What Happens When We Die: Part 5

     Many of the popular ideas people have about hell do not come directly from the Bible, but from the Roman Catholic Church’s mis-translations of Greek into Latin and the resultant interpretations of those texts into word pictures designed more to frighten people into becoming converts than to foster discipleship.  The Roman Church’s teachings about the afterlife must always be taken with caution given the many historical abuses of Popes and bishops in either trying to intimidate compliance or raise money. The Roman view of hell is that after death unbelievers and other assorted non-Catholics will be judged and sent to the fires of hell where they will be mercilessly tortured forever.  Hell as eternal torture is believed and taught not only by Roman Catholics, but by many Protestant fundamentalists.  There is nothing more repugnant to the Western mind, whether believer or unbeliever, nothing more illogical and cruel than the idea that a loving God could condemn people to eternal punishment and suffering based on a single decision or even the span of a short lifetime. A sadistic view of judgment goes against everything Western Civilization has taught about justice, fairness, and love.  Not surprisingly many Christians reject the Roman teaching about hell. Some try to remain faithful to the Bible while others just ignore Scripture as irrelevant and superstitious.  Some argue that hell is temporary and redemptive, or hell, if it exists at all, is a quick and total annihilation; still other humanitarians teach only the most horrible people, like Hitler and Stalin and Genghis Khan, populate hell.  What mistakes in translation did the Roman Church make and how does our picture of hell change in light of correcting those ancient errors?  What can we know about what we call “hell” but which the ancients called by many different names? 

     The King James version of the Bible perpetuated many of the Roman translation errors, lumping several very separate and distinct words all under the single word hell; among these are sheol, Gehenna, Tarturus, and Hades.  We’ve already examined the Hebrew word, sheol.  Sheol is nothing like the Roman Catholic picture of hell.  Sheol originally meant pit or grave.  When the Old Testament said someone went down into sheol, they were simply being buried in a grave.  During the Babylonian captivity, the Jews were influenced by Assyrian myths of afterlife.  Sheol evolved into a place of shadowy, murky existence; nothing about torture or punishment or reward.  When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the Septuagint regularly used Hades to translate sheol.  In early Greek thought Hades was almost identical to sheol, the shadowy world of the dead thought to be under the ocean floor – the deepest pit imaginable.  During the 400 years between the Old and New Testament periods, Jewish rabbis, influenced by Greek philosophy, began to debate that Hades might be a place of punishment and destruction. The picture of suffering in Hades is chronicled in the Apocryphal book of Enoch.  The Pharisees believed that Hades was a kind of Purgatory in which the dead awaited the resurrection, some to eternal life and some to eternal destruction.

     Jesus confirmed Enoch’s vision of hell as a place of punishment.  Jesus used the word Gehenna when referring to the awfulness of hell.  Gehenna literally means “valley of Hinnom.” It was the ravine just outside the southwest walls of Jerusalem.  Jews regarded the place as sinister and cursed.  Before David renamed the city and made it his capitol, Jerusalem was known as Jebus.  It was the center of worship to the deity Molech.  The Jebusites sacrificed children to Molech in the Hinnom Valley.  Even some of Israel's most wicked Kings (Ahaz and Manassah) reinstituted child sacrifice in Gehenna to placate foreign gods.  The ground was forever cursed by this unspeakable idolatry.  The only gate on that side of Jerusalem was the Dung Gate where refuse was carted out and dumped in the ravine.  Although there is no contemporary evidence of it from Jesus’ time, in the middle ages Gehenna was used as a body dump for strangers and criminals. Because of its association with the worst forms of idolatry, Jews and Muslims would have considered Gehenna a very evil place.  Isaiah concludes his book with an allusion to Gehenna.

And as they go out, they will see

    the dead bodies of those who have rebelled against me.

For the maggots that devour them will never die,

    and the fire that burns them will never go out.

All who pass by

    will view them with utter horror.                          Isaiah 66:24

When Jesus talks about Gehenna in the Synoptic Gospels, he uses Isaiah to talk about the seriousness of sin.

“But if you cause one of these little ones who trust in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone hung around your neck.  If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to enter eternal (aion) life with only one hand than to go into the unquenchable fires of Gehenna with two hands.  If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one foot than to be thrown into Gehenna with two feet.  And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. It’s better to enter the Kingdom of God with only one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna    ‘where the maggots never die and the fire never goes out.’

                                                                                                                                (Mark 9:42f.)

     Let’s look at this text in some detail.  Notice the context of harming children (little ones), associating Gehenna with its original awful history of child sacrifice.  Roman doctrine uses these verses to affirm that Jesus thought of hell as eternal suffering?  He may have indeed, but it’s interesting to me that most believers do not take the first part of the verse literally in which Jesus talks about the benefits of self-mutilation, but take the words about hell as doctrine. Taken literally, Jesus says it’s the maggots that live forever.

     Let’s look at another text in which Jesus talks about suffering in Gehenna used by the Roman Church as a proof-text of eternal sadistic torment. It’s the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus found in Luke 16.  In a great reversal of the prosperity gospel of first century Judaism, the poor man is carried to Abraham’s side (bosom) while the rich man suffers in Hades.

The rich man died and his soul went to Hades. There, in torment, he saw Abraham in the far distance with Lazarus at his side. The rich man shouted, ‘Father Abraham, have some pity! Send Lazarus over here to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue. I am in anguish in these flames.’ (vs. 23-24)

Later in the story Hades is again called a place of torment (v.28).  Is hell the main point of the parable?  My own thinking is that Jesus borrows from a well-known story, perhaps used as part of the rabbinic debate about hell.  Jesus never used people’s names in his stories.  Lazarus and Dives (that was the rich man’s name in these stories) may have been as familiar to Jesus’ listeners as stories we hear about someone dying and meeting St. Peter at the gate. We don’t take that literally (well, if you do, you shouldn’t).  We know it’s a story, probably a joke, about getting into heaven.  The point of this story is not primarily to teach about Gehenna, but to affirm the sufficiency of Scriptures for salvation.  

       Other word pictures Jesus used to describe Gehenna are found in Matthew 8:12 and repeated in 22:13.

