, death should be attractive to us. We may dread the ordeal of dying and the suffering that sometimes attends it, but death itself should be precious to the believer.

Besides the testimony of Jesus, the Scriptures abound with evidence that life begins at death. The apostle Peter writes positively of “an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4). The apostle Paul writes with the same certainty: “We know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1). And it is clear that he had no idea of waiting in a grave for this to happen, for he said: “I have the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil 1:23). He is equally emphatic in 2 Cor. 5:8 where he refers to being “present with the Lord” when he is “absent from the body.”

There is in the scheme of things a resurrection and a judgment, but these do not preclude the believer going immediately into the paradise of God at death, for judgment does not determine one’s destiny.

That life really begins at death is even more exciting if we are to have new bodies, spiritual bodies that have some similarity to the bodies we now have, and this seems to be the verdict of Scripture. While it is a subject shrouded in mystery, we have some hints as to the nature of “a house not made with hands,” as Paul refers to our future embodiment. That passage, 2 Cor. 5, strongly suggests that the soul of the believer is never without a body, for the apostle says, when referring to putting on the heavenly clothing, “so that we will not be found naked” (verse 3). Paul sees the soul of man as always embodied: when our earthly body is dissolved we put on (immediately?) our heavenly body (2 Cor. 5:1). If Paul cannot see himself (the soul or spirit) “found naked” (without a body), we can only conclude that the apostle expected to receive an ethereal body immediately upon death.

Since 1 Cor. 15 describes a resurrection in which the believer will receive a spiritual, glorious body, we can conclude that the body received immediately at death is a temporary one or one that will be more gloriously manifested at the resurrection. At this point we must be careful and not be too literal, to the degree of crassness, in our view of the resurrection. There must be symbolic truth involved when the Bible speaks of graves opening and the dead coming forth, for most graves have long since disappeared and the bodies have turned to dirt that has shifted and washed into rivers and seas and even turned into other elements.

We can hardly think like the Scottish preacher that was dedicating a new cemetery. “How wonderful it will be on resurrection morning for those buried here,” he said, “for their first view will be this lovely scenery.” No one who interprets the Bible with even modest responsibility believes anything like that. His first mistake was to suppose that the dead are in their graves. His second mistake was to turn the promise of a resurrection into gross literalness. To me the resurrection means that we will live again and we will have spiritual bodies.

The believer as a “joint heir” with Christ is promised that he will have an ethereal (spiritual) body such as Christ had at his resurrection. The aged apostle John, in the face of these mysteries, wrote: “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that, when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him just as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2). We shall be like him! Another apostle gives a hint of what Christ is now like in heaven: “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of his glory, by the exertion of the power that he has even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20-21).

Christ now has a body, a glorious body, in heaven, and our worn-out earthly bodies will one day be like his heavenly body. It is a breathtaking promise for those who really believe.

The scanty evidence we have suggests that Jesus’ resurrected body was a new body and not a resuscitated old body, even though the new resembled (or could resemble at his will) the old, for his disciples recognized him, ate with him, and saw the marks of crucifixion. He could appear and disappear, walk through closed doors, and transport himself as fast as the mind can think, none of which he did in his old body. After his resurrection he seemed to be in a different dimension. I would guess, based on John 20:6, where the cocoon-like grave wrappings are described as folded or collapsed, that Jesus’ body simply disintegrated or disappeared, ceasing to exist, which is what will happen to ours. He then appeared, again and again, in a new resurrected (different in kind) body, which had a cosmic character in that it moved in and out of this world. It was in this body that he ascended, but not in a spatial sense, as if actually moving through space, except to accommodate the senses of his disciples, for such would be unnecessary. Jesus could go from earth to heaven and back again (Is there really space involved?) as fast as he could think.

It is remarkable that when Jesus was in the tomb there was no one on earth that believed he would rise, not even his own apostles. But when Peter and John entered the tomb that Easter morning and “saw,” as Jn. 20:8 puts it, they believed. What they saw was what Jesus left behind, the collapsed wrappings (into which 100 pounds of spices had been sprinkled) that revealed that no man had disturbed the corpse. They saw the empty cocoon that once contained the body, now gone, and they now believed he was risen, though John tells us that they still did not understand the Scriptures that spoke of the resurrection.

Our Lord’s appearances during the next forty days (Did he not move between heaven and earth during this time?) should answer the oft-asked question of whether we will recognize one another in the next life. The answer has to be an emphatic yes, otherwise heaven would be a gathering of lonely strangers. Jesus had gone to paradise the day of his death, but he nonetheless appeared to his followers upwards of a dozen times that we know of, and they always recognized him, though he sometimes withheld his identity for a time, as in Lk. 24:16. This tells us that Jesus’ heavenly body had likenesses to his old body. While this is a mystery beyond our comprehension, we can believe that our bodies will be like his and we too will be recognizable to those who knew us on earth.

Since we will know even as we are known (1 Cor. 13:12), we can conclude that all those in heaven will know one another. If Peter and John recognized Moses and Elijah, whom they never knew on earth, in a supernatural experience on earth (Lk. 9:33), will we not know them in heaven?

Surely death does not mark the end of our spiritual growth, so we go on learning, serving, growing in heaven in new bodies, in ways that we now have no way of comprehending, but I would guess that our vineyard will include innumerable universes. God has not created the vast expanses of the heavens for no reason. We will continue to live and to grow, to advance in our fellowship with our Creator. This principle surely applies to all God’s handiwork: where there is life there is growth. I sometimes comfort a mother who has lost a little one with: Oh, yes, indeed, you will see him again in heaven, but he will be grown by then! Of course, soul growth continues after death, for there is no such thing as a static soul. We can presume that the infants who die (and the millions of aborted ones?) are met on “the other side” and cared for in a special way as their Father’s purposes are fulfilled for each one, soul growth.

While I am not a reincarnationist, I would not rule it out as a possibility for some souls who have had no chance in this world. I am not sure there is anything in Scripture that necessarily rules out are-embodiment of a soul in this world. It has been extensively believed throughout history
and was apparently believed by Jesus’ disciples, otherwise they would not have supposed that a man was born blind because of his sins, obviously committed in a previous life (Jn. 9:2). Jesus did not rebuke them for such a conclusion; in fact he responded with “It was neither that this man sinned (in a previous life) nor his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Nor did Jesus scoff at the idea that some saw him as a reincarnated Old Testament prophet, as reported by his apostles (Mt. 16:14).

Reincarnation helps to answer such hard questions as, if it is important that a soul be prepared for heaven by a life here on earth (which is apparently God’s intention), why do so many in this world have no chance at all? Some may return for another chance. And I will warn you, if you have not looked into arguments for reincarnation, that the evidence for it is impressive. While I respect any viewpoint that has been believed by so many for so long, including both the great philosophers and the great religions, on reincarnation I remain an inquiring skeptic.

I am also sympathetic with a particular kind of universalism that sees all souls as eventually claimed by God for all eternity. I am disturbed by any conclusion that makes God the loser in the struggle for souls, with Satan getting the vast majority and God so few. Nor can I conceive of God and the redeemed ones as gloriously happy in heaven when all others, the multiplied billions, are damned forever in a devil’s hell. Would not the love of God be defeated and His purposes thwarted? Neither do I draw, comfort from an annihilation theory: that the unredeemed are destroyed. Universalism does not rule out a hell that burns away the dross, metes out retribution for evils done in the flesh, and corrects the inequities that only another world can accomplish and which the justice of God demands.

Such theologians as C. H. Dodd point to the Scriptures themselves as teaching the eventual redemption of all mankind, such as Rom. 5:18: “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.” Some of the early fathers insisted that Col. 1:20 shows that the “all things in heaven and earth” that will finally be reconciled to God includes even the devil and his angels, following their purification in “the lake of fire.”

While it must be granted that universalism is speculation and should be held only as a studied opinion, some responsible scholars, such as the late William Barclay, are on record as confirmed universalists. One persuasive point they make is that no choice of man is ever final, for God, who is eager to show mercy, will not allow it to be final. And “the Hound of Heaven” to whom a thousand years is but as one day has plenty of time to pursue sinful man, even through the labyrinths of eternity!

While there is uncertainty about some of these things, we can be sure that life really begins when we die. This being the case we can see more clearly what life in this world is all about: we are to be preparing ourselves for the main event! If the values of the world to come are centered in fellowship with God, then our concerns in this world should be to train our souls, develop character, and increase our capacity for life with God. —the Editor


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Since this has been a sad year for Ouida and me, having lost our 3-year old grand-daughter, some of our gracious readers are concerned that we might not be happy. We are gloriously happy, for by God's grace we lay claim to that eternal city where there will be no more darkness, no more sadness, and where all tears are wiped away. We have inexpressible joy because we believe the promoises. We thank you for loving us.