“I hope he’s alright,” said a friend (let’s call him Sam), regarding another mutual friend (Conrad) that died a couple of days ago after a caving accident.
The statement just didn’t make sense to me. “‘I hope he’s alright?!’ What do you mean? His dead,” I thought. “‘Alright’ and ‘not-alright’ are irrelevant to a deceased.”
And then, of course, it hit me. We have two completely different paradigms. Sam is Catholic. And in Sam’s paradigm our friend Conrad is most likely now in purgatory burning off his sins.
In my paradigm Conrad is dead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There is no consciousness – no bliss in heaven, nor torture in purgatory or hell. “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead do not know anything, nor do they have any more a reward…” (Ecclesiastics 9:5).
For many people the idea of life after death (i.e. innate immortality of the soul) brings comfort. It is heartening to think that ones departed mom or child or friend is in Heaven. But I guess for many the idea of life after death can also be disheartening, because they might not be in Heaven, but instead experience serious anguish in purgatory or Hell.
Personally I find comfort in the idea that the dead are unconscious – that they are “sleeping the sleep of death” (Psalm 13:3), not suffering in some spiritual realm, and oblivious to the sufferings occurring in this sinful world. Until that wonderful moment at the Second Coming when “…the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise… Therefore comfort one another with these words” (I Thessalonians 4:16, 18).
2 comments:
something i've always wondered about re the 2nd coming -
if you are blind, dumb, deaf, quadroplegic on earth - is that how you are gonna be after the 2nd coming?
will it matter?
the heaven idea that was fed to me as a kid, always bugged me, coz there were so many holes in the story...
meh.
--if you are blind, dumb, deaf, quadroplegic on earth - is that how you are gonna be after the 2nd coming?--
Nope, our bodies will be glorified: “…who shall change our body of humiliation so that it may be fashioned like His glorious body, according to the working of His power…” (Philippians 3:21).
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