---

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood,
[Jesus] himself likewise shared the same things, so that through
death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that
is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in
slavery by the fear of death. For to me, living is Christ and
dying is gain. As it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear
heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for
those who love him’.

By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into
a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the
dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled,
and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with
fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will
send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all
causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into
the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing
of teeth. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction,
separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of
his might. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there
that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will
transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed
to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to
make all things subject to himself.

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the
things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand
of God.

For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking
for the city that is to come.

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die,
we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die,
we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again,
so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.

And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once,
and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once
to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal
with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

So whether we are at home or away, we make it our
aim to please him. For all of us must appear before the judgment
seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has
been done in the body, whether good or evil.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may
have eternal life.

Hebrews 2:14,15; Philippians 1:21; 1 Corinthians
2:9; 1 Peter 1:3-4; Matthew 13:40-42; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Philippians
3:20-21; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 13:14; Romans 14:8-9; Hebrews
9:27-28; 2 Corinthians 5:9-10; John 3:16.

…..

Death – and the possibility of life after death
– is a serious issue. We are going to be dead a very long time!
Alexander the Great told his slave to say every morning ‘Philip,
remember that you must die!’ Death is no respecter of persons;
it is the ‘great leveler’: one out of one dies.

You know the well-known lines from Hamlet:

To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream;
aye, there’s the rub: For in the sleep of death, what dreams
may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give
us pause…

The dread of something after death, The undiscovered
country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than to fly to others
that we know not of.

Psychologists tell us we die, generally, the way
we’ve lived. Not everybody has the confidence of the ancient Hebrew:
‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will
fear no evil for you are with me’ (Psalm 23:4). Dryden probably
expressed the more common feeling: ‘Death, in itself, is nothing:
but we fear/ To be we know not what, we know not where.’

Christianity is all about someone who has come to
this world from another world, to inaugurate the ‘kingdom of God’.
We humans are not capable of constructing our own utopias; instead
God comes to us in Jesus to redeem us from our follies and to
invite us to enjoy ‘eternal life’. Our faith in his teaching,
his claims about himself, and the reality of his resurrection,
give us a ‘sure and certain hope’ that this life is essentially
a curtain-raiser. Someone has returned from the ‘undiscovered
country’. Our faith in Jesus Christ pierces this ‘cloud of unknowing’.

Jesus taught about the inevitability of rewards
and punishments within and beyond this life, depending on our
relationship to him. Eternal life – a life lived in relationship
with the living God – can be experienced here and now, and more
fully beyond our death or resurrection. Death, separation from
God, is similarly both a present and future experience.

It has been said that Shelley and Milton, despite
the vast differences between them as writers, shared equally an
imaginative inability to think of anything interesting to do in
heaven. The caricature of people sitting on clouds strumming harps
is deep in our folk-consciousness. We simply do not know ‘the
furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell.’ The best we can
say is that Jesus thought heaven was definitely worth attaining
and hell definitely worth avoiding. He seemed to believe in the
reality of both places. And, as we have said all through this
book, for Christians he’s the authority. If you know someone who
has better credentials follow that person (but make sure first
they get themselves resurrected!).

If Jesus was who he said he was, our resurrection
and the life hereafter are ‘for real’. John Drinkwater’s poem
is most suggestive:

Shakespeare is dust, and will not come To question
from his Avon tomb. And Socrates and Shelley keep An Attic and
Italian sleep. They see not. But, O Christians, who Throng Holborn
and Fifth Avenue, May you not meet, in spite of death, A traveller
from Nazareth?

‘Death,’ exclaims the great Christian St. Paul,
‘has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting? Thanks be to God, who gives us
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15:54,55).

…..

Death, grotesque character, bogey-man of little
children, non- existent phantom, I don’t take you seriously, But
I am disgusted with you. You terrify the world, You frighten
and deceive us, And yet your only reason for existing is life,
and you are not able to take from us those that we love.

M. Quoist, Prayers of Life, Dublin: Gill and Son,
1967, p.31.

The day I die will be a glorious day! April I think
– or maybe the first of May. And birds will cry aloud for joy
and life newborn, that glorious morn – the day I die.