“…throw them outside into darkness (or outer darkness) where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

     This idea of weeping and teeth gnashing is interpreted also as tortured suffering by the Roman Church.  But does Jesus mean the hideous sadistic pictures painted by Dante and the medieval church?  Gnashing of teeth is used in the Old Testament not to picture torture, but as a symbol of mocking rage  (Psalm 112:10).  Jesus is telling us the unrighteous suffer immense sadness and grudging regret.

      The book of Revelation amplifies the picture of hell's destruction, introducing the “lake of the fire” into which Satan, the Beast (spirit of Empire) and the False Prophet (false religion) are thrown (Rev. 20:10) as are Death, Hades, and those whose names are not found written in the Lamb’s book of life (v.14).  The unholy trinity of Satan, Beast, and False Prophet are said to be tortured forever in the lake of the fire, but for Death and Hades and those not the elect, their dip in Fire Lake is called the Second Death. This seems to point quite clearly to an end of judgment.

       The Apostle Paul never uses Hades or Gahenna but speaks of “destruction.”  He writes in his earliest letter about the sudden and unexpected destruction upon the wicked when Christ returns (1 Thess 5:3, 2 Thess. 1:9).  In Romans 9:23 he discusses God’s patience with those destined for destruction under his wrath.

       As expected it's the teaching of Peter on "hell" that most captures the imagination of the Roman Church.  Contrary to the Apostle’s Creed, Jesus did not descend "into hell."  This rendering is based on another mistranslation and interpretation of 1 Peter 3:19-20.  

                 Christ suffered for our sins once for all time. He never sinned,
                  but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. 
                  He suffered physical death, but he was raised to life in the 
                  Spirit. So he went and preached to the spirits in Hell 
                 (literally, Tarturus)—those who disobeyed God long ago when 
                 God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat. 
                 Only eight people were saved from drowning in that terrible flood.

The Roman Church infers from this verse that while he was in the grave, Jesus proclaimed the Gospel to the Old Testament faithful, totally ignoring the clear New Testament teaching that Abraham was saved by his faith in Christ (Romans 4:3).  It is to preserve their doctrine of hell that the Roman Church teaches you are saved by religious works.  Peter uses a unique word for hell, Tarturus, often translated prison.  It was the Greek equivalent place name of Gehenna, a place of suffering for the dead. A better interpretation of this text  based on a better translation is that the Spirit of Jesus preached in the days of Noah through Noah to souls who are now in the place of sufferings. 

      The biggest problem with the Roman doctrine of hell is the translation by Jerome of the Greek into the Latin Vulgate of the time-related Greek words aion and aionian.  Jerome translated these as eternal or everlasting. His translation spoke of everlasting torment. Greek-speaking Jews of the first century used the word aion and its cognates in two ways depending on context.  In many newer translations of Scripture you will see the more literal and correct translation of the word as “age,” like our English word eon which is derived from it.  So when the New Testament speaks of eternal or everlasting destruction, the context is critical to understanding whether we are dealing with something bound to a specific eon or something that, like God, exists forever. This means one might translate "everlasting destruction" as "an age of destruction," indicating a definite period of time.

         Sincere students of the Bible may come to different conclusions, but here are my best efforts to make sense of Scripture and our newest insights in cosmology.  All humans will be resurrected, some to eternal life with God and some to everlasting destruction.   I've already written that those "in Christ" have been declared righteous by the Father, and have been nurtured by the Holy Spirit during their entire pilgrimage on earth. They are already regenerate and sanctified, meaning their eternal life had already begun before death.  In the same way a mother on crack gives birth to a sickly child, so the person who has rejected God and/or not received the nourishment of sanctification throughout his nephesh-psuche life comes into resurrected life less able to thrive.  As stated previously, I understand time and eternity as having to do with dimensions and speed.  I do not understand all the mechanisms about how these things work.  I have to speak in metaphors because our words are inadequate to describe these singularities, but I believe the unregenerate person upon death is not able to go as fast or as far into the future or to fully develop the dimensionalities required for a life with God in the re-created Heaven-earth.  The unrighteous literally fall short of heaven and end up together in a place much like the ancient understanding of Hades, a holding facility, described in the Scriptures as a “prison” (Psalm 142:7, Isaiah 24:22, Rev. 20:7).  There is no torture or punishment here.  Hades is a place for detention rather like a third world prison where you are brought and left without information, without rights, without comfort. It is the torture of apathy. Hades is a world unto itself, murky and featureless. But it's most important characteristic is that it is a place completely separated from God, his providence, or his mercy.  There is no moral law, only the the law of survival.  There are no more good moral people, because goodness is gone and morality is replaced by a preoccupation of getting the resources necessary for sustenance, protection, and superior place.   Resurrected non-believers build alliances to scheme ways to increase their power.  These gangs are led by exceptionally manipulative leaders.  Whoever were people's Godless heroes in life, run the gangs in Hades.  The rebellion that may have appeared only minor and inconsequential in their life on Earth is now amplified and intensified.  Nice people become boorish and insufferably selfish.   Hatred of God becomes obsessive and all-consuming. God does not use this “hell” to redeem people, but to reveal their true self-idolizing character.  That which made them merely self-righteous unbelievers in life develops to its full extent when all masks of propriety are stripped away.  It is a place of repeated false hope, betrayal, disappointment, revenge, and regret.

                                 

     This cruel and apathetic world goes on and on until one day the gray skies are rolled back and the gloom is overwhelmed with a terrifying light.  The inhabitants of Hades are dumbstruck.  Eyes are not able to adjust to the excruciating brilliance.  People try to shield themselves from the light, but the shining pierces their body and causes them to scream in pain.  Some late arrivals at the periphery try to run away, but a force restrains them and begins to slowly and inexorably draw everyone to a Man who emanates the blinding light.  The horde of people moves like melting silver toward a bunghole.  The drone of agony and despair grows quiet the closer one gets to the Light Being.  They line up single file.  A Voice like a thunderous waterfall speaks to each person.  Like an audience with a King, each one stands transfixed and after a moment bends the knee, moves away, and another takes his place.  This is what the Scriptures refer to as the Great White Throne Judgment (Rev .20:11).

