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The Dream Fulfilled

04/01/2007 - What Happens When We Die?, Selected Scripture

When I was in college I read a very interesting book. I didn't realize it at the time, but later on I discovered that it was a ground breaking book, the first one of its kind. The book was called Life After Life, written by a man named Dr. Raymond Moody. And it's all about near death experiences and what happens when we die. It generated enormous public interest when it was published in 1975 and since that time has sold over 13 million copies worldwide.

Dr. Moody is both a physician and a Ph.D. and is considered the leading authority on "the near death experience," a phrase he coined back in the late 1970's. He's written eleven books, is a much sought after public speaker, and has appeared three times on Oprah as well as on hundreds of other local and nationally syndicated talk shows.

In the book he details case studies of people who actually experienced clinical death, but were later revived. In other words, their heart stopped beating. They suffered a cardiac arrest and the doctors who were tending to them thought they were dead, but then they were resuscitated.

And after interviewing over a thousand of these people he discovered that most of them had very similar experiences. They described floating up out of their bodies in the operating or emergency room and watching their resuscitation take place. They could hear the voices and understand the words of the medical personnel who were working on them. Yet after a while they would realize that they were invisible. No one in the room could see them or hear them.

They all had difficulty putting into words what they experienced, but the ideas were very similar. They'd often describe a tunnel, a passageway that they would enter into and at the end of the tunnel there was this brilliant, warm, loving, accepting light. And when they would see that light they would have these amazing feelings of peace and comfort. Although in a few interviews some did describe a more hellish kind of experience.

Some said they saw relatives or friends who had already died and were there to greet them and help them with the transition. Others said they saw Christ or God or an angel. And that being, whoever it was, would ask them a question. And while they used different words to describe the question it was always something like, "What have you done with your life? Or how have you learned to love?"

Then they would describe this detailed review of everything they had ever done. Their life, every detail of it, was displayed all around them in the form of a full-color, three-dimensional panorama from birth all the way up to the present time. And yet, all of that they say was compressed into a mere matter of seconds.

According to a Gallup Poll, as many as eight million Americans claim to have had a near death experience. Moody says, "One thing that is fascinating is that all of the patients who go through this tell us that there is one thing that comes up to them as the most important feature of their life in these reviews. They say that it doesn't have anything to do with earthly success. No one asks them about their financial well-being or how much power they've had or any of these other things that our society suggests that we should be paying so much attention to. Every single person has told me that what they were faced with there was the question of how they had learned to love, and whether they had put this love into practice in their lives."

Fascinating, isn't it? What does happen when we die? Will we go through a tunnel? Will we see a bright light? Will we be asked a question?

Every culture, every society, every person seems to have a fascination with death and what lies beyond the grave. Many of us who have lost loved ones often wonder, "Where are they now? What are they experiencing? We can't see them, but can see us? Do they know what's happening here? And if they could tell us something about what's beyond the grave, what would they tell us?"

This morning we continue our series called The Dream Fulfilled: Glimpses of the Kingdom with a teaching I've called "What Happens When We Die?" Our text book for this series is not Life After Life, but the Scriptures, the Bible, the Word of God, revealed to us by a God who knows what's beyond the grave. He created life and dreams about enjoying life forever with us.

Let's start at the beginning. Open your Bibles to Genesis 1. The grand story of God opens with the words, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1 unfolds the story of creation culminating with the creation of human beings in God's own image, male and female. Genesis 2:7 adds the significant detail that the Lord God formed the man (the Hebrew word is adam) from the dust of the ground (the word is adamah) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Life comes from God. God is into life. But there was a problem. The man was not complete by himself. He needed community. It was not good for him to be alone. And so from the man God creates another living being called woman because she was taken out of the man. And now together the man and woman reflect the image of God. They become one flesh the Bible says. Two become one, just as God is three in one. And for a while everything is wonderful. Heaven and earth overlap in the garden.

But it doesn't last long. The man and the woman are given the good gift of freedom. They can choose to obey or disobey God. And unfortunately they make the wrong choice. And that choice has consequences. And so in Genesis 3 we learn for the first time, that this life giving God is also a just God. Justice is a big deal for God. And one of the consequences of their wrong choice is death.

The word "die" first appears in Genesis 2:17. Look at verse 16, You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, ¹⁷but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.

