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)
Keep going!!! Al Lawrence
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