     From Hades each condemned being is taken to a dark, starless place at the center of which is a massive, spinning black hole.  Everything is dragged into this Abyss.  As matter collapses and burns at its edges, it looks like a lake of fire.  But this is the Pit into which the unholy Trinity will be cast and which will consume even time itself.  The destruction of this pit is eternal; that is, there is no coming back from it.  The unrighteous are destroyed forever by the “Second Death” (Rev. 20:14).  All these events occur prior to the revealing of the new heaven-Earth in the Eternal Now of God prepared for his Chosen in Christ.

     The question this side of death is can we know whether we are in Christ or not in Christ?  Does the Church control who enters Heaven or Hades-Gehenna-Tarturus?  Not even the Church knows the people God is preparing for Christ. In the early Church before Constantine, sacraments functioned to confirm the believer in his or her eternal life. Only those who had been rigorously examined by godly men could be baptized and partake of the Lord’s Supper. The rite didn’t save you. You were assured of your salvation hearing the Word of God and surrendering to the life of the Spirit by sincere confession of faith and death to self that baptism pointed to. It wasn't the physical, supernatural properties of the Eucharist that assured you, but self-examination and reconciliation  with God and neighbors. But all that changed under the Emperor Constantine (the spirit of the Beast) when the purpose of the Church changed from making disciples to making converts (the false Prophet).  Faith in God's Word no longer saved, but the rite of baptism.  The Eucharist devolved into magical thinking about bread and wine rather than about the presence of the Holy Spirit in the true body of Christ, the community of believers.  Many baptized but unrepentant people will be in Hades and many who have never heard the name of Jesus will be in Heaven-Earth.  This is not to deny the need for the Church or the Gospel, but rather a recognition of the sovereignty of God to have eternally known, effectually called, and faithfully preserved those who are his as well as to recognize that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” enters into the Kingdom (Mt. 7:21).  The benefit of hearing and believing the Gospel is that we may have the assurance of our salvation as promised by God in his Word, procured by the faithfulness of his Son, and lived out each day of our lives by the sanctifying body-building work of the Holy Spirit. 

     Therefore, if you are able to believe and trust in Christ, run to him every day.  If you are not able to believe and trust in Jesus, be taught.  If you have been taught, and you are still unpersuaded, then eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow you die.

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 4

      In his novella, Flatlander: A Romance of Many Dimensions, author Edwin Abbott explores the impossibility of someone in a two dimensional world comprehending a three dimensional one. Stick figures would not have the language or the intellectual categories to understand depth, things being in front, or behind. Since Einstein the story has been used to help students of relativity theory understand the challenge of trying to comprehend the fourth dimension of time.

     As Christians caught up in our cultural and religious versions of Aristotle’s three-story universe, it is very difficult for us to understand the Gospel in deeper dimensions outside our own. This is especially true when we ask the question, what happens the moment we die. That word “moment” assumes we know what time it is.

      21^st century believers possess facts about Creation that were unknown to the writers of Scripture. All truth is God's truth.  So, the truth of scientific discovery does not negate the truth of God’s Holy Word, but we may need to update our thinking about what God's Word may mean.  The purpose of Scripture is and always will be to proclaim and instruct God’s plan of amnesty offered in Christ.  The Bible is not a theoretical physics textbook. Say the word "universe" and I’m likely to picture that vast array of stars and swirling nebula called “space, the final frontier” in the introduction to Star Trek.  Admit it, we don’t imagine the universe as a flat platter covered with a sky dome (firmament) and supported on columns or mountains as did Moses and his Bronze Age contemporaries who first penned Holy Writ.  Yet, in spite of its out-dated, culture-bound cosmology, we can still believe the Genesis account of creation, although we’re probably going to have to update our thinking on what the Hebrews meant by “day” and a few other cosmological expressions. The truth that God originated the world in a logically sequential process still shines through the ancient text.

     The problem with most afterlife myths is that they are bound up with notions of time.  God must wait until a certain day known only to him to commence whatever is going to happen.  So, we end up constructing all kinds of theories about what will happen when and where we are in the interim.  But hold on.  God is not limited to time.  God is eternal.  Can you really answer the question, what's the calendar-clock time where God is?  It's ridiculous. The Greek word most often used in the New Testament for talking about this is not kronos (tick tock time),  but kairos, the timing of things, stuff happening at just the right time.

     For the average person, time is the steady progression seconds, minutes, hours, days and years, that make up that "ever-rolling stream" as Isaac Watts paraphrased Psalm 90.  But physicists have known for about a hundred years time is a dimension in space.  Time is a perspective on speed and distance. Everything we are able to perceive in our three dimensional existence is moving through the universe in roughly the same direction and at roughly the same speed we are.  Our galaxy is travelling through space at a dizzying 2.5 million miles per hour.  It’s like riding on a bullet train. You, the other passengers, the seat on which you are sitting, and the cup of coffee in your hand are all moving at the same speed inside the train so we appear to each other stationary. But the world outside is barely discernible; it’s a blur because it is moving about 150 miles per hour slower than we are.  People stopped at the railroad crossing might catch a glimpse of us seated by a window for a split second.  But then we're gone.  Since we can’t see heaven, one option is to assume it doesn't exist; or, it just may be that heaven is travelling at a different speed than we are.  If we argue for a real place named Heaven, and not just a subjective mental experience of peace while the brain runs out of oxygen, we have to account for where Heaven is in time and space.  Heaven is not outside of time, but it may not be in our time. Whatever else we may say about heaven, for the purposes of this paper we can say God is there now and from that vantage point God created and now sustains our cosmos. (if you're a skeptic, play along.)

     It's entirely possible that God could exist in a parallel-type universe. Scientists are telling us almost daily there is a lot more to Creation than we can see.  In fact, some of the things theoretical physicists are now saying make believing in God sound downright simple.  Just this week physicists celebrated the confirmation of a Higgs boson (misnamed the “god particle”). This discovery of something moving so fast that we can only detect it when it's vanished helps explain the nature of matter and could validate the presence of many more dimensions to space than our mere four.  In fact, scientists postulate that there may be as many as eleven dimensions of light and matter.  They talk about the real possibility that there could be alternative universes to our own.  In my opinion we are coming full circle back to the worldview similar to that of the ancient Jews who pictured Heaven not as far, far away, but as overlapping earth, sacred space being the intersection of the eternal and the finite.  For more on this, read N. T. Wright’s, Simply Jesus.

