Eternal Death

Is there really an afterlife? While most people think humans will never be able to prove what happens after death, half of adults still believe their spirit lives on—somewhere.

The new survey of over 1,000 people in the United Kingdom, finds 50% of respondents believe in an afterlife. Of this group, 60% believe everyone experiences the same thing when they die—regardless of their individual beliefs. However, two in three believe scientists will never be able to tell us what really happens when someone passes.

Regardless of whether people think they’re going to heaven (55%) or worry their life choices could end up sending them to hell (58%), the poll finds 68% of all respondents have no fear of what comes next. Overall, one in four think people go to heaven or hell, 16% believe they’ll exist in a “spiritual realm,” and 16% believe in reincarnation.

No matter what happens after death, respondents are confident it’ll actually be an improvement over their current life. The poll finds adults think heaven provides people with a chance to recapture the things they’ve lost throughout their life.

The vast majority (86%) think the afterlife involves a sense of peace and 66% describe it as a place of happiness. Three in five adults believe there will be no more suffering when they die.

However, respondents think there are a few conditions people need to follow in order to reach this peaceful realm. Over four in five people (84%) say you have to live a good life and be a generally good person to reach heaven. One in three claim you have to place your faith in a higher power to reach the afterlife and one in five say it requires you to confess all your sins.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This survey was taken in mid-life when old age and illness are seen as far away. When one gets closer to the end, it is likely many of them will change their opinion, or fall deeper into denial with the help of Satan who wants to soothe them with lies.

In a novel by the British mystery writer P.D. James, a detective shares a common sentiment, saying, “I don’t go for all this emphasis on sin, suffering, and judgment. If I had a God, I’d like him to be intelligent, cheerful, and amusing.” In response, her Jewish colleague says, “I doubt whether you would find him much of a comfort when they herded you into the gas chambers. You might prefer a God of vengeance.”

Theologian J. Todd Billings comments on this quote:

A God without wrath is a God who whitewashes evil and is deaf to the cries of the powerless. A student of mine who grew up in a gang culture and had many whom he loved taken from him by violence told me with profound honesty that “If God will not avenge, I am tempted to avenge.” Precisely because God is a God of love, he is also a God of holy wrath.

Drive three and a half hours north of Turkmenistan’s capital, into the flat, seemingly empty desert. In the middle of nowhere, you’ll see it. Bright orange flames rise out of an infernal abyss, licking the night sky. The air at the pit’s edge is thick and hot, like standing too close to an erupting volcano. It smells faintly of propane, and it is loud, like a jet engine revving up. Welcome to the Gates of Hell—at least until its devilish blaze is snuffed out.

In January of 2022, Turkmenistan’s President announced plans to extinguish the decades-old conflagration in the chasm. He cited safety concerns for those living nearby as well as economic loss as valuable methane gas burns off into the atmosphere. But he didn’t specify how he would put out the immense fire—perhaps by filling in the crater or diverting the gas elsewhere.

People have been trying to put out the crater’s fires since they first ignited—whenever that was. No one even knows exactly how or when the crater formed. The most widely circulated story about the crater says it formed in 1971 following a drilling accident. The Soviets were drilling in the desert for natural gas, when the drilling rig collapsed into the earth. Hoping to burn off the methane gas that floated up from the newly formed crater, the Soviets lit it on fire. They thought it would burn off the methane in a day or two. Five decades later, the crater’s still burning.

It’s rumored the Soviets tried to stop the blaze several times. But the fiery hellscape has continued to burn, drawing more and more tourists each year. The crater’s growing popularity is largely thanks to the internet and viral photos of the unearthly phenomenon.

But it may be harder to stop the flames than just pouring a bunch of sand into the pit. Explorer George Kourounis said, “As I was digging into the ground to gather soil samples, fire would start coming out of the hole I just freshly dug because it was creating new paths for the gas to come out of the crater. So even if you were to extinguish the fire and cover it up, there’s a chance that the gas could still find its way out to the surface and all it would take is one spark to light it up again.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This deadly manmade fire may one day be extinguished. But the real fires of hell will burn forever according to the Lord’s own words as he described the Lake of Fire, the destiny of the unsaved.

In the classic Russian novel Eugene Onegin, a jaded aristocrat Onegin, meets an innocent young girl in the countryside. The girl, Tatyana, writes him a letter, offering him her love. Onegin does not reply. When they meet again, he turns her down: the letter was touching, he tells her, but he would soon grow bored of marriage to her. Years later, Onegin enters a St. Petersburg party and sees a stunningly beautiful woman. It is Tatyana. But she is now married. Onegin falls in love with her. He tries desperately to win her back. But Tatyana refuses him. Once, the door was open: she offered him her love. Now it is shut.

