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November 13, 2005
What Happens When We Die?
Isaiah 25: 6-9 / Westminster Larger Catechism Q 86
II Corinthians 5: 1-7
November 13th, 2005
What happens to us when we die? It is a question you probably don’t think about when you’re healthy and when those dearest to you are healthy. But when loved ones die the question may have some interest. And when we realize our own strength is subsiding and the end is near, perhaps the question becomes pertinent. What happens to us when we die? The simplest answer to this question is, as the old King James Version put it: “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.”
The question is a little bit like the one a child may ask about how she will look when she is sixty-five years old. She can’t really conceive of being that old. Not enough fingers to count. And you and I can’t “see” what we’ll be like when we’re no longer “older people,” but people who have taken the next step in our pilgrimage.
I am convinced that death is just one stage in a pilgrimage of the soul. I have been present when a number of people died. I have seen what seemed a far off look take over the face. Sometimes those on the point of death see other people in the room. One of our saints of the past at Faith Church looked at the door and said “not yet” to people nobody else in the room could see. And when death has ended the life of the body something seems to stay in the room briefly.
Catharine Marshall tells of not being able to make it to the hospital in time when her preacher husband, Peter, died. But when she got to his hospital room she sensed Peter was still there, apparently waiting for her. And then he was no longer there. The sense was vivid to Catherine, his wife.
I want to get at this question in two stages: first, what happens right away? and second, what happens in the long run? But these two stages are artificial. I suspect they won’t make sense very quickly after we die. Because what is time when you no longer have clocks? When you are not going to wake up to go to work, who cares about an alarm clock? And when there is no end to the workday, and no scheduling of doctor’s visits, and no appointments with the broker or the banker or the candlestick maker, there is no difference chronologically between right now and whatever follows.
What place shall we choose in the Bible to instruct us? Luke read for us from the prophet Isaiah. There the Lord promises the end of death and a great banquet with the finest of food and drink. Tears will be banished from the earth. A bit farther on in Isaiah the prophet refers to the “lords” who have ruled over Israel. “They are dead, they will not live; they are shades, they will not arise.” By contrast, “Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise.” But what this is like we’re left to guess.
In II Corinthians 12 Paul described an experience that most of us don’t know what to do with because it goes beyond the ordinary. But it had a beginning and end. It was a parenthesis in his life. He modestly described this event as though it happened to someone else. It was so heady he could hardly keep from being elated so that God had to give him a “thorn in the flesh,” to keep him composed. He wrote, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise . . . and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” He had to wait 14 years to tell this.
Then seems to have crossed a bridge between ordinary life and what many would call a “mystical” experience, except that it did not seem mystical to him. He stepped into the beyond. But it was an “ordinary” experience for him--like visiting a palace for you and me, or for Peter, James, and John like seeing Jesus transfigured with Moses and Elijah standing there before them. I mean it was an event. It was something he saw. But how unlike anything he’d experience in this life.
We wonder what Paul saw. Was it what the Medievals called the “beatific vision,” the sight of God? Was it God whom he saw in the way we will see God in heaven, after the gulf between sinful man and holy God has been erased and we are fit to look Him? Did Paul see himself as he would be, having seen Jesus face to face? “We shall be like him when we see Him face to face,” John writes. Did Paul get this glimpse and he was amazed at what he saw of his unblemished self. Did he get a premonition of what he described in Romans 8 as “the adoption of sons,” the redemption, the restoration, the wholeness that is so blemished in the course of this life?
I look at myself and I look at others and wonder what we will be like when all the blemishes of personality and character are erased, so that we are the perfect beings God had in mind when He shaped us in His image and breathed into us His breath. We don’t realize how we have been disfigured by many of life’s experiences. It is very evident when you look into the faces of some people. But behind every hard and tortured face there is a potential saint whose face, once healed, will be the same in size and color but scarcely recognizable after it sees Jesus. “It does not yet appear what we shall be!”
But then Paul was plunged back into ordinary, clothed in his ordinary sinful body once again. He didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what he saw on the other side. But I wonder if this was a foretaste of what he was to see the moment after Nero ended his life. Paul was a martyr.