     Here’s a thought experiment proposed by some theoretical physicists.  Imagine yourself standing in your backyard on a clear night watching stars twinkle. (By the way, the ancient Israelis thought the stars were angelic beings, Yahweh’s star army called "the heavenly host," hovering high in the firmament, or "sky dome."  We don’t try to fit that ancient cosmology into our scientific world view. We accept that’s how the ancients understood their universe, but for us who have seen men walk on the moon, it’s more like historical poetry, or even a myth.  We don’t insist that it’s a description of verifiable astrological fact. )  We know the light you are seeing from those far, far away suns has travelled millions of light years across mostly empty space to reach your eye.  The star you are seeing in your backyard may have exploded to cinders eons ago, but it takes time for the light from that event to reach us out here on the edge of the Milky Way.  So, looking at the night sky is looking backward into time. Now imagine yourself instantly a hundred million miles closer to that star and in the instant you arrive at your new vantage point, you see the star explode.  You will see it go super-nova about ten minutes before the same person back on earth will see it.  From an earth-bound perspective, you are in the future.  Now imagine we place cameras every 100 million miles along the trajectory our star’s light has travelled from the point where it blows up out past the earth to where the light from the star's birth is just reaching.  If we could snap a picture from each camera simultaneously, we could see time unfold  like a series of frames on a movie reel as we panned from right to left. This exercise helps us understand more clearly what time actually is: it is merely a perspective on distance and speed.  From the perspective of heaven (where God is), any point in time is accessible.  That's what we mean we say God is omnipresent.  All time is in God’s now. Imagining such weird stuff is one thing, but what about how this might look in the real world.

     The only evidence we have for a heaven-human interface is the resurrection body of Jesus.  Because the Scriptures say that we will become what he is in his resurrection existence (I Cor. 15:49), we may find some important clues for understanding life as God intended it.  One obvious conclusion is that Heaven does not take place outside of all time.  Eternity does not mean timelessness. That would be a realm totally out of sync with the life God originally intended.  In his resurrected body Jesus can move at our speed.  For 40 days, Jesus interacted with hundreds of mortal people in this three dimensional existence.  But eyewitnesses say he was not subject to the limitations of space-time as we are. He could be here and then not here but somewhere else in an instant. Jesus could enter locked rooms.  His body was tangible, not ghost-like or ethereal. He ate fish on a beach with his friends. His body was real.  In the same way, our resurrected body will be a tangible body, a body that has both continuity and discontinuity with our current nephesh-psuche.  The wounds of Jesus’ torture on the cross were still evident.  Mary recognized his voice.  I find it fascinating that Mary was warned not to touch him, but Thomas could.  Does this mean that his resurrection body was still forming for a time or was it something more to do with Mary’s motives?   It may take more than a moment for those In-Christ to acclimate to traveling on God’s wavelength, and getting up to God’s speed.

     The Apostles who had walked with Jesus those forty days struggled with describing what happened to God’s In-Christ people when they died.  They had seen Jesus as a different kind of human, not a ghost or an apparition. They described his ascension as going up into clouds, but that’s poetic language, too.  Jesus’ ascension is not about him helicoptering off the planet to far away heaven.  Ascension is King-speak. He ascended to his throne.  He takes his rightful place. And Jesus told them why he had to disappear: so that the Holy Spirit could be given to guide each believer in the way of truth (John 14).  The spirit of Jesus becomes omnipresent in the world.  The resurrection body is not bound by the same time and space limitations, but can conform to them.  My opinion is that the resurrection body moves in all 11 dimensions.  What the disciples could only perceive in their worldview as lifting into the clouds may have been Jesus separating himself to a safe distance from the onlookers and becoming a fully energized multi-dimensional human, accessible everywhere and in every time.

      Paul didn’t really think the saints died at all.  In light of what Jesus had become and taught him in person in the Arabian wilderness for three years after his Damascus Road experience, Paul describes the metamorphosis with different word pictures: as being “swallowed up in victory,” “clothed with an imperishable existence”, harvested (1 Cor. 15), caught up in the air (1 Thess. 4:17).  Paul was much more likely to write that the a dead body was asleep because he didn’t want to acknowledge that believers die. Why? Because Jesus said believers had already died, our eternal life had already begun the moment God graced us with the faith to believe the Gospel.  In the same way God’s gift of faith renewed the nephesh-psuche invisibly, so the final stage of amnesty was an invisible transformation, a metamorphosis out of sight of the wailers around the corpse.

     Our psuche body cannot survive in God's recreated heaven and Earth, merged as one.  One of the worst and most confusing Pythagorean translations of Scripture is 1 Corinthians 15:44 where Paul is made to say, “We are planted a natural body and raised a spiritual body.”  Isn’t that what a Pythagorean wants and expects to hear?  But that is not what the text says and certainly not what Paul meant.  What he actually wrote is: sown a psyuche-body, raised a pneumaticka-body. We start existence as a psuche body, perfectly adapted to living in three or four dimensions travelling at the same speed with lots of other psuches.  But when we are resurrected we are energized by a different force, by God’s Spirit. Time and distance collapse in new dimensions of glory. Scientifically speaking, I think this means our corporate existence becomes compatible with the world as God intended.

    I might liken the experience as like coming out of surgery, opening our eyes to find ourselves in a different place and with a different set of abilities. Unlike surgery, we will not awaken to pain, but to something unfamiliar. The air will smell different; light will reflect differently. We will touch our face to see if we are alive and find a different kind of skin, a different sensation of touch that can penetrate the surface of things. We will be more solid than we remember; more agile, less frail.  We may recognize our surroundings; we may not.  But I think those In-Christ will know that we have been rescued and transformed into something built for a completely different kind of world.  I think it likely that Jesus himself greets each one of his elect children upon their arrival, puts us completely at ease, and gives some initial instructions on how to habituate to the new surroundings.  He tells us where to find our loved ones.   There is no judgment.  People ask,” What age will we be in heaven?”  That’s like asking a flatlander to describe the depth of something. Remember, it’s not time that makes us old and wears us out.  That’s the entropy of the current rebel planet. Time is only a perspective on distance and speed and does not have to result in entropy. In God’s renewed Heaven-Earth, time passes to allow things to become newer, fresher, stronger and more excellent.  There is no longer death because the “law of sin and entropy” has been revoked or overcome in new dimensions of glory. Time doesn’t stand still. We will have work to do as we continue to grow in Chris and discover his sufficiency and His excellence in new ways forever.

