If I Should Die Before I Wake

What's Beyond This Life?

K. Scott Oliphint and Sinclair B. Ferguson

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781781913970

1

THE END

This morning we saw a car slide smoothly out of the parking lot in the local shopping center. The driver was a beautifully dressed, impeccably groomed woman. She would probably be best described as ‘holding on successfully to her middle years.’ The car was a gleaming Jaguar. The Pennsylvania plate was obviously personalized. The door closed with the gentlest click. The engine started up almost imperceptibly. The car moved away virtually noiselessly and so gracefully that it was hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy.

‘What a car!’ We made our way to our own modest automobile parked nearby. Should we be jealous? Only for a second, for the thought came: But she can drive it only so far; she can’t take it with her!

A moment later, another car pulled out a few parking spaces further down. It was driven by a poorly dressed, elderly man. He looked in his late sixties or early seventies and had the air and appearance of someone who was either retired or perhaps unemployed. His auto had seen better days in a previous decade.

He opened the rusty, battered door of the beaten-up station wagon. The engine revved up noisily. The car stuttered and spluttered as though against its will. Moments later he too was gone. Different thoughts passed through our minds now: What a heap. Should we feel sorry for him in his apparent poverty? Then another thought came (and a smile with it): Well, he doesn’t need to take it with him either. At the end of the day, the rich man (or woman) in the castle and the poor man at the gate will both leave everything behind. At last they will both be equal.

The Great Leveler

Death, we say, is the great leveler, the ultimate equalizer. ‘Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man’s cottage door and at the palaces of kings,’ wrote the Roman poet Horace. Fame, riches, love of family and friends – none of these can protect us against the one great inevitability.

The words ‘You can’t take it with you’ come so easily off our tongues. Sometimes, sadly, they are an expression of our secret jealousy of someone else’s material blessings. But they also have deeper significance. One day we will lose control of all that we have. Everything we hold as precious will slip from a lifeless hand. The greatest of all engineering miracles – the human body – will close down completely. We will breathe our last. We will die. ‘Anyone can stop a man’s life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it,’ wrote the Roman author Seneca. ‘Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,’ Ben Franklin wryly tells us.

Have you ever sat down and said to yourself, ‘I am going to die. What does that mean? What is death? How do I feel about it? How should I think about it and prepare for it? What will happen to me? What is there after death?’ Then the thought may cross your mind: I do not even know where I would begin. Such moments of honesty should encourage us to do something to remedy that situation.

Death is not only a certainty, it is also a mystery. Medical science continues to explore it, to redefine it, and to try to delay its arrival. Contemporary western society does everything it can to distance itself from its reality. The sick die in hospital beds, not in their own homes; then the mortician plies his craft, and the funeral services are ‘beautiful.’

We are all grateful for the help we receive to ease the pain of death. But at times we are tempted to think that there must be an organized strategy at work that only disguises its harsh reality and therefore does not heal us deeply enough. We are protected from staring death in the face and seeing it for what it actually is. There may be some comfort to our jealous spirits in the fact that death is the great leveler; it makes all of us equal. But there is no comfort in what death equals. It equals loss, separation, and sorrow. Therein lies its power to create the deepest and most abiding pain our hearts can experience.

The Ultimate Mystery

One day a person walks up a flight of stairs carrying perhaps 180 pounds of their own weight effortlessly. The next day it takes two people to carry out the lifeless body. What has happened?

We can answer that question in biological ways. Death can be defined as the cessation of the activity of the brain or the heart; bodies simply wear out. One way or another ‘death was due to natural causes,’ we are told. It just happens. But no one really believes that in their hearts. Or, better, no right-thinking person can accept that without protest. Death is not natural. If it were, would we feel such deep protests in our souls? If it is natural for the bonds of love and friendship we enjoy to be completely severed, why do we feel so angry about it?

The Ugly Intruder

Death is unnatural because it is destructive. It is something that ought not to be. It is deeply wrong. This, at least, is the teaching of the Bible. Its opening chapters make that clear.

God created people to live in this physical world while enjoying spiritual communion with him. God made humans in his image, as a kind of physical representation of himself (Gen. 1:26-27). In a sense people were created to be miniatures of the great and glorious Lord who created all things.

This is why the early chapters of Genesis emphasize certain similarities between God and humans: God has dominion over the entire creation, visible and invisible; humans, in turn, have dominion over the animal kingdom and the earth (Gen. 1:26-30). God created in six days and rested on the seventh; people, in turn, are to be creative in their work in six days and then rest on the seventh (Gen. 2:2-3).

God enjoys communion and fellowship (Gen. 1:26; cf. 3:22). In the biblical story it is clear that in God’s being there exist three persons in perfect fellowship with one another; people, in turn, were made ‘male and female.’ Men and women were meant to sense their likeness to God, to enjoy fellowship and harmony with their Father in heaven and with one another. This gives them a sense of meaning and purpose.

