One Personality, One Life, One Death

The important question of “who am I?” has gotten a new twist by the recent outbreak of “past lives-therapy.” It is bad enough to have so many people turning inward in self-analysis to determine whether or not they are “fulfilled” or “free” or “in touch with themselves.” But with the springing up of the new “past-lives therapy,” whether in group sessions or in expensive personal sessions with the therapist, people are being told that they need to search back to discover who they were in previous existences. Recently I met someone who “remembered” another existence when she had had her hands tied behind her back, and had been burned at the stake. This was her traumatic death, which could be responsible for some of her present troubles, she said. People are led to be certain that they have lived several lives before, and are “helped” by “meditation,” “hypnosis,” or some sort of talk sessions, into discovering who they were. The spread of this acceptance of reincarnation will add another question to, “who am I?”, making the puzzle more complicated with, “who was I?” Reincarnation is taken in this new form of psychoanalysis and made to be a reasonable probability, divorced from religious connections, so that Presbyterians, or Methodists, or people of any kind of religious affiliation are told that this won’t interfere with their beliefs. It is just something that takes place, and we need to recognize it in order to become “better adjusted,” and overcome our “depressions and tensions.”

Perhaps you haven’t met anyone yet who tells you what her life was, or his life was, in the past few centuries, but you probably will before long. It is important not to be just jolted, or shocked, or amused, but to think very soberly as to why this cannot be true. With the onslaught of old heathen ideas coming in new clothing we need to be ready with an answer for ourselves that is in season with the need, as well as answers for someone who might want to discuss the idea with us.

People of any religious affiliation are being told that reincarnation will not interfere with their beliefs. It is taken in this new form of psychoanalysis and made to be reasonable.

We were listening to a trio playing Beethoven’s trios for piano, violin, and cello in the little old Vevey theater the other evening. This dusty, small, undecorated old place seemed a strange bit of space to be containing the gorgeous sounds coming forth from one of the world’s best trios. The exact same “space” has had divergent kinds of entertainment, bringing forth sounds as varied as could be imagined. As we sat there listening Fran whispered to me, “Strange about space, isn’t it?” and I nodded, looking around me and thinking my thoughts about all that had been seen and heard in this particularly hemmed in bit of space. One could go on for pages about the use, and re-use of space throughout the history of the world. Buildings that have been used as places of business, temples, markets, churches, and have continued to stand to be used by yet more divergent purposes. Pieces of ground, properties, estates that have been the scene of titanically different events, or daily uses. One plot of ground could easily have been used for the guillotine at one time, and for grazing cows in another, and a maypole dance at some other point in history. Space is used, over and over and over again with so many different uses, and as the background for so many scenes. Just think of Holland as so much under sea water at one time, and as a battlefield another, as full of tulips and windmills at one time, with some of that same space filled with high rise apartment buildings that are as grey in contrast to tulips as is a stormy evening in contrast to a blazing sunset. Space—the space we are familiar with in the world, was in existence when Adam and Eve walked in their bit of geography, and was all there as Christ lived and died and was buried and rose again. The same space he walked and talked in during his days on earth still goes on filled with the footsteps and voices of hundreds of people.

But people, human beings are significant personalities, so significant that the way has been opened up to them to live forever. An individual is born in a body, and when that individual becomes a Christian, a child in the Lord’s family, he or she has the same body that will one day be changed to be like Christ’s resurrected body. But may we never forget the marvel that it will be the same body. The changed body and the changed life of the kind of “born again” the Bible is talking about consist of the same body and the same person forever. We are not wiped out so that someone else can use our bodies, nor are our bodies wiped out so that we can use the bodies being formed by two new parents.

It is very interesting in the connection of the preciousness of our identity as a person that we really are separate identities forever. Jesus died that we might each be saved, one by one. We are not gathered up in bunches of ten at a time blurred through years of merging.

Hebrews 9:27,28 points this up with a knife-edge sharpness: “And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once, and after this comes the judgment; so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, not to bear sin, to those who eagerly await Him, for salvation” (NASV). We die once. Our one-time trauma of death is as much of a promise as the one-time suffering of death Christ had to go through for us. It is a very conclusive statement—we don’t have to “worry about living many lives that end in many deaths. Space is re-used. In contrast, personalities live one lifetime and are warned not to waste that period of time. Personalities die once, unless Jesus comes back before they die, in which case even that “once” is canceled.

Thank God for eternal life in which we will have access to another section of “space” where God is preparing for us a city, and eons and eons of time to explore and grow in understanding and discovery. But thank God we won’t have to be confused as to who we are or who we have been.

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