His experience was like what Jesus described happening to a poor man named Lazarus in a very sobering parable. Jesus told of a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen, who feasted sumptuously every day. People sometimes refer to him as Dives, which is the Latin word that means “rich.” At the gate of the rich man’s estate lay a poor man named Lazarus, his body covered with sores. Dogs came and licked them, a kindness on the part of “man’s best friend.” Lazarus hoped to get scraps of food left over from the rich man’s table.
Both the rich man and Lazarus died. Angels carried Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom. This referred to the custom of reclining on couches at the dinner table where the head of one person was almost in the lap of the one reclining next to him. So Lazarus enjoyed intimate dinner fellowship with Abraham in Paradise.
The rich man also died and was buried. He went to Hades, the place of the dead who don’t go up to Paradise. He was in torment and saw far off that Lazarus, who he had seen lying outside his gate, was now Abraham’s dinner guest. In the parable we get no hint that the rich man regretted what he had not done in life. No “If only I had done something!” Charles Dickens was kinder to Scrooge, giving him a second chance.
The rich man cried out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me. Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame. But Abraham said, “Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now is comforted here and you are in anguish.”
The rich man pleaded, “Then tell my five brothers to warn them lest they come to this place of torment.” But Abraham had to tell the rich man that would be of no use. Even if someone went back to them from the dead, they wouldn’t change their ways. Where the rich man went right away was very unpleasant. Where the poor man went was paradise.
Jesus told one of the thieves who was crucified with Him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” But we read elsewhere in the New Testament that Jesus crossed the divide that Lazarus could not cross to cool the rich man’s tongue with a drop of water.
Paul writes of Jesus, “He descended into the lower parts of the earth.” Again in I Peter we read of Jesus that, “being put to death in the flesh . . . He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.” This speaks of a between world, not hell and not heaven—and not like Purgatory. No one is sure exactly who is referred to as the “spirits in prison.”
Paul was able to come back from his moment in Paradise. He could not tell what he saw there perhaps because, as Jesus said of Lazarus, nobody would believe him. But this experience no doubt informed what Paul wrote in the lesson that we read a few moments ago. When he wrote, “We would rather be absent from the body and present with the Lord,” I wonder if he meant he wished he could remain in Paradise where he once was—unsure if it was in the body or out of the body.
I have the hunch that Paul was telling us about how it will be when we are separated from our bodies.
But another issue comes into the picture about which we do not think too often. We who are Reformed in doctrine appreciate greatly that we are justified before God by faith. By faith we appropriate God’s unmerited favor, a favor we cannot possibly earn. It is all of grace that we are saved.
But I get the impression from Scripture that being saved is like being allowed inside the front door of heaven. Being saved means you’ve got a ticket to get into heaven. Then what? The Apostle Paul, who made most plain the doctrine of justification by faith, writes
Each one’s work will become manifest; for the Day will
disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the
fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If
the work which someone does builds on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If any one’s work is
burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be
saved, but only as through fire.”
“Saved, but only as through fire.” That is, like a branch plucked out of the campfire. It is not completely burned up with the rest of the wood, but its end is charred. It has the smell of burnt wood. Paul, who had a vivid understanding of the grace of God also had a vivid awareness of the implications to us of receiving this grace.
In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians Paul writes, “So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.”
We are presently watching the confirmation process of the successor to Justice Sandra Day O’Conner. Judge Samuel Alito has put together quite a paper trail over his past fifteen years as an appellate judge. The senators can scrutinize opinions he has written on all sorts of cases. They can tell how he thinks, what he’s like, so as to get some idea what he will be like should he be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. Of course, they can’t see how he may change once on the bench, but they hope to gain an assessment of what he is now from how he has presented himself in the past.