We were thus made for two worlds – one physical and the other spiritual. We have been created to live in and to enjoy harmony with both. Dogs may become good friends, other people may become special friends, but God himself is meant to be our best friend.

God also intended us to grow and mature. This was true physically. The first man was, among other things, a gardener (Gen. 2:15). He was meant to develop muscle tone through the exercise that gardening gave him, quite apart from his guarding and adding to the beauty of the world.

We were also created in such a way that we could develop morally and spiritually by overcoming temptation. Just as we become stronger physically by exercise, so also we become stronger morally and spiritually by choosing to obey, rather than disobey, God’s will. This is why the Lord forbade Adam to eat from one of the trees in the garden. If he ate from it, he would die (Gen. 2:17).

Little further explanation is given. The fruit of this tree was not poisonous. It probably looked no different from the fruit growing on other trees. The point of the commandment was to test Adam to see whether he would obey God and trust his wisdom.

If Adam had been obedient, he would have been morally and spiritually strengthened. If the fruit had been poisonous, to refrain from eating it would merely have been common sense. But to refuse to eat the fruit because of God’s command – that would have been obedience.

But fail here, God said, and death would be the result: ‘dust you are and to dust you will return’ (Gen. 3:19). The man and woman, created out of dust in the image of God, would begin to disintegrate and eventually become mere dust again. Glorious creatures of an omnipotent Creator, they would be reduced to earth’s minimal-value substance: dust. All that they were created to be would be destroyed. By disobedience they would cut themselves off from fellowship with their life source.

The Great Destroyer

What did the warning that God gave to Adam mean? Did God relent? It certainly appears so. Despite eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve continued to live.

This is true, at least in one sense. But the rest of the story tells us how ‘sin entered the world through one man … [and] death came to all’ (Rom. 5:12). Disintegration and destruction – physical, social, and spiritual – began immediately.

Their God-ward relationship was destroyed. Adam was alienated from God and turned to hide when the Lord came near to him (Gen. 3:8-10).

Their self-ward relationship was destroyed. People were created not only to live in harmony with God, but also at peace with themselves and all that God had made them to be. But now Adam and Eve became dissatisfied. Their consciences, once resting quietly, now rose up to accuse. They were not only guilty of disobedience, but they also felt guilty. They became uncomfortable and insecure in God’s world (Gen. 3:10).

The marriage relationship was destroyed. Adam was also alienated from Eve. Perversely he blamed God for giving her to him in the first place, and then he blamed her for what was clearly his own disobedience: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it’ (Gen. 3:12). The intimacy that they had previously enjoyed, expressed in the simple comment that they ‘were both naked, and they felt no shame’ (Gen. 2:25), was forever fractured. Now recriminations were the order of the day (Gen. 3:12).

Their creation-ward relationship was destroyed. Adam was alienated from the world of nature. He was meant to have dominion over it, to be its steward and master. Now he would have to labor and sweat to subdue the earth. Ironically, he would eventually be subdued by it. First he would till the soil, but later he would become part of the soil that someone else would till: ‘dust you are and to dust you will return’ (Gen. 3:17-19).

Family relationships were destroyed. After Adam was driven from Eden, his elder son became the first murderer. Sadly, it was his second son who became the first murder victim (Gen. 4:8).

In time Adam’s family tree would develop. The staccato entry on his descendants’ gravestones would be repeated time and again: ‘then he died’ (Gen. 5:5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 27, 31). These words became the universal epitaph. But this relentless onward march of death is highlighted by the fact that there was one exception to it: ‘Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him’ (Gen. 5:24). Enoch was the exception that proved the rule. The fact that he did not die served only to underline the new factor that sin brought into the world: all the lesser alienations of our lives eventually produce the most dramatic and tragic alienation of all – physical death.

We usually think of physical death as ‘real death.’ In some ways, however, physical death is simply the sacrament of death: it is the outward physical emblem of the spiritual reality that is already present. Death involves the disintegration of life and begins as soon as we cut ourselves off from its only true source.

Physical death, then, is the outward expression of this spiritual disintegration. We are like a garment that moths have eaten; it seems to be intact, but it collapses from within at the slightest touch. The threads of the garment lost their strength long ago, and a beautiful garment is reduced to shreds in a moment. A whole process preceded, but the destruction happened in an instant – just like death.

The Minimizer

We have seen that there is nothing natural about death. It is not a native inhabitant of God’s order. Paul explains: ‘sin entered the world through one man, and death [entered] through sin … death reigned from the time of Adam…’ (Rom. 5:12-14, emphasis added).

