What Happens When We Die (Part III)

We have arrived at our third and final installment in our series on what the Bible says happens when humans die. This discussion concludes at a perfect time as theChristian church has just celebrated All Saints Day, a commemoration of the church “triumphant” (those believers who have died).

Over the past two posts in this series, we have examined the Old Testament. We saw how belief in the afterlife went from being nonexistent (you just die and are dead)then to the possibility that the spirit and body have different trajectories and finally to a hope for resurrection—a time when God’s justice will be done if it was not on earth.

Paul’s Letters

Now that we arrive at the New Testament, the first place we look is Paul’s letters—the church’s earliest documents. Resurrection from the dead is the thing that makesChristianity what it is; however, it is not resurrection itself. Rather, theNew Testament changed everything by who it proclaimed was raised from the dead: the Crucified One. God bestowed the highest honor on one whom the world despised, rejected, and dismissed as disposable. Such a proclamation offered everyone else at the bottom of the world’s pile hope that their lowliness might also be transformed.

In the First Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul and his ministry team write to a congregation that is worried. What will happen to those who believe but die before Christ returns? Paul writes: “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died” (4:14). By raising Jesus, God has already demonstrated faithfulness beyond death, and so the living Christians can trust their friends to God’s care until the return of Christ.

Jesus’s Parables

The second place we might look in the New Testament for a picture of what happens after death are Jesus’s words in the gospel narratives. Jesus tells many parables that suggest both reward and punishment in the afterlife. For example, the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16) shows a rich man and poor man dying. The rich man goes to Hades, a place of torment and fire; the poor man goes to be with Father Abraham and is comforted. Jesus explains that their choices and their circumstances in this life determined their place in the afterlife. Interestingly, the majority of Jesus’s parables that include punishment in the afterlife are explicitly for people who are believers.

Revelation

The third and—appropriately—final place we might look in the New Testament is John’s Revelation. Here we see death described as taking place twice: the first and second deaths.

• “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Whoever conquers will not be harmed by the second death” (2:11).
• “Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. Over these the second death has no power” (20:6).

It’s important that we remember that John’s Apocalypse is written symbolically, so these descriptions don’t necessarily tell us what will happen so much as they help us think about the nature of it. By describing more than one death, John’s visions help us understand death as relative (Brian Blount). There are many ways a human being can experience death, and for those who understand God as eternal and capable of raising up new life from death, we should place a higher premium on life defined as “living righteously before God” rather than life as “breathing and heart beating.”

The one thing that all these notions of death and the afterlife have in common is that however it is depicted, it bears on the life we live here and now. The earlyChristians cried momento mori—“remember you will die!”—in order to live faithfully now.