    I am trying to answer the question, what happens the moment we die.  My answer to that depends entirely on the perspective from which you view the event. From the perspective of the dead believer, death doesn’t touch me. One moment I am one thing and instantly I am changed into something else and discover myself in a world similar to what I had known, but newer, lighter, and completely under the sovereign control of a very real God and his human viceroy, Jesus.  From the perspective of those gathered at my death bed, I stop breathing and in their timeline they grieve and go on with making plans for my funeral. They are still trapped in nephesh-psuche time. They cannot see the atomic structure of my body completely transform as "I" and not some other begin a new existence in a parallel universe, right on top of the old one, but travelling at a much faster speed.  From their perspective I have ridden a bullet train to the future.  My soul didn’t sleep or wait around for the end of time.  I’m at the end of time.  That is why prophets could foretell the future, why the New Testament teaches we are foreknown and predestined. Because in nepesh-psuche life we are playing out the great story of redemption that has already been accomplished.  On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus let Peter, James, and John glimpse the future as Moses and Elisha appeared with Jesus who became Wholly Other for a brief time. From the perspective of God’s eternal now, the moment I die is the moment I am free from the constraints of time, religion, sin, and weakness to follow my Savior as he marches on, conquering worlds for the Father, praising in song the Lamb that was Slain among the whole company of the redeemed.

     There is still one part of the story that remains to be told. What happens the moment those not In-Christ die. Is there a hell? What will it be like? And who will be there?

(To be continued)

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 3

     Before we can fully comprehend what happens the moment we die, we must understand what death is and what it is not.  Why do we die?  Those who reject or ignore the Bible contend that death is a natural part of life (as irrational as that may sound).  They consider death OK for old people, but tragic and unfair for the young. The book of Genesis reveals that life as God intended (nephesh, psuche) did not include death. The Biblical revelation is that death is not a natural part of life, but the result of a treasonous crime against a rightful Sovereign.  None of us knows where or when we will die, and that is certainly a great mercy. But God has revealed in his Word why we will die.

“The nephesh that sins shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

In our Western mythology of afterlife, we tend to interpret “sin” in terms of Pythagorean ethics (see Part 2 of this series). Sin is moral or ethical failure. Sin is inversely correlated with heaven; more bad deeds than good deeds earns for us hell; more good deeds than bad means we can be rewarded with heaven. This reward and punishment way of thinking about afterlife has made atheists of many parents crushed by the cold hand of death upon an infant who never got the chance to make a moral or immoral decision. Death hardly ever seems a natural part of life when the corpse is a child or a young adult struck down in the prime of life with a ravaging, painful disease.  Inevitably everybody is confronted with the question of why bad things, especially death, happen to good people.  What about those hundreds of thousands of people killed by the tsunami in Myanmar?  What about 13 million Russians slaughtered by Stalin?  If there is a God, why does he allow such atrocities to occur?  Either God is not good, or he is not all-powerful.  The logical mind insists God can’t be both. If God is good, he must not be all-powerful else he would have prevented such massive cruelty.  If God is all powerful, he must not be good because he could have stopped it and didn’t.

     Jesus’ disciples raised this very question one day (see Luke 13:1ff).  Apparently Pilate had ordered his troops to kill some Jews while offering their sacrifices in the Temple. By implication, the sacrifice had expiated their sin. So, Jews were outraged and confused about how God could allow such a thing.  Jesus’ answer is chilling.

Do you think those people were any worse than the 18 people crushed to death when the Siloam Tower collapsed? Here’s the truth of the matter: unless you deal with your sin problem, you will all perish like them. (Luke 13:2-4)

Jesus isn’t confused about God’s goodness or power.  It is precisely because God is good and all-powerful that God is completely justified in taking life. Just because we don’t take sin all that seriously doesn’t mean that God will easily dismiss it.  All death is God’s judgment against sin.  Jesus isn’t embarrassed by God’s ways. He doesn’t make excuses.  Jesus doesn’t question the Creator-King’s right to do with his creation what he will.  Jesus says, the irrationality of death is your problem, too, if you have rebelled against God.

     It seems to me that when the cynic raises his fist at God and demands, “How could a good and all-powerful God allow bad things to happen to innocent people,” the unbeliever is acting out of an unspoken assumption that things shouldn’t be this way. What way should they be? When is death ever timely?  In Romans 1, Paul writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that God has implanted in every soul the inherent knowledge that there is an all-powerful God.  The irrational expectation that the cosmos should be fair I think is evidence of this primeval awareness of a higher dominion and accountability, something the Bible calls the “image of God.”  Don’t think of mirrors.  Think of an engraved image on a coin.   In the same way a coin bears the image of the authority who made it and to whom the coin belongs, people were created to bear the stamp of their Creator. But a massive rebellion has gripped the world God made.  People (me included, me especially) ignore and contradict the Creator’s will, wishing to live as if we belonged to no one but ourselves, hoping that the world should operate according to our whims.  The Bible view of reality is very different.  All have rebelled and squandered the life God intended (Romans 3:23).  It’s a fatal flaw in our existence, to be fickle and faithless and forever preoccupied with ourselves.