What happened? Adam was created to be at home in two worlds – the physical and the spiritual. But now a sinner and cut off from his source, he inevitably experienced disintegration. He no longer felt equally at home with God and with the world. He hid, as though he no longer felt at home in God’s presence. He was no longer at home in this world, either – with his wife there were recriminations; in his work there were frustrations; in his family there were estrangements; in his own body there was disintegration. Eventually the impossible and unthinkable would happen: although he was a physical individual, he would undergo traumatic separation from his body. It would lose its life-principle and simply disintegrate.

We are Adam’s children. As a result of sin, the life of men and women is minimized, belittled, and finally destroyed.

That is what death does. But there is more.

The Final Paymaster

Death is ‘the wages of sin,’ says Paul (Rom. 6:23). We deserve it, because we earned it. However unwelcome, it is ours by right. It has already been paid into our account. We cannot avoid it.

When God created man he made him specifically for life-giving fellowship with himself. God’s presence was his original natural environment. But Genesis 3 describes how Adam and Eve refused to be content with a life of absolute dependence on God; they wanted to be like God themselves – free and independent of him. Adam and Eve wanted life without limits. Instead of making themselves independent they destroyed themselves. In place of life they experienced death, God’s final limit on all our independence.

The greatest and the least of us will be humbled in death. So long as we live and breathe we are scarcely able to take this fact in. The difference between life and death is absolute; it is shattering. Yet we have been so desensitized that we are almost blind to its inevitability. We struggle to avoid contemplating the end of life to which we are daily and irreversibly heading.

The New Testament has a telling way of putting this. It speaks of us being in lifelong bondage through the fear of death (Heb. 2:15). This is the mother of all lesser fears. In fact, it is often obscured by them. But like a mother wart on our skin, if we can be delivered from this mother of fears, all other and lesser warts in our lives will be weakened and we will be transformed.

The message of the gospel is that there is a way of deliverance. It involves facing up to the great fear and its cause. That may well be painful. But it will lead to freedom from the fear of death, joy in living, and peace and assurance about the future.

‘Do not be afraid’ are Jesus’ most frequently spoken words. Be assured that he will be with you as you make your way from the bondage of fear to freedom and assurance.

2

AFTER DEATH

‘I have no fear of death.’ Sometimes these words are spoken with quiet faith, at other times with a bravado that seeks to mask anxiety or anger in the face of the defeat of life and at the pain that it brings to all who come under its shadow. Death is the final proof that self-interest and self-centeredness cannot triumph because they cannot endure.

There is always a further dimension. It is underlined by the author of the letter to the Hebrews, although his words are etched already in our instincts: ‘man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment’ (Heb. 9:27).

Can I face God’s judgment of my life with confidence in myself? Surprisingly, large numbers of people believe they can. Many Americans believe that when they die they will pass the scrutiny of God’s judgment and enter heaven. Yet most of us will admit that we are rather vague about how God’s assessment will be made. What does the New Testament have to say to us?

The most obvious feature of God’s judgment is that it is universal in nature; no one will escape it. From the Bible’s very first description of God as judge it is clear that the whole world is his courtroom and every man and woman is subject to his judgment. He is ‘the Judge of all the earth’ (Gen. 18:25).

This is not exclusively an Old Testament teaching. God is ‘the judge of all men’ (Heb. 12:23). When his judgment is portrayed in the New Testament, all the inhabitants of the earth are subject to it (cf. Matt. 25:32).

The most extensive exposition of God as Judge is found in the vivid judgment scene that Paul portrays in Romans 2:1-16. He stresses its universal nature: ‘to each person’ (Rom. 2:6, quoting Ps. 62:12). There are no exceptions, as becomes clear later in Romans when the verdict is pronounced and the sentence is given (Rom. 3:9-20).

What are the important things to know about this judgment? Paul gives us the following fundamental principles.

God’s Judgment Is True

‘God’s judgment … is based on truth [on the reality of the situation]’ (Rom. 2:2). Our own assessments of others are always partial and therefore imperfect. At best they approximate the truth. We cannot marshal all the evidence and take all of the circumstances into account. We see the outside, and have, at best, a fragmentary knowledge of the inner dynamics involved in others’ actions. We are easily misled and often misinterpret situations.

But God’s judgment takes account of the true state of affairs. He is our Creator, and he perfectly understands the norms he has set for human behavior. Since he is faithful to his own nature, his judgment is also rigorously fair. There will be no partiality in his assessment of things. ‘God does not show favoritism’ (Rom. 2:11). It will not be possible to say, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ in the expectation that our position in society will guarantee us God’s preferential treatment. He will assess us as we really and truly are.

God’s...

Table of contents

• Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
• About the Authors
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. The End
• 2. After Death
• 3. The Way to Heaven
• 4. What Will Heaven Be Like
• 5. The Best Is Yet to Be
• 6. Ready to Go
• Epilogue
• Appendix - Annihilation
• Also from Christian Focus…
• Christian Focus