One of life’s great questions is what happens to us when we die? Is there anything beyond this life, or is this all that there is?
All of us must face death – both the deaths of people we know and love, and eventually our own deaths. It is a solemn and serious matter. How can we be prepared for whatever comes next? What comfort is there when loved ones die?
People do not normally come back from the dead, so having any certain answer is very difficult. Some people have near-death experiences, but it isn’t clear whether these are genuine, or simply the strange hallucinations of the brain close to death filtered through a person’s cultural background.
But the astonishing claim of the Bible is that Jesus has indeed died and come back from death – not near-dead or mostly dead, but nailed to a cross by expert Roman executioners all-dead. I won’t go into the arguments here, but there are excellent historical grounds for believing that Jesus rose from the dead. Further, God has revealed to us through the Bible hints and details of what comes next. And the Christian message regarding death is one of comfort and hope.
There are two stages to the Christian hope: what happens to us immediately on death, and what our final eternal hope is. Unfortunately these two often get confused, and our immediate hope is mistaken for our ultimate hope.
The part that is most familiar is that we go to Heaven when we die. I do believe that is a real and genuine hope and comfort to us. But it’s only part of the picture. The New Testament comforts us primarily with the hope that whoever trusts in Christ will be raised to new bodily life to be with him when he returns. Similarly, unbelievers will also be raised to life to face Christ’s judgment.
Let’s look at some of the parts of the Bible that talk about this to get a better picture of our future hope.
“To live is Christ, to die is gain”
For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. (Philippians 1:21-24 NIVUK)
I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:14 NIVUK)
Paul here says that to die is to go to be with Christ. The hope we have is that when we die, we go immediately to be with him. It’s amazing – as Christians, we don’t need to fear death. We don’t have to reconcile ourselves with eventual oblivion and non-existence, or fear God’s judgement, or come back in another life to try again at living rightly. We can embrace death knowing it brings us to the presence of Jesus, and we can take comfort that though we’re parted from those we love, if they trusted Jesus then they are with him now. We live our lives heavenward, pressing forward to this.
This is wonderful hope, but there’s more!
“He will transform our lowly bodies”
While Paul is confident that if he dies, he will go to be with the Lord, he doesn’t lose sight of his hope in the Resurrection at Christ’s return.
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. (Philippians 3:20-21 NIVUK)
Jesus will come from Heaven to Earth to transform our current mortal bodies into new immortal bodies like his own.
We also need to be careful not to mistake heavenly “citizenship” for permanent residence. As Tom Wright argues in Surprised by Hope, the reference point that Paul and his first-century readers would have had for “citizenship” was Roman citizenship. The aim of being a Roman citizenship was not for all citizens to live in Rome, but to spread the Roman way of life throughout the Empire.
Likewise, as Christians our goal is to bring Heaven’s rule to this world. When Jesus comes back, he won’t come to take us away to Heaven, but to raise us from the dead to live forever in the New Creation. I’ll come back to the question of what happens to this world and how it relates to the New Creation in more detail a later blog post.
“How can some of you say that there is no resurrection from the dead?”
One of the key passages talking about the Resurrection is 1 Corinthians 15. This is often quoted to affirm the historical importance of Christ’s resurrection:
But if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so if your faith. (1 Corinthians 15:14 NIVUK)
Paul’s starting point is responding to people in Corinth who were denying the general resurrection – that is, our resurrection in the future. Paul argues that Jesus’ resurrection and our future resurrection are inseparably connected:
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised […] But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. *(1 Corinthians 15:13, 20)
If our only hope were that of going to go to Heaven when we died, we’d have no hope at all, because that would mean Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead. Jesus rising from the dead was the firstfruits, the prototype, the new design for all who trust in him.
The Bible teaches that the reason we die is sin – “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). When Jesus died on the Cross, he took away the guilt of our sin so that we’re forgiven, and by his Resurrection he gives us new spiritual life to live in a way that’s good and loving and holy. Because our sin is dealt with in Christ, we are set free from the power of death. This isn’t just “spiritual life” in some vague nebulous sense, but actual physical life and death. If Jesus has dealt with our sin, we can be certain we will be resurrected to new life. If we downplay the resurrection, we downplay the very salvation that Jesus died to bring.
When I was younger, I somehow had an image of Heaven that I’d be floating around in a disembodied sea of cosmic bliss. But this kind of thinking is closer to the Buddhist idea of Nirvana than to the Bible. The body has sometimes been disparaged and neglected in Christian thought, reducing our humanity down to being “eternal souls”. There’s a quote erroneously attributed to C S Lewis saying “You are not a body that has a soul. You are a soul – you have a body”, and both alternatives are in my view wrong. We were created to be integrated wholes, not material slabs or disembodied souls.
“I am the Resurrection and the life”
By emphasising Resurrection, I’m not at all wanting to distract from our hope being in Jesus. This isn’t about getting a nice new body so we can settle down on a farm in the perfect world and forget all about God. It’s only by being united to Christ and sharing in his Resurrection we will be raised, and it is his perfect rule that will make the New Creation wonderful.
As Jesus says in John’s Gospel:
Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ (John 11:25, 26 NIVUK)
Jesus is the Resurrection and the life. Our greatest longing must be for God himself. But in him is life, and we are made to worship him through our bodies and through creation. After all, that’s how he made us in the first place, so it would be weird if he suddenly decided all this physical stuff was a distraction. Rather, he became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
This has big implications for how we view the world we live in. We’re not hanging around on the battlefield waiting to be airlifted out to somewhere else. The good news is that Jesus has already won the war, and will shortly liberate the world from its occupation by sin and evil – we’re insurgents on the winning side. Or we are if we believe in Jesus – as Jesus asked, “do you believe this?”
There are plenty more Bible passages talking about the Resurrection, but that’s probably enough to be getting on with! In the next couple of posts, I’ll explore some more of what this means for our everyday lives and for the universe as a whole.