     Religion is the invention of flawed humans to create myths and systems that attempt to undo the damage of our self-centered propensity, make God less angry with us, and thereby earn our heavenly reward.  Every civilization in history was grounded in religious myths of expiation.  Even the descendants of Abraham to whom God revealed the one and only way to end individual rebellion, ignored the way God had saved Abraham. The Jews asked God to give them a group plan by which they could do something.  God gave Moses the step-by-step dos and don’ts of attaining the life God intended, hoping they would see the utter impossibility of the task. Moses hadn’t even brought the tablets down from the mountain before Israel was dancing around a golden calf, breaking rule #1 of the law covenant.  But that didn’t stop the priests from working out a religion based on Pythagorean salvation. They took elements of God’s holy demands and from them concocted a system that re-defined everything.  Judaism was about keeping the moral and ethical Law.  It didn't matter that you couldn't obey the Law.  You could offset your wrong choices and impure thoughts by doing religious things, adding to the positive side of the moral ledger and proving your good intent to whomever you meet at heaven’s gate.  Jump ahead a millennium or two.  When the medieval Roman Church read the Old Testament through Aristotelian spectacles, they concluded this merit-based morality was the path to God.  Of course in such a religion there can never be any assurance that you will get to heaven the moment you die because you may have sinned and not even known it.  You hope and pray that when you are about to die, or if you have just died and your soul may still be floating around nearby, the priest has time to give you Holy Unction (last rites), the one last religious good you do to prove yourself deserving of heaven.

     Jesus taught nothing like this because he rejected the Jewish religious idea of sin as ritualistic or moral.  He intentionally flaunted the ceremonial and moral code of his Jewish contemporaries. He intentionally violated the two most sacred taboos of his culture, saying his body was the true Temple (John 2:13-21) and the Sabbath was his in which to work (Matthew 12:8).  Jesus forced religious people to deal with the fact that God is not made in their image and is no respecter of their religious traditions. Sin is not merely what we do or fail to do.  Sin is existential; it’s something we are that overflows into our daily behavior. Jesus’ mission was not to make morally bad people good enough to go to heaven when they die. Jesus came to provide amnesty for rebels according to the plan God had revealed to Abraham enabling them to live the life God originally intended.

     Religious people use the word salvation to talk about God’s amnesty plan.  Jesus knew that he was Israel’s Messiah, the promised deliverer foretold by the prophets.  He appears to have been the first rabbi to understand that the Suffering Servant of Isaiah was Messiah.  He would be Lamb of God sacrificed for sin. He would stand in for a group of people and take upon his own body the wrath of God and the punishment for their rebellion. This group was made up of Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and freemen.   Jesus read the Old Testament very differently than the way it was being prostituted by the priests of his day.  Jesus trusted the promises of God that his body would not see decay (Psalm 2), but that God would vindicate him as God’s Anointed Savior by raising him from the dead, thereby fulfilling God’s unbreakable contracts with Abraham and David. These people for whom Jesus died, who are they? What did they do to deserve such special treatment? Who are these the New Testament says are “in Christ,” no longer condemned, no longer hell-bound, no longer God’s enemies, in spite of the fact that they continue to lapse back into their rebel ways?

                The Bible says these folks were chosen by God before the creation (John 17:24, Ephesians 1:4). The amnesty plan would not immune them from rebellion all at once, but would be completed in a series of stages.  The first stage is regeneration through the Word of God; they hear the Gospel and faith is created as a gift of God.  From God’s perspective, they suffer death to self and receive the Spirit of the resurrected Christ. Their old nephesh-psuche is regenerated and their eternal life begins, this gift of faith delivering them from God’s judgment and from his ultimate death penalty (John 5:24). Their destiny is assured. Nothing can undo God’s purpose for them (John 10:28-29).  Because they are in Christ, when God looks on them, he does not see their rebellion, but only the merits of Jesus.  The second stage is the work of the Holy Spirit to deliver them from rebel habits of thinking and acting individually and to re-orient their social and political life to gathering with others who are in Christ and learning about the Law God is writing on their hearts. Their eternal life has already started,  Born again of the Spirit, they cannot be unborn. The final stage of amnesty begins the moment we die. At stage one we were saved from the penalty of sin; at stage two, the power of sin; at stage three, the presence of sin.

                Now this is all just too bizarre for those who are not in Christ. That is the primary way they know if they are included in this rag-tag bunch of people for whom Jesus died, was raised, and now intercedes. Paul says that instead of being covered in Christ's spirit, they are covered only "in flesh."  The amnesty plan means nothing to them. They are not interested in it at all (1 Cor. 1:18-25). But those God foreknew and chose 5 billion + years ago (many of whom do not even know it) find themselves drawn to Christ, have a life history that is such that upon hearing God’s amnesty proclaimed from the Scriptures, something deep within them changes and life becomes totally new (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). But how do we know this isn’t all just one more mythology told by Reformers of the Pythagorean Church? How does all this work in real space and time and not just in the pages of some holy book or in the mind of a clever theologian.  How does it get applied?  If we are going to answer the question, “What happens the moment we die?” we need to examine our assumptions about time and space.  And that’s where we turn next.

(To be continued)

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 2

     We think we know who we are. It’s assumed in the question, “What happens to you when you die?”  Who are you?  What are you?  The naturalist says you are essentially stardust, an organism made out of carbon and water mostly with a lot of other trace elements thrown in for good measure, and like everything else on earth, the moment you die you cease to exist. Decomposition begins, and, atom by atom, you disappear back into the material world.

     Essentially, this is the oldest Biblical answer of what happens when you die. You become a corpse. The ancient meaning of the Hebrew word, nephesh (often translated soul), was corpse or even tomb (Numbers 5:2, 6:6, 9:6, 10, 19:13, Leviticus 19:28, 22:4, Haggai 2:13).  Nephesh comes from a root meaning "to blow out" or "exhale."  Ancient people saw death as a respiratory phenomenon; that is, when people exhaled their last breath but did not inhale, they knew they were dead. They reasoned that the difference between someone alive and dead was the “breath of nephesh” that the Creator breathed into Adam when he became a “living nephesh” (Genesis 2).  The Old Testament is more likely to use the word nephesh to mean “life” rather than the medieval notion of soul as a non-material eternal self that we have become used to. The word denoted the totality of an individual’s existence. C.S. Lewis summarized the Old Testament view of nephesh when he wrote, “Man doesn’t have a soul; he is a soul that has a body.” Nowhere in the Old Testament is nephesh considered something that can be separated from flesh or mind or emotion.  The Israelis of the Old Testament and even into the time of Jesus conceived of man as a unity. In Deuteronomy 6:5, the great creed of Judaism, people are commanded to love Yahweh God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. This did not mean they conceived of Man as made of four distinct parts. This verse makes use of parallelism to broaden a concept, a literary device used throughout the Bible and especially in the Psalms.  Heart and mind were the internal aspect of love. “Soul” and strength were the external manifestations of love.  Psuche is life. 