And I will walk where fairer flowers than any earth
has seen grow sweet and wild. And undefiled the panorama of my
Father’s home will stretch before my wondering eyes. And with
what glad surprise I shall behold far fairer than all else my
Jesus’ face.

And all that wondrous place will centre on his beauty
– and his grace.

And this will be my own – my very own! For I’ll
be home – the day I die.

Margaret Phillips, The Day I Die. 100 Christian
Poets, Gordon Bailey, England: Lion Publishing, 1983, p.128.

Every person has their own tale to tell, including
those who wouldn’t believe in God if you paid them.

As human beings we are trapped by our rootage in
nature. We are all subject to the forces of aging, sickness, pain
and death. We lack what Big Daddy, in Tennessee Williams’ play
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof calls the ‘pig’s advantage’ – ignorance
of our mortality. The nature of existential anxiety has been discussed
by many thinkers including Soren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir,
Erich Fromm, Paul Tillich, Erik Erikson, Rollo May, Ernest Becker,
and Mary Daly. Erikson calls it the ‘ego chill’. Tillich described
it as our ‘heritage of finitude’.

Howard Clinebell, Growth Counseling, Nashville:
Abingdon, 1979, p.110.

The consequence of… original sin was three kinds
of death: ‘judicial death,’ the realization that rejecting the
relationship with God meant being cut off from his eternal life;
‘spiritual death,’ the awareness of God’s wrath, coupled with
the realization that human beings can do nothing to restore the
lost relationship; and finally, ‘physical death’ which, as James
Denney wrote, is simply a negative sacrament, the outward and
visible manifestation of an inward, spiritual disgrace.

Kenneth Swanson, Uncommon Prayer, New York: Ballantine,
1987, p. 48.

I view death as a coronation. My death will be a
victory. I want the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ sung at my funeral. I
don’t want to leave my family, but I know it is going to be fantastic
on the other side…

There are many people whose lives seem to be prematurely
snuffed out. When my seven-month-old daughter died, I came to
the conclusion that the purpose for her life was fulfilled in
those seven months. That experience transformed me; my view of
death has come into focus because of Judy. We are not here to
fulfil our own purposes, but God’s.

If I am living in conformity with God’s will, if
I am obeying him and doing what he tells me step by step every
day, then when it comes time for me to die, I know this is just
the next step in his will.

Evelyn Christenson, ‘Death’, in LaVonne Neff et.
al, Practical Christianity, Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers
Inc., 1988, p. 219.

When you are with somebody you love, you have little
if any sense of the passage of time, and you also have in the
fullest sense of the phrase ‘a good time’.

When you are with God, you have something like the
same experience. The biblical term for the experience is Eternal
Life. Another is Heaven.

What does it mean to be `with God’? It doesn’t mean
you have to be thinking about being with God, or feeling religious,
or sitting in church, or saying your prayers, though it might
mean any or all of these…

We think of Eternal Life, if we think of it at all,
as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of
it as what happens when life begins.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins,
1973, p.20.

We know neither the moment of the consummation of
the earth… nor the way the universe will be transformed. The
form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away, and we
are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth
in which righteousness dwells, whose happiness will fill and surpass
all the desires for peace arising in our hearts. Then with death
conquered the children of God will be raised in Christ, and what
is sown in weakness and dishonour will put on the imperishable:
charity and its works will remain, and all of creation which God
made for human beings will be set free from its bondage to decay.

Gaudium et Spes, par. 39, in Tony Kelly, Touching
the Infinite, Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1991, pp. 25-26.

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged
by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We
are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces
and lives of our children and by our dreams. Each day finds us
at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the
roads we have not taken as by the roads we have.

The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable
time in the future God will ring down the final curtain on history,
and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgments
upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves
be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who
judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully.

Romantic love is blind to everything except what
is lovable and lovely, but Christ’s love sees us with terrible
clarity and sees us whole. Christ’s love so wishes our joy that
it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy.
The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering
which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal.
The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one…

People are free in this world to live for themselves
alone if they want to and let the rest go hang, and they are free
to live out the dismal consequences as long as they can stand
it. The doctrine of Hell proclaims that they retain this same
freedom in whatever world comes next. Thus the possibility of
making damned fools of ourselves would appear to be limitless.