For many of us, it is easy to reject Jesus now. Like Tatyana's letter to Onegin, his offer is touching. But we believe we will be happier without such a commitment. We worry he will cramp our style, so we move on with life and leave him in the spiritual countryside. One day, the Bible warns, we will see Jesus in all his glory, our eyes painfully open to his majesty. We will know in that moment that all our greatest treasures were nothing compared with him, and we will bitterly regret that decision. But it will be no more unfair than Tatyana's rejection of Onegin. If we accept Jesus now, we will live with him forever in a fullness of life we cannot imagine. If we reject him, he will one day reject us, and we will be eternally devastated. The choice is ours.

Tim Keller says:

In one of my after-service discussions a woman told me that the very idea of a judging God was offensive. I said, "Why aren't you offended by the idea of a forgiving God?" She looked puzzled. I continued, "I respectfully urge you to consider your cultural location when you find the Christian teaching about hell offensive." I went on to point out that secular Westerners get upset by the Christian doctrines of hell, but they find Biblical teaching about turning the other cheek and forgiving enemies appealing.

I then asked her to consider how someone from a very different culture sees Christianity. In traditional societies the teaching about "turning the other cheek" makes absolutely no sense. It offends people's deepest instincts about what is right. For them the doctrine of a God of judgment, however, is no problem at all. That society is repulsed by aspects of Christianity that Western people enjoy, and are attracted by the aspects that secular Westerners can't stand.

Why, I concluded, should Western cultural sensibilities be the final court in which to judge whether Christianity is valid? I asked the woman gently whet her she thought her culture superior to nonWestern ones. She immediately answered "no." "Well then," I asked, "why should your culture's objections to Christianity trump theirs?"

Leighton Ford, evangelist and brother-in-law of Billy Graham, once met the former boxing champion Muhammad Ali at a hotel in Sydney, Australia. Ford listened as Ali regaled a group of admiring onlookers before introducing himself as "Billy Graham's brother-in-law." Ali's face lit up as he said, "Oh Billy! Billy! I love Billy! I went up and saw him at the house at Montreat and he signed a book for me." Ford explained what happened next:

We got into a very interesting conversation. He was not only very articulate, he was also a very bright man. Of course earlier in his life Ali had become a Muslim, but he told me and the onlookers, "You know I have travelled all over the world. And I have seen all these different religions. It seems to me that they all have the same thing. It's kind of like you have a river, and you have a lake, and you have a pond, and you have a stream. But they all have water in them, so they are all the same, aren't they?"

I said, "Muhammad that is very interesting. But suppose you have all of them and suppose they are all polluted. Then you would need a purifier, don't you? You see that's who Jesus is. Jesus is the purifier." And he thought about that for a minute and he said, "That's good. I had never thought about it quite like that. Jesus, the purifier."

I know that Muslims don't refer to Jesus as "the Son of God" because they interpret that in some physical way that God had relations with Mary, which of course isn't true. So I told him, "Did you know that in the Bible Jesus is called the Second Adam?" And he said, "I didn't know that." I said, "Yes, you see there was the first Adam that God made in the first creation. Then the second Adam was Jesus, the new creation, in whom everyone can become new." And he said, "I've got to think about that."

Well it was 30 years ago and I haven't seen him since. I know that "The Greatest," as he called himself, has met the One who alone is really the Greatest, because all great ones pass away. But he has come face-to-face with the One great God. I wonder what Muhammad Ali had to say, or maybe he would say, "God what do you have to say?"

The magazine Vanity Fair published an article on the actress Jessica Alba, which had the following paragraph on Alba's faith and views on God:

Alba's childhood was marked by two things: illnesses … that landed her in the hospital often, and a burning desire to leave a mark on the world, which at the age of 12 meant becoming a devout born-again Christian. "I was seeking a purpose," Alba says of her years as a member of a conservative Christian youth group. "I wanted to exist for a reason." This lasted until she was 17, when, she says, she was turned off by the boundaries and labels set by fellow churchgoers. That year, she attended an acting workshop in Vermont and "fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, 'There's just no way he's going to hell!'" Acting opened her to a new world of creative people and a community where she belonged. "I felt like, at the end of the day, God is love and everyone is human."

Editor's Note: Alba expresses what many in our culture feel and think—that God does not and will not judge sin. But the Cross shows God's righteous judgment of sin and that he bears our sin.

The British ocean liner, the R.M.S. Lusitania, was struck by a torpedo from a German submarine on May 7, 1915. It appears that in an effort to minimize panic, the captain, William Thomas Turner, created a false sense of assurance. Shortly after the torpedo struck the liner, a fellow passenger, Charles Lauriat, heard a female passenger call out, "Captain, what do you wish us to do?" Author Erik Larson writes he replied, "Stay right where you are, Madam, she's all right."

"Where do you get your information?" she asked. "From the engine room, Madam," he said. But the engine room clearly had told him no such thing … Lauriat and the woman now headed back toward the stern, and as they walked they told other passengers what the captain had said. Second-class passenger Henry Needham may have encountered the pair, for he recalled that a passenger approaching from the direction of the bridge had shouted, "The Captain says the boat will not sink."