     Most of us were introduced to Pythagoras in Junior High geometry.  But this ancient Greek was probably the very first to theorize the immortality of the soul and its transmigration after death into another realm. Up until Pythagoras (570-495 BC), the Greek etymology of psuche was identical to that of the Hebrew nephesh; it was the breath that distinguished a corpse from a living being.  But in his work on ethics, Pythagoras reasoned that psuche was different from the body (soma). The body would die. But your psuche was the real “you” that would leave the body at death and begin an afterlife either in the underworld or someplace better, depending on how ethically you had lived your life.  Here is the origin of our Western ideas of the immortality of the soul. How many Christians would be surprised to learn that their idea of the soul going to heaven after while their body rots in the grave is not Biblical, but Pythagorean?

     In the second century after Jesus these ideas found their way into the church.  Called Gnosticism, it was the non-Biblical teaching that matter was bad and spirit was good; that the purpose of salvation was to free the soul at death to return to God. Pythagorean-Gnostic ideas were beginning to be advanced as early as mid first century when the Apostle Paul was preaching the Gospel in Greece. To avoid misunderstanding, the Apostle Paul hardly ever uses the word psuche in his letters.  He wanted to avoid confusing the Biblical view of personhood with that of the pagan Greeks. The Greek idea of soul immortality and the inherent evil of flesh was brought into the Roman Church by Thomas Aquinas who thought Aristotle and Plato were Christians before Jesus. Not only did we live in Aristotle’s three-story universe, but the Church insisted people were a trichotomous amalgam of body, mind, and soul.  After 19 centuries, these notions are baked into our language and our cultural heritage, preserved in hymns and prayer books, and affirmed in secular media from Dante’s Inferno to Hollywood’s latest Gnostic tale of disembodied spirits escaping to heaven after death.  

    What did our Lord teach?  We must listen to Jesus and interpret the Old Testament through him and the faithfulness of the early Church to him.  Jesus affirmed the Scriptures and the indivisibility of human life. Psuche is the life God gave us.   Jesus speaks in Mark 10:45 that his life mission is “to give his psuche as a ransom for many.”  Obviously, Jesus doesn't have a disembodied essence in mind, but his life. In Mark 8 Jesus begins to teach his disciples that he must be rejected and crucified by God’s people.  When Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from such thoughts, Jesus rebukes Peter and makes a statement found in all four Gospels.

“He who would save his psuche will lose it; but he who loses his psuche will save it.”

                                                                                (Mark 8:36, Mt. 10:39, Lk 17:33, Jn 12:25)

Jesus clearly means one's life.   Losing my immortal soul is impossible in that Pythagorean way of thinking. 

      The only saying of Jesus that is sometimes cited as evidence of his teaching about a body-soul dichotomy is Matthew 10:28.

“Do not fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the psuche. Rather fear him who can destroy both psuche and soma in Gehenna (the garbage dump of Jerusalem).”

Through Pythagorean spectacles we might read this and think he is splitting soul and body.  But if you read it carefully and take psuche to mean in this verse what it means everywhere else in the teachings of Jesus and the Old Testament, psuche and soma are bound together.  From a human perspective, people can kill the body but they can’t kill the life God intended for you when he created you. In other words, you were made for something beyond this life.  You aren’t a body that has a soul; you are a soul that has a body.  There is no teaching anywhere in the Bible about disembodied human souls.  When Jesus loses his psuche, God will raise him bodily from the dead, uniting forever psuche and soma.

    So let me summarize. Who are you?  You are a living psuche.  Jesus corrected the ancient Jewish idea of annihilation after death both in his teaching and by his resurrection. Psuche is your individual life as God intended and which you can save by sacrificing it or lose by grabbing for it.  Changing our ideas about psuche must necessarily impact how we understand the Bible’s message about salvation.

     What happens the moment you die? In Christ, you are saved. And to that we turn in the next part.

(To be continued)

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 1

     Recently I got involved in an email discussion regarding the human soul. My word study on the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psuche evoked questions and even some accusations that I did not share the prevailing view of my Christian friends, several of whom are trained Bible teachers. One wanted to know what I thought happened the moment I die. And as I thought about this, I realized how different is the Biblical answer from the Christian mythology that now parades as orthodoxy in many circles. Having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I have done a lot of thinking about this subject and, more importantly, I have carefully examined the Word of God for what it may actually tell us; no, reveal to us, about our entrance into eternity.  Embarking on this study, I soon realized that my answer would involve not only re-examining the Biblical concept of “soul,” but would necessitate confronting medieval notions of cosmology as well as our view of time and space. In other words, it’s complicated, not because God made it complex, but because people have clung to the detritus of idolatry and sought to justify religious speculations with obscure proof-texts from the Bible taken out of their historical and literary context to serve a cultural religious myth.

     The myth goes something like this. When you die, your soul is released from the body and you find yourself either in heaven or in hell, depending on whether the good you did outweighed the bad and evil in your life. This is the general Western view. People who are more than nominally Christian say your final destination depends whether you believed the gospel of Jesus.  Believers go to heaven, a place of reunion with other dead souls, our family and friends; unbelievers are consigned to purgatory, a kind of time-out, or sent directly to hell, a place of eternal torture and ultimate destruction.  If during your life you believed the right things about Jesus, you go to heaven the moment after you die; if you rejected Jesus, you might get a second chance if you're friendly with the Roman Church, or otherwise, you suffer in hell forever, or maybe you simply cease to exist.  Some Christians, wishing to preserve a place for the Biblical doctrine of resurrection of the body, believe the believer's soul will be reunited with a resurrected body either at something called “the Rapture” or at the second coming of Jesus. In the meantime, we sleep in God’s loving care.