Of course, the serpent told them that they wouldn't die. But he lied. That's all the evil one can do is lie. So in the story we see that the word of God brought life, but the word of the serpent brought death. And so death entered into God's good creation.

The word "death" means separation. To die means to be separated. When we die physically our spirit is separated from our body. When we die spiritually our spirit is separated from God. And that's what happened to Adam and Eve. They were separated from the life of God and to symbolize that the story tells us that they were kicked out of the garden.

Rob Bell in his brand new book called Sex God writes, "By giving in to the temptation, Adam and Eve are essentially claiming that God isn't good. They're giving in to the deception that good is possible apart from God, the source of all good. The Scriptures call this being separated from 'the life of God.' When these first people eat the fruit, it isn't about the fruit, it's about their dissatisfaction with the world God has placed them in. Creation isn't good enough for them."

And so Adam and Eve are immediately separated from the life of God. They die spiritually right away. But it will take some time for them to die physically. We don't know how long Eve lived, but Genesis 5 tells us that Adam lived 930 years, and then he died. His spirit was separated from his body.

Now what happened to them after they died? Did they go to heaven? Did they go to hell? What? Well, the concept of death in the Old Testament is not real clear. What concept they had was built on the words that God had spoken to Adam in Genesis 3 when he announced the curse.

Look at Genesis 3:17-19, Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.¹⁸It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

After Adam and Eve died physically their bodies decomposed. After perhaps a burial of some kind they literally returned to the ground. Adam's body went back to being adamah, dust, but what about his spirit? What about the breath of life that God had put into both of them? Where did that go?

Well, as we read through the Old Testament we discover that at death everyone went to the grave, the Hebrew word is Sheol. The Greek word is Hades. The wicked, those who chose not to follow God went to the grave and the righteous, those who did follow God went to the grave. In the Old Testament, Sheol or Hades was the place of the dead. That's all they knew.

But as the Old Testament comes to a close we read the words of Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel the prophets who speak about a future resurrection of the body. Some day they tell us the graves will be opened and our bodies will come back to life. Resurrection always has to do with the body coming back to life.

Isaiah puts it this way in Isaiah 26:19, But your dead will live. Their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning. The earth will give birth to her dead.

Daniel puts it this way in Daniel 12:2, Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.

The prophets speak of a great resurrection at the end of time, some to everlasting life and others to everlasting contempt. The Jewish concept of the afterlife when Jesus was alive was not the concept of dying and going to heaven or dying and going to hell. It was about dying and going to the grave, and waiting in Sheol for the resurrection. And the resurrection would bring us back to a new earth resurrected and released from the curse.

Jesus understood and spoke about this resurrection. In John 5:28-29 he says,Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out - those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.

At one point he was questioned about this resurrection by a group of religious leaders called the Sadducees who didn't believe in it. And so with a wink, wink, and a nod, nod they gathered a crowd and said, "Watch this. Hey Jesus, if someone was married more than once who's going to be their spouse in the 'resurrection?' What if a woman had like seven husbands?"

And in Matthew 22:29-30 Jesus answers, You're off base on two counts. You don't know your Bibles, and you don't know how God works. ³⁰At the resurrection we're beyond marriage. As with the angels, all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God (The Message). Next question!

In John 11:25 Jesus goes even further with this concept of the resurrection when he says, I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will live, even though they die. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. In this passage, as in many others, Jesus makes faith in him the one condition needed to participate in the resurrection that leads to life.

So according to the Bible and Jesus himself, bodily resurrection is where every human being is headed, some to life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. That concept is unique to the Judeo-Christian faith.

In an article called "The Resurrection of Resurrection," theologian N. T. Wright says, "Christianity was born into a world where one of its central tenets, resurrection, was universally recognized as false. In Greek thought, death released the soul from the prison of the body. But there was no hope of the resurrection of the body."

"Resurrection does not mean being 'raised up to heaven' or 'taken up in glory.' Resurrection is not simply death from another viewpoint. It is the reversal of death, its cancellation, the destruction of its power. For early Christians, resurrection was seen to consist of passing through death and out the other side into a new sort of bodily life. As Romans 8 shows, the apostle Paul clearly believed that God would give new life to the mortal bodies of Christians and indeed to the entire created world."

"Resurrection hope turned those who believed it into a counter-empire, an alternative society that knew the worst that tyrants could do and knew that the true God had the answer. For the Christians believed that the Messiah had already been raised from the dead."

As we approach Easter next week and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, the great hope that we have as believers in Christ is that one day our mortal bodies will raised back to life and changed to become like the body that Jesus received at his resurrection. He is the first fruits of what is to come. And with that brand new, resurrected body, we will be equipped to live on a brand new, resurrected earth. That's what we have to look forward to. That's why Easter is so important.

But what happens now to believers who die? If our body goes to the grave and returns to dust or ashes, awaiting the resurrection, what about our spirit? The early church was concerned about these things too, especially when believers starting passing away before Jesus came back and established his kingdom. They thought those believers might miss out.

The apostle Paul who addressed that question at various times and in various ways writes this in 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. ⁷We live by faith, not by sight. ⁸We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. ⁹So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. ¹⁰For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that everyone may receive what is due them for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

In this passage Paul is saying that as long as we are living in our physical bodies in a certain sense we are away from the Lord. But when we die and leave our physical bodies then our spirit is at home with the Lord. And because we are going to be with him we make it our goal to please him, because our life will be reviewed. That judgment is an expression of God's justice.

And it makes me wonder if that is the bright light that people have described, the person people have claimed to meet, the panorama of our life, the question of how have we learned to love?

Jesus described this place as paradise to the thief on the cross. Stephen, the first Christian to die for his faith, describes it as heaven. "Look," he says in Acts 7:56, "I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" … While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, "Lord, Jesus, receive my spirit." Then he fell on his knees and cried out, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." When he said this, he fell asleep.

Stephen's body didn't go to heaven, his spirit did. His body fell asleep, which is how the biblical writers refer to death because a dead body looks like a person is asleep. But Stephen's spirit went into this invisible realm called heaven. When a believer dies his or her spirit goes to heaven, to paradise, to be with the Lord, while their body awaits the future resurrection. When those who reject Christ die their spirit goes to a place of torment, Jesus said, where they too await a future resurrection that will lead to everlasting shame and contempt, again an expression of the justice of a good God.

About this passage theologian Wayne Grudem writes, "Stephen did not see mere symbols of a state of existence. It was rather that his eyes were opened to see a spiritual dimension of reality which God has hidden from us in this present age, a dimension which none the less really does exist in our space/time universe, and within which Jesus now lives in his physical resurrected body, waiting even now for a time when he will return to earth."

"Christians often talk about living with God 'in heaven' forever. But in fact the biblical teaching is much richer than that. It tells us that there will be new heavens and a new earth - an entirely renewed creation - and we will live with God there ….There will also be a new kind of unification of heaven and earth … There will be a joining of heaven and earth in this new creation."

When we die we will be with Jesus forever. But we will not always be in the dimension we call heaven. That will only be our temporary home until Jesus returns and our bodies are resurrected and joined with our spirits, outfitted for our final destination which is the new heaven and the new earth coming together as one.

I like the way theologian Rene Pache puts it when he says, "The emphasis on the present, intermediate heaven is clearly rest, cessation from earth's battles and comforts from earth's sufferings. The future heaven is centered on activity and expansion, serving Christ and reigning with him. The scope is much larger, the great city with its twelve gates, people coming and going, nations to rule. In other words, the emphasis in the present heaven is on the absence of earth's negatives, while in the future heaven it is the presence of earth's positives, magnified many times through the power and glory of resurrected bodies on a resurrected Earth, free at last from sin and shame and all that would hinder both joy and achievement."

So what happens to us when we die? As best as I can tell from Scripture our body goes to the grave, but our spirit goes to be with the Lord. The physical part of us "sleeps" until the resurrection when our body and our spirit will once again be joined to live forever on a resurrected earth. And that resurrection occurs when Jesus returns. That's the blessed hope of every Christ follower.

In Peter Jackson's movie The Return of the King, the conclusion of the great Lord of the Ring's trilogy, Pippin the Hobbit and Gandalf the Wizard have this conversation. "I didn't think it would end this way …" Pippen says. Gandalf replies, "End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path … one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass … and then you see it." Pippin says, "What? Gandalf? See what?" "White shores … and beyond, the far green country under a swift sunrise." Pippin responds, "Well, that isn't so bad." "No," Gandalf says, "no, it isn't."

Death is just another path. To be away from the body is to be present with Lord … forever. In heaven … yes … until the resurrection and then life as it was always meant to be lived in a remade body in a remade universe where heaven and earth will be one to stay.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.