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.
21st 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)
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