     Now, the odd thing is, there are texts in the Bible that can be used to justify all of these ideas. So, is the Bible contradicting itself? Can we even know what happens the moment we die? Did we become believers primarily because we wanted to go to heaven the moment we die? That was the reason I remember responding to my first altar call at a youth rally. The evangelist had painted this horrible picture of hell that awaited the unprepared soul. He told a story of a boy rejecting an altar call on Sunday and later that week was killed, his life snuffed out before accepting Christ, and now tortured forever by Satan and his demons in hell. Yikes!! As a 12 year old even I knew I needed my fire insurance. So up to the altar I went and joined a lot of other teens pleading for God to forgive their sins and not to kill them.

     After nearly 30 years of ministry and Bible study, learning Hebrew and Greek, schooled in the theology of the early church and the Reformation, my position was the myth of “soul sleep.”  As recently as a year or two ago, I would have answered that the moment I die my essential self (soul) is put into a kind of spiritual holding pattern until the Second Coming of Christ when I am somehow reconstituted as a new, eternal being in the New Heaven and New Earth. I pointed out the New Testament texts where Jesus said to Jairus that his daughter wasn’t dead, but only sleeping; or where Paul in his wonderful description of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 12 talks about those who are asleep being awakened by the Lord at his coming.

     I call these ideas myths. A myth isn’t necessarily a lie; it is a story told with elements we do understand to help us explain stuff we don’t understand. Myths are stories in which values are personified, interact, and spell out moral duty. The problem is we mistake our myths for truth because we don’t know what we don’t know (better read that last sentence again).  We think we know what words mean. We think we understand the late Bronze Age of King David or the Israelite theocracy of 2000 years ago.  We think we know what time it is. We think we know where we are. We think we know what happens after death because someone we know saw a deathbed vision (My great grandfather said he could see the heavenly Jerusalem) or we read a book about coming back from the dead (floating above my corpse, tunnel of light, reuniting with loved ones, etc. etc.).

     For those of us who accept the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the Word of God, we at least have some touchstones of truth in understanding our life journey.  But the fact is: God’s Word on afterlife is a progressive revelation.  That means, for a reason known only to God, he allowed the cultural beliefs of ancient people to be recorded as holy writ. The picture of life after death for the vast majority of Biblical time was the notion of Sheol, a word meaning the pit. Originally the idea was that a person’s destiny was the hole in the ground.  Eternal life was your children taking the faith of their ancestors into the future. Probably during the Exile (587-520BC) Persian notions of afterlife began to seep into the Hebrew mind and writings. Sheol became a place of shadowy existence, a kind of eerie ghostly experience.  The point is: it's tricky business to proof-text these ideas without a context.

     In Jesus day, people who knew the Bible the best had lots of disagreements about what happened the moment you die. Sadducees, the ruling elite, held to the ancient idea of no afterlife. The Pharisees and Essenes believed in a life after death. We don't know the dating of Job, but at least according to the canonical order of things, Job first introduced the notion of resurrection. The prophets developed the idea that there would be a resurrection of the faithful when Israel’s Messiah would be declared King of the world.   

“I know that my Redeemer lives and he will stand upon the earth at Last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body** I will see God.”  (Job 19:25) (**The Hebrew is muddled here and could be translated "without my body.")

     And that brings me to the problem with Bible translations. Every translation is an interpretation. I don’t mean to sound like an elitist, but if you cannot read Hebrew or Greek and have no background in those cultures, you are at the mercy of what translators think a text means.  In our email exchange about the meaning of soul, one fellow copied and pasted a whole list of texts containing the word soul and then proceeded to correct my viewpoint. Of course, what he did not know (remember, we don’t know what we don’t know) was that there are different Hebrew words for soul and different ideas of it, depending on when the text was written. God doesn’t spell out resurrection in the Genesis. But Bibles have to be sold to people, and while some translators have enough integrity to provide notes on alternate readings and meanings, not all do. 

     Here's an example. One of the favorite Scriptures cited by those who believe the “go-to-heaven-immediately-after-we-die” myth is Jesus’ word to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). They lift the word paradise out of any historical context and just assume it means heaven. They also presume that, like our own language, ancient Greek manuscripts had punctuation and don’t realize that ancient texts were just a series of capital letters without even spaces between words. So, the verse could be just as easily translated: “Jesus said, “Today I assure you, you will be with me in the pleasure garden (that’s what the Persian word for paradise meant).”  Why did Jesus say “paradise” and not heaven?

     Translators, marketing to both students of Scripture and people who know nothing about the ancient world, try to make sense of texts in light of what most people already think they know.  So, instead of a clumsy concept like Sheol, the translator uses “hell.” Peter never said Jesus preached to the souls in hell. The place name is Tarturus. What in the heck is that? So, if you only read translations of the texts you’re bound to get confused.

     Let's muddy the waters even more. Combine that with the medieval Catholic Church that bought hook-line-and-sinker into the pagan cosmology of Greek philosophy. In his treatise De Anima (On the Soul) Aristotle taught the immortality of the soul as opposed to the mortality of the body. Thomas Aquinas (beatified by the Roman Church) plagiarized Aristotle and in Question 75 of his Summa Theologica made the pagan idea into Christian orthodoxy. The Roman Church re-defined or re-packaged the Biblical story in this Greek wrapper and firmly implanted the Aristotelian cosmology in the Western mind. Heaven was up and far away. Hell was down. Earth was in the middle. Our sojourn on Earth was to determine where we went the moment we died – up to heaven away from this awful, sinful world, or down to hell, where we were beyond hope, or maybe to something called the Pergatorium, the room off to the side of the Roman banquet hall where you would go and make yourself throw up (purge) so you could come back and eat some more.  Weird, huh?

     So, this is is the mishmash we have inherited: a view of the world and our place in it that is completely at odds with how Jesus and his Jewish ancestors thought and spoke. We use the ancient texts but disregard the Aristotelian spectacles through which we read them.  Remember when Galileo's telescope led him to state that the sun did not revolve around the earth. The Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy and threatened his immortal soul with damnation because the Bible said the sun went around the earth.  Galileo recanted, but his insights were true.  In our time we are undergoing a radical change in what we know about space and time.  The medieval cosmology not only crumbles but is shown to be a hoax of the first order.  Medieval notions of soul, hell, and heaven will not survive the onslaught of truth as God allows people a deeper look into the mystery of creation.