"The remark," Needham wrote, "was greeted with cheers and I noticed many people who had been endeavoring to get a place in the boats, turned away in apparent contentment."

Turner's words merely confirmed what the passengers and crew already believed, or wanted to believe: that no torpedo could cause the ship mortal damage.

Of the 1,959 passengers aboard the Lusitania, 1,198 perished.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Judgment; Hell; Warning—Jesus spoke about hell and judgment (as do other parts of Scripture) not to scare us, but to prepare us for what's really coming. (2) Honesty—This is also a good example of the need to speak the truth in love in Christian community.

British evangelist Rico Tice says, "Loving people means warning people." He illustrates with the following personal story:

I was once in Australia visiting a friend. He took me to a beach on Botany Bay, so I decided I had to go for a swim. I was just taking off my shirt when he said: "What are you doing." I said: "I'm going for a swim." He said: "What about those signs?" And he pointed me to some signs I'd not really noticed— Danger: Sharks! With all the confidence of an Englishman abroad, I said: "Don't be ridiculous— I'll be fine." He said: "Listen mate, 200 Australians have died in shark attacks— you've got to decide whether those shark signs are there to save you or to ruin your fun. You're of age—you decide." I decided not to go for a swim.

[Many of the words about hell found in the Bible] are all straight from Jesus' lips. And they're a loving warning to us. The reason Jesus talked about hell is because he does not want people to go there. The reason Jesus died was so that people wouldn't have to go there. The only way to get to hell is to trample over the cross of Jesus. That is a great motivator for our evangelism.

In an interview with Rolling Stone Johnny Depp magazine said:

I went around for years thinking, "Well, what's it all for? All this stuff that I gotta do, interviews and movies and success or not success or this or that. [But when my daughter was born] it was if a veil was lifted, and things became clearer, and I went, "Oh, I get it now! That's what life is for … " I didn't have a real handle on what life is supposed to mean or be or anything like that. And I still don't. And I'm not sure life is supposed to mean anything at all. But as long as you have the opportunity to breathe, breathe. As long as you have the opportunity to make your kid smile and laugh move it forward … . I think we're here and that's kind of it. Then it's dirt and worms.

When he dies, Depp said it would be cool to have his body "just tossed over a mountain so that people could watch [my body] bounce." "Might as well entertain people,' Depp said.

Michelangelo's final work was called Rondanini Pietà, on which he worked for ten years. Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Michelangelo, wrote that Michelangelo "ended up breaking the block [for this sculpture], probably because [it] was full of impurities and so hard that sparks flew from under his chisel." The sculpture was rescued by a servant and survives to this day. It bears the marks of Michelangelo's chisel, but none of the beauty of his earlier work Pietà.

What happened? Another sculptor named Lorenzo Dominguez once summarized the dilemma and unpredictability of working with stone. He said, "The stone wants to be stone; the artist wants it to be art."

The same dilemma exists for those of us who are the work of God's hands. In an attempt to free the image of Christ that's within us, God begins chipping away everything that isn't Jesus. The stone of our lives either submits to the chipping or it resists.

If it submits, features of the Savior begin to emerge from our life. If it submits long enough, the Savior himself emerges. If, however, it resists, and continues to resist, there will come a day when God will let the stone be stone.

C. S. Lewis said as much when he stated that 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, "Okay, go ahead and have it your way."

Possible Preaching Angles: You can use this story to either talk about disobedience and rebellion in the life of the Christian or to illustrate the gift of human free will we can use to reject God and end up in hell.

A 2012 interview with the actor and film director Woody Allen states that "Allen has been confronting the horror of mortality … since he was five."

Allen said,

There's no advantage to aging. You don't get wiser, you don't get more mellow, you don't see life in a more glowing way. You have to fight your body decaying, and you have less options.

The only thing you can do is what you did when you were 20—because you're always walking with an abyss right under your feet … which is to distract yourself. Getting involved in a movie [occupies] all my anxiety … If I wasn't concentrated on [distractions], I'd be thinking of larger issues. And those aren't resolvable, and you're checkmated whichever way you go.

Steve Jobs shares:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked."

Colin Smith addresses people who object to God's judgment on sin:

You may say, "Wait a minute. How can any sin deserve everlasting destruction? If God is just, how can he punish like this?"

The best answer I ever heard to that question was given by a friend of mine who is a middle school pastor. He outlined the stages of the following scenario:

Suppose a middle school student punches another student in class. What happens? The student is given a detention. Suppose during the detention, this boy punches the teacher. What happens? The student gets suspended from school. Suppose on the way home, the same boy punches a policeman on the nose. What happens? He finds himself in jail. Suppose some years later, the very same boy is in a crowd waiting to see the President of the United States. As the President passes by, the boy lunges forward to punