Life After Death – Part One
Overview
There have been quite a number of folks (5 families in the past two months – Bernita Sample’s husband passed on Wednesday morning) in our congregation who have had loved ones die in the past few months. My own family had to come to grips with saying goodbye to my wife’s father. Being a part of so many funerals in such a short period of time, I paid attention to some of the conversations people had during the wakes. I was rather surprised by some of the strange beliefs that people had concerning the afterlife. Let me share a few observations about death itself and then share with you why death is such an integral part of our lives.
Death is a great mystery, with faith alone offering answers while science believes that it has nothing to offer us because it cannot measure or see the results.
Strangely enough, science ought to give us hope because it has observed the first law of Thermodynamics. This law states mass and energy are never destroyed but only changed. If you burn up a piece of wood, it becomes a pile of ash, heat and light energy and carbon dioxide smoke. It isn’t destroyed, but rather changed.
If this is true of the material world, can it be so hard for us to believe it for the spiritual world? Harry Emerson Fosdick once said, “Can it be that God is the most unscrupulous waster in the universe, making great personalities, only to throw them utterly away?”
I believe that God is the great preserver and sustainer, wasting nothing! And that alone provides a strong case for life after death!
Because death is such a great mystery, we have concocted great explanations for what happens to us after we die:
Muslims believe that the men will spend eternity with 72 black eyed perpetual virgins. They hold to the belief that those whose good deeds do not outweigh their bad will be delivered to hell for eternal suffering.
Hindus believe that they will come back as an insect or an elephant or a cow, depending upon how they have lived their lives.
Buddhists believe in transmigration, where they will be born in another body with the hopes of achieving Nirvana which will be his escape from this suffering and life.
Some sects of Christianity believe that you go to an in-between place called purgatory where you are cleansed by fire of the sins that the blood of Christ couldn’t clean you of.
Some folks believe they will become angels playing harps and sitting on clouds.
Others think they will be disembodied spirits, visiting relatives and friends and tormenting their enemies as ghosts.
Still others, more hopeless, believe that this life is all there is. When you are dead, you are dead, and when you are gone, you are gone. So live it up because tomorrow you might die.
What do you believe?
Do you believe there is life after death?
This two sermon series will deal with the facts and the biblical truths concerning death and the afterlife, what life will be like beyond the grave.
This series will consist of 2 parts:
This week: Death – its origin, types and meaning as well as deliverance from it.
Next week: Life – what we will look like, act like and become.
Let me start then with a story about a man who laughed at a Christians belief about life after death. He said, “The only thing we can prove about a human being is that he is made of things like sulfur; iron; magnesium and water.” The Christian ignored the man and kept on talking. The man laughed and said, “Why don’t you answer me? You don’t have any answer.” The Christian said to him, “Yes sir, I do have an answer, but I am not in the habit of talking to a pile of sulfur; iron; magnesium and water.”
We need to go back to the beginning, when man was created to best understand the concept of death and the afterlife.
Genesis 2:7 “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”
The garden of Eden is a place of perfection, where man is created to live, reproduce and walk with God. Man becomes a living being, literally a soul (Nephesh ) in a breathing, living body fit for his surroundings.
That is what our bodies are, clothing for our souls that allow us to interact with our environment.
Adams body was a physical body.
Contrary to what some claim that Adam’s body became physical after he disobeyed God, the Bible says that Adam’s body was created as a physical body to interact with a physical existence and with a spiritual God.
We are tri-part beings – spirit, soul and body. Our body interacts with our physical environment, our soul is our personality that is designed to last forever, and our spirit is where we interact with the spiritual realm (and with God).
Adam’s body was created to exist in a physical world that was perfect and without flaw.
Adam’s body wasn’t designed to die.
I believe that part of the wonderful blessing of a perfect creation was that Adam’s body was designed so that it didn’t wear out or die.
But I also believe that it wasn’t designed to be his eternal body either. (more on this next week).
His body was merely a suitable tool in which Adam could interact with his environment and get to know God in an intimate manner.
Did you know that science has learned why we grow old?
There are chemicals in our cells that stop being produced after our cells divide and reproduce a certain number of times. Our bodies are designed to regenerate cells to take the place of dying ones, but at some point, they simply stop reproducing them as quickly as they die off.
At some point, the cells begin to die quicker than they are replaced, and our bodies begin to sag, our hair begins to gray, our bones become thinner, our skin develops lines instead of remaining soft and supple. This process is called aging.
And eventually, our bodies will simply shut down if disease doesn’t turn off our lives before that.
Adam’s un-dying and un-decaying body didn’t mean that he didn’t have cells that were dying and regenerating, but rather, that his body would continually be renewing itself.
And there is one more truth we need to be aware of:
God breathed a living soul into the dust that He had formed into a body, and if that soul, called Adam, was removed, the body would have crumpled back into dust again.
A body without the soul has no life in it.
And yet, our soul did not exist until our body came to life at the moment of conception.
(In Psalm 139 we hear that we are fearfully and wonderfully made in our mother’s womb!)
If the nails are taken out of a wood crate, the crate ceases to exist, and only a stack of boards and a pile of nails remain. If the boards are nailed back together, the crate exists again. The same with man, if the soul is separated from his body then there is no longer a living physical being. When God combined the breath of life and body, man became a living being.