Or maybe Hell is the limit. Since the damned are
said to suffer as dismally in the next world as they do in this
one, they must still have enough life left in them to suffer with,
which means that in their flight from Love, God apparently stops
them just this side of extinguishing themselves utterly. Thus
the bottomless pit is not really bottomless. Hell is the bottom
beyond which God in his terrible mercy will not let them go.

Dante saw written over the gates of hell the words
`Abandon all hope ye who enter here’, but he must have seen wrong.
If there is suffering life in hell, there must also be hope in
hell, because where there is life there is the Lord and giver
of life, and where there is suffering he is there too because
the suffering of the ones he loves is also his suffering.

`He descended into hell’, the Creed says, and `If
I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there’, the Psalmist (139:8).
It seems there is no depth to which he will not sink. Maybe not
even Old Scratch will be able to hold out against him forever.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins,
1973, pp. 48, 37-38.

Hell is not so much a threat to be hurled at other
people, but a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer
in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ
in solidarity with his descent into the night. One draws near
to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness. One serves the
salvation of the world by leaving one’s own salvation behind for
the sake of others.

J Ratzinger, ‘Eschatology’, pp. 217 ff. in Tony
Kelly, Touching the Infinite, Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1991, p.
193.

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more;
neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the lamb
which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall
lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes, Revelation 7:16-17.

This is one of the most comforting passages in all
literature. It teaches that our loved ones are in a place of
peace and beauty. They are under the watchful care of God and
regularly experience his tenderness. The deep hunger and thirst
of their souls has been satisfied. God, like a loving mother,
puts his protection over them and with kindly hand wipes away
every tear from their eyes. This he has done for your dear ones
who have crossed over to the other side.

If you learn to love this passage and meditate upon
it, he will wipe away every tear from your eyes also.

Norman Vincent Peale, Thought Conditioners, New
York: Foundation for Christian Living, n.d., p.24.

I have heard of love at first sight. I have rarely
heard of love before sight. How can I expect to love a day that
I have never seen? But, depend upon it, when he makes that last
day of mine, he will make it well: and, as is invariably the case,
it will be a very different day from the day my terrors have painted
for me. Even for the Day of Judgment the same will hold true.
It would be the nightmare of the ages if that day were being fashioned
by any hands but his. But since, when that day comes, the print
of his fingers will be upon its dawn, we may be sure that its
proceedings will appeal to everyone’s reason and to everyone’s
conscience. Justice and judgment will be the habitation of his
throne, and we shall sing the old song. `This is the day! This
is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad
in it.’

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In, London: Epworth
Press, 1958, p.25.

There is the constantly recurring question whether
we shall know and meet and recognise each other again on the other
side of death. One thing is quite certain – Christian orthodoxy
does not teach the immortality of the soul; it teaches the resurrection
of the body. We do not mean by that the resurrection of this body
as it is. For many of us the last thing in the world that we would
want is the resurrection of the burden and the weariness of this
mortal body. We would never wish for the resurrection of the actual
body with which someone was smashed up in an accident or died
with an incurable disease. It so happens that Greek has no word
for personality, and the resurrection of the body means the survival
of the personality; it means that in the life beyond, you will
still be you, and I will still be I…

There are two quotations of which I have always
been very fond: `God has his own secret stairway into every heart’.
`There are as many ways to the stars as there are [people] to
climb them’… I have often quoted the dimensions of the heavenly
city as they are given to us in Revelation 21:16. Each side of
the city, which was in the form of a square as John saw it, was…
twelve thousand `stadia’. A stadion was about two hundred and
twenty yards; and… twelve thousand stadia is about fifteen hundred
miles. The area of a square whose sides are fifteen hundred miles
is two million, two hundred and fifty thousand square miles! There
is an immense amount of room in the city of God, room for all
who come. Further, the city had twelve gates, three on the east,
three on the north, three on the south, and three on the west.
There was a way in from whatever direction the pilgrim to it might
come.

William Barclay, Testament of Faith, Oxford: Mowbrays,
1977, pp. 62, 98-99.

