Life After Death (after life after death)...

We slipped. We've all done it - just said the wrong thing at the wrong time. The other night while we were putting Nate to bed he asked a TOUGH question, to which we replied, "you'll have to ask God when you get to heaven"... A reasonable enough response.

"I DON'T WANT TO GO TO HEAVEN!!!"

"I WANT TO BE HERE WITH YOU!!!"

I wonder if we ever really get over that response to our own death.

Nate knew that "heaven" was the place people went after they "died" - a concept about which he knew very little except for the fact that when someone "died" and went to "heaven" he NEVER got to see, touch, talk to, cuddle, wrestle, or laugh with them again. This "heaven" was becoming the place where our loved-ones went so that we couldn't be near them again. To a 4 year old, "you'll see them one day" doesn't hold a lot of meaning...

But WE grown-ups know better, right?

What is heaven? What happens to us after we die? We know as Christians that we have the same hope that saved Jesus from a sealed tomb, but I think our models and metaphors for what that might look like are really quite inadequate, unimaginative, and often-times unbiblical.

The only time most of us ever think about "heaven" is after a friend or family member has died and we're at the funeral. Trying to cope, various people will stand at the microphone and either claim that their friend is looking down on us, or has become an angel, or is in a better place. Where do we get these ideas? Are they biblical?

The short answer is yes. And no.

The Bible does promise us that for those of us who are "in Christ" there is a hope. Those who have departed are not, as we fear so deeply, just simply gone.

For followers of Jesus, we know that we will share in His resurrection at the end of the age. But the end of the age isn't here yet, so what happens to us if we die between now and then?

The NT concept is that we are "asleep" in the Lord.

The British Priest and Physicist John Polkinghorne says that in this sleep we are conscious and cared for, but we are not yet fully and bodily resurrected. One way to look at it is that our software (our thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories - everything that makes us, us!) is downloaded onto God's harddrive until our hardware (the physical body) is renewed. After our bodies have been transformed, our "software" is then downloaded and we are - for the first time - whole.

So what we REALLY are looking forward to is not "life after death" - the state of sleep described above, but instead "life after life after death" - in which our bodies will be resurrected and transformed without the effects of sin and decay. We will be as Jesus was after his body passed through the grave clothes - remember, the wrappings were empty - it wasn't his soul that was resurrected, it was ALL of him.

We will be, like Jesus, the same, yet different.

And when we become like Jesus, God will bring heaven and Earth together in the act of new creation. War will end. Poverty will end. I won't be able to manipulate you to get what I want any more. God will save and transform everything, and we get to be a part of that "new creation" NOW, as we follow Jesus. Wow.

Unfortunately, I can't explain all this to Nate yet. I'll just tell him that heaven is a happy place where we will be together and where we'll be even closer to God. But I can't wait to one day tell him the whole story...

I owe almost all of these ideas to Polkinghorne, NT Wright, and Dr. Nancey Murphy.