God did not intend for Adam to be a disembodied spirit. He initially designed him to live in a body suitable for existence in the physical world.
So, his soul required a body to begin its existence, and the body requires the soul to remain alive.
DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?
But at the same time, Adam wasn’t destined to live in this body or in this environment in Eden forever, because we know from the New Testament that the completion of God’s plan was to dwell face to face with God forever in eternity.
But he also wasn’t destined to experience death (until he sinned).
I believe that Adam’s body ultimately was designed to be glorified, that is, converted, transformed so that it would be fit for an eternal existence. (We will look at the details of that next week).
But something happened that prevented that from occurring. Do you know what that was?
Genesis 2:15-17 “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Now we know the story, how Eve and Adam eat of this tree and physically don’t immediately die! But they do experience several immediate results. They experience shame and a sense of guilt from their disobedience of God’s command. They also realize that they cannot be like God, despite the devil’s promise.
But since God said that they would surely die the day they ate the fruit…and they didn’t die physically, right away, it means that they died in another, less visible way. It tells us that some part of them had died that day.
That death was the death of their “spirits.” The part of them that had been designed to interact with the spiritual world and with God. It became “dead toward God.”
Genesis 3: 17-19, 22-23 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ’You must not eat of it,’ "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By 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." … 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve experience the unfortunate consequence of being cursed for their conduct. In verse 19 it says, “until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
In other words, their bodies, which were not designed to degenerate and decay would now in fact do so.
The seeds of decay were planted and germinated when man sinned.
In the biblical account, each succeeding generation’s life grew progressively shorter. Something was corrupted and damaged in the DNA of man when sin occurred. The bible calls it the “curse.”
I mentioned just a moment ago that it wasn’t just physical death that Adam now faced but death of his spirit. :
Spiritual death was the primary consequence of Adam’s sin.
Adam had an eternal soul, one that would outlast his body, and even though it could not die, the body in which it was housed would.
Yet his soul was experiencing death in a way that we cannot grasp.
Death is more than physical decay and cessation of life in the body.
That is how our culture and society define it.
Death is defined by God as separation.
Physical death is defined as the separation of the soul from the body. The body dies and the soul must depart.
But there is another type of death. It is spiritual death.
This occurred instantaneously for Adam and Eve in the garden when they sinned.
They were separated from God by sin.
They could no longer enjoy the rich intimacy that Adam had with God when he would walk and talk with God in the garden.
Sin, disobedience had fractured that relationship. And now, the perfectly holy God is unapproachable. Adam and Eve are banned from the garden and from the Tree of Life.
The death(s) that occurred then, that every human being will face are two fold:
Physical death is now seen as normal. But God understands it as tragic. It wasn’t His plan.
But much more tragic than physical death is being alive physically and dead spiritually.
Being dead to the voice and love of God.
Being unable and unwilling to respond to the marvelous love of God.
The bible says we are alive physically but dead spiritually. We inherited from Adam the state of human existence of death being in our DNA. We live as beings separated from God as a result of sin.
Jesus said that this was our present state of existence in John when He declared, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned (literally: come into judgment); he has crossed over from death to life.” (John 5:24).
What Jesus declared here is that our “default” state of existence is of spiritual or eternal death. We are dead but when we believe in Him and trust Him for our forgiveness, we cross over from death to life. We no longer face judgment but face eternal life.
John 3:36 says the same thing, “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey (believe with obedience) the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides (remains) on him."
Disobedience = unbelief.
John 11:25-26 says, “Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.
This is the nature of life after death. We go on. There is more. There is hope. There is the promise of life…but you need Jesus.
Hebrews 9:27 And…it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment,
Your action
I saw a sign on Rt. 20 this week in front of an Insurance agency that read, “Don’t leave this world without insurance.”
If you are living without Jesus Christ then you are dying. Don’t die without Him! Choose today to live with Him! Don’t leave this life without Jesus!
Develop a burden for those who don’t know Jesus Christ.
“One of the reasons we don’t feel it (the burden) as much as we should is that life in America is so entertaining that thoughts of desperate, eternal, spiritual need is hard for us to feel, let alone talk about. The world is just too interesting to make ourselves uncomfortable with thoughts about perishing people.” (John Piper)
Mickey Harford last week stood up during our praise and sharing time and told us how her heart ached for her son whose wife had died suddenly at the age of 51. She then said, “and she wasn’t ready, and that is a tragedy.”
Folks, there are folks slipping away into eternity and they aren’t ready.
You may have family members, neighbors, and friends who living lives ignorant and oblivious to the eternal consequences of their actions.
Don’t be passive and let them wander down that wide road to destruction.
Pray for them and ask God to create opportunities to have spiritual conversations with them so that you might share with them what a difference Jesus Christ has made in your life.
Our response time is worship. But during worship you may want prayer…maybe you may wish to pray for a loved one at the altar during the next few songs. Joe and I will be here on the front rows, just walk up to us and tell us what we can pray for you for. Let’s stand and sing about our blessed assurance.
Reflect as you worship on the awesome gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ that is yours today! Ask God to speak to you about how you can share that gift with someone else this week.