Similarly, you and I are developing a paper trail in this life. We are developing our credentials, we might say, that will be exposed to the eyes of the One who by grace allows us inside the front gate of heaven. It is not just a paper trail—that may include letters we’ve written, or emails, and the like. It will include the indelible record of our thoughts and intentions. This is why Paul urges us to make every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. It will include those words we’ve said that we wish we may not have said. All of this forgiven. The guilt erased. But still it’s there on the carbon disc of the cosmos, a record of our accumulated character. No wonder we can be saved only by grace. Who can survive such a scrutiny? But somehow the result of examining our paper trail, to discover with what we have built our lives is involved in our reward once let into heaven by grace. What we do—will this be given to us on the basis of our paper trail? Maybe those assigned to strumming harps on fully clouds are the ones who’ve strummed away their lives. I say that with tongue in cheek, of course, because no doubt no one will be fixed to a cloud for eternity with a harp in his hands. Jesus told His disciples, “My Father assigned to me a kingdom that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” But we don’t know what that means.
When God makes all things new, when there is a new heaven and a new earth, I take it that we’ll have plenty to do that will make all that interests us here seem like a baby’s fascination with a rattle. And somehow we are now equipping ourselves with the capacity for what will be offered to us then. And some of us will find we can do very simple things like pushing elevator buttons, no matter how clever we were in this life. Some of us will do more complicated and interesting things like designing landscapes. Then quantum mechanics will be as simple as plucking a flower. Some of us who in this life saw the hungry person and fed him, the person in prison or ill and visited him, and the naked and clothed him, will be welcomed to speak with Jesus as friend with friend, because we will have known Him from this life—and didn’t realize it. We are developing a paper trail in this life which may include a happy relationship with Jesus.
I discovered an Old English dialogue between the Soul and the Body. The soul is made for friendship with God, but the body is trapped in fascination with the temporary things of this brief moment we call “this life.” The dialogue begins, “It behooves every hero to ponder his own soul’s pilgrimage, how deep it is when death comes, sunders the siblings who were once together, body and soul.” The soul speaks to the dust that once was the body:
“How have you oppressed me? Little have you
thought what you later would become in your soul’s
journey, after it was led away out of its own body!
Wretch, what torment for me! Listen, you little thought
to be worm’s food . . . And out of heaven the almighty
Measurer sent you a soul through an angel, through his
own hand in his princely power, and then bought you
with holy blood! Yet you bound me with hard hunger
and held me prisoner in the torments of hell! I lived
inside you. Enfolded in flesh, I could by no means
come out of you, and your sinful lusts sank me down.”
The soul, we might say, is made for God. And your soul and mine is interested in what is most important. But our flesh and blood, that Scripture tells us cannot inherit the kingdom of God, have the ability to control, to dominate the soul. Your soul looks out and sees a family where the bread-winner has lost work and the family is about to be evicted from the home. I have a family in mind—living down on Klondike Road. Your soul understands what your eyes read that our criminal justice system is grievously flawed in this free land. It now claims at least one person from every ten families in our country. Your soul registers what it means when your eyes see pictures of people helpless after an earthquake, or in the grips of famine, and little people with bulging eyes whose parents have died of AIDS. Your soul comprehends and feels something ought to be done for them.
But our body balks at responding. The extent to which you and I compel our bodies to do what our souls, our hearts know the body needs to do; we are creating a paper trail of use later on. But we find it hard to think in terms of the hereafter, so only the love of Christ that we may allow to fill our hearts can guide our bodies to do the good that the Kingdom of God has to offer this troubled world.
When the end comes to us we will be struck with the wisdom of the little adage: Only one life, t’will soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.” How do we do anything for Christ? Why would we want to do anything for Christ? Because Jesus told us where He is now—where we can see Him. Jesus is in need. Because we are grateful for the grace of God. Because God loves us and has given to us His love. And this love needs to be expressed. And God has given us bodies to express love—in many ways. And when these bodies of ours have run their course, however long that might be, when they come to the end and know they have spent their energies on what is of lasting importance, then death has no remorse.
A favorite book of many Christians in days past was Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Taylor saw all of life as a preparation for death, because death introduces us to a phase of our pilgrimage that lasts a lot longer than this brief span we call time. Modern medicine has made it possible to live longer now, but not very much longer than in the 18th century. And our bulging nursing homes inform us that the added years are not always happy years. So let’s make good use of the good years. Love God with all your mind, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. And cling to the grace of God without which we are without hope in this life or the next.
Let us pray: O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and a peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (John Henry Newman)
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 13, 2005 09:30 AM