Life is constantly changing; nothing lasts for ever! This is a sad reality but one that we all have to come to terms with. It is often hard to accept that we will grow old, that loved ones will pass on and that children grow up and leave home. It’s sad but true!
Please read on as I have good news for you. Your life will not end when you die! At first sight that sounds like a contradiction in terms but let me clarify what I mean.
I’ll start at the beginning. The Bible teaches that when God made us he did it in two stages. Firstly he made man ‘of the dust of the ground,’ that is he made a physical body. The second stage is that ‘he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’. God put life into the body and man was called a living soul. We are more than ‘flesh and blood’ we have emotions, personalities, consciousness and memories; in other words there is a spiritual dimension to people. The Bible constantly refers to people as ‘souls’, it states that the soul is precious, that we can lose our soul and that Jesus died to provide the ‘salvation of’ our souls. As a society we also believe in the value of one soul, we launch lifeboats, send out mountain rescues teams and halt whole motorways all to rescue or save one soul.
Initially, humans had a straightforward relationship with God. There were open lines of communication. God and Adam, the first man, it would appear, enjoyed daily contact and intimate friendship but an event took place that ruined that relationship and distanced humans from the creator. Bible students and Christians often call this event ‘the fall’. It’s not a popular notion but it’s still the only rational explanation as to why intelligent people constantly struggle with moral and ethical issues. The scriptures state ‘Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned’. But, here’s the point, death is not the end. Death in the Bible is about separation. We are familiar with the concept of death as separation from the physical world. The other dimension of death as separation from God is usually ignored. At ‘the fall’ man died to God. Unless a person has repented and accepted the gift of God, which is eternal life, then they are effectively ‘the living dead’. Dead to God, dead in sins. The Bible teaches that though the body ends in physical death, the soul lives on. The destination of your soul (I should really say ‘your destination’ as you are your soul) is determined by a choice made in this life.
Most people don't believe this any more. The late Stephen Hawking, British Physicist and author dismissed the notion of an afterlife. He once said 'I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark'.
This argument sounds very feasible especially when proposed by such an intelligent man. It does however ignore the fact that we are not just biological computers. It ignores man's consciousness which the best of brains have grappled with but have to admit is beyond their explanation. Consciousness cannot be defined in purely physiological terms. People are not just a combination of physical and chemical properties they are people with the capacity to relate to God.
Let me remind you of why my information source is the Bible. It is easy to dismiss the Bible as the purely the writings of men but that would not be doing justice to the information it contains, its origins and the consistency of its message. The Bible has an inbuilt testing system of prediction and fulfilment which either stands or falls on the substantive evidence of archeology, science, history, geography and social development. There have been no developments to date in any of these disciplines which have produced evidence which undermines the truthfulness and probity of the Bible.
I suggest that we should pay more attention to what the Bible teaches. One of the books of the Bible (John's gospel) specifically states that it was written 'that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing you may have life in his name'.
My prayer is that this will be the outcome for you if you choose to read the Bible for yourself.
No comments
Post a Comment