Ever since I read Richard Baxter’s sprawling, rhapsodic
classic, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest 40 years ago, I have thought
that today’s Christians ought to be much more heavenly minded
than we are. Baxter showed me how the hope of heaven should spur
us to resolute effort in our discipleship (‘run in such a way
as to get the prize’ 1 Corinthians 9:24) and also bring us joy,
since heaven is our real home. When persons suffering from loss
of memory cannot recall where their earthly home is, we pity them;
but Christians who forget that heaven is their true home, and
never think positively about heaven at all, are much more to be
pitied… If the prospect of being with Jesus Christ, closer than
ever before – all frustration, weakness, and pain having been
left behind – does not thrill us constantly, our Christianity
is dreadfully sub-standard. If we really loved our Lord, would
not this guaranteed hope be a source of eager delight? And is
not loving the Lord the heart of real Christianity? Think about
it.

See you in heaven, I hope.

J.I.Packer, ‘Why I Like My Pie in the Sky’, Blackburn,
Victoria: New Life, 16 August, 1990, p.4.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those
who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’, and those to whom God says,
in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.
Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that
seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.

C.S.Lewis, The Great Divorce, quoted in Clyde S.
Kilby, A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C.S.Lewis, London: Geoffrey
Bles, 1968, pp. 170-171.

…..

Father God, I have committed my whole life to you.
The future is unknown to me, but not to you. Thankfully, modern
medicine can prolong my life, but not for ever. Beyond this life
I’m in your hands: thank you for that most ultimate security.

Give me an unwavering faith in Jesus Christ your
Son, whose coming to us has changed everything. May this faith
annul death’s terrors, and enable me to enjoy his promise of ‘life
in all its fullness’ including some day a glorified body like
his.

Save me from whatever contagion clings to me from
this present evil world. Give me strength to run or to walk, or
to wait with patience.

May I love you with all my heart and serve you with
all my strength, until the day I experience a triumphant welcome
on the other side…

…..

O my God, shall I one day see thee? What sight
can compare to that great sight? Shall I see the source of that
grace which enlightens me, strengthens me, and consoles me? As
I came from thee, as I am made through thee, so, O my God, may
I at last return to thee, and be with thee for ever and ever.

John Henry Newman, in Tony Castle, The Hodder Book
of Christian Prayers, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986, p.26.

Lord Jesus Christ, Good shepherd, in you, past,
present and future are brought together in one great hope. Renew
our faith in you, so that the past may not hinder us, the present
overwhelm us or the future frighten us. You have brought us this
far, and we praise you; continue to lead us until our hope is
fulfilled and we join all God’s people in never-ending praise.

Alan Gaunt, New Prayers for Worship, John Paul the
Preacher’s Press, 1978, p.2.

O God, so rule and govern our hearts and minds by
the Holy Spirit, that being ever mindful of the end of all things,
and the day of thy just judgment, we may be stirred up to holiness
of living here, and dwell with thee forever hereafter; through
Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord.

Frank Colquhoun, Prayers for Every Occasion, USA:
Morehouse-Barlow, 1974, p.130.

We set our hearts on heaven, where Christ is at
God’s right hand. Christ is our life, and when he appears, we
too will share his glory. Christ lives in us. Though our bodies
will die, yet for us the Spirit is life; the Spirit of God who
raised Jesus from death. This is our secret. Christ is in us;
We will share the glory of God…

A grain of wheat is a solitary grain till it falls
to the ground and dies. A grain of wheat is a solitary grain,
but dead it bears a mighty harvest.

Praise to Jesus, the resurrection and the life.
All who have faith in Christ, though they die, they will come
to life; and no one who is alive in faith will ever die.

For the Son of Man was raised up so that everyone
who believes in Jesus may have eternal life.

Look on Jesus, lifted up, lifted high to redeem
the world.

A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland: Collins, 1989,
pp.105, 107.

Lord, care for your people and purify them. console
them in this life and bring them to the life to come. we ask
this in the name of Jesus the Lord…

Father, in your plan of salvation your Son Jesus
Christ accepted the cross and freed us from the power of the enemy.
May we come to share the glory of his resurrection, for he lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever.

Daily Mass Book, Brisbane: The Liturgical Commission,
1990, pp.38, 159.

…..

A Benediction: May the resurrected Christ, whom
having not seen you love, grant you his life, eternal life. May
you live every day of this life, may you be willing to serve the
triune God without prospect of reward, and yet, beyond all knowing,
may you anticipate with absolute assurance, the resurrection of
the body and the life everlasting. Amen.