What Happens When We Die Pt 1 for paper

I will be writing about death and what happens after we die. It is not a topic that can be covered in one article, so the subject will be covered in three articles. First “What Happens When We Die”, then “The Fate of the Unsaved”, then “The Fate of the Saved”.

Death is not something we can ignore, though thinking about it may make us uncomfortable. It is like the undertaker who signed all his correspondence with “Eventually Yours”. We will all, sooner or later, have dates with the undertaker. You cannot outlive death! We are all terminally ill with a disease called death; we just don’t know when the end will come.

So first, to understand death we need to review what we are as human beings. I have written about this before so what follows is a summary. We are composite beings that have a body and a spirit. When God created man he said: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.”  Genesis 1: 26  God is a spirit. He has a spiritual body that does not consist of flesh and blood. He is a spiritual being that possesses will, intellect and emotions. Man was made in God’s likeness, so we can assume man physically looks like God. Man was made in God’s image; he was given a spirit that was the image of God’s Spirit. That spirit given to man possessed a will, intellect and emotions that were like Gods. It is important to dwell on this. So often we think of our will, intellect and emotions as solely a brain function; a function of our physical body. God does not have a physical brain, yet he possesses will, intellect and emotions. All spiritual beings (God, angels, Satan, demons) can think reason and communicate without a physical brain. The attributes that make up what we call our mind or consciousness are a function of our spirit in combination with our brain and they define us as human beings. It is this will, intellect and emotions that are a function of both our brain and our spirit that separated Adam from the animals. Man was an order of creation above animals, not evolved from them. Animals also have will, intellect and emotions, but it is limited to a function of their physical brain. We generally call this level of functioning instinct. It is not an accident that no animal has man’s mental capabilities or intelligence.

It is having a spirit in the image of God that gives man life: “The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.”  Job 33: 4   The breath of life breathed into Adam was the Spirit of God. Adam was created as a combination of flesh and blood, and a spirit and so are we:  “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139: 13

So man is a composite being with a physical body and a spirit that has cognitive abilities apart from man’s physical brain. A lay definition of medical death could be defined by the ceasing of the function of the heart resulting in the rest of the body, including the brain ceasing to function because of a lack of oxygen. But spiritually death is the separation of the body and the spirit: “Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets. …..  and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”   Ecclesiastes 12: 5b &7  

So at death the man’s physical body decomposes or is cremated while his spirit lives on. This spirit contains the will, intellect and emotions of the man, or all that makes him a thinking, reasoning being. That spirit, like God or angels, or Satan has complete cognitive abilities and does not die with the body.

Now some churches and cults teach that our spirit sleeps with our bodies in death. But Jesus said when speaking to the Jews of his day: “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”  John 8: 56   Abraham died more than a millennium before Christ, yet he saw Jesus. He was not sleeping, but remained “cognitive” and saw Jesus “in his day”. Also Moses and Elijah appeared and talked with Jesus at his transfiguration. They were not sleeping. Also Jesus said: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” Matthew 32: 22

These people’s bodies were sleeping in the grave, but their spirits were not. They were very much alive with full cognitive abilities. So after death we retain our cognitive abilities and can think, reason, communicate and see the same as before we die.

So we are dead, what happens next.The Bible classifies the whole human race into two broad categories—the saved and the unsaved or the lost. The saved are those who believe in Jesus and are baptized. The lost are those who do not believe. What happens to the saved is radically different from what happens to the lost. This will be the subject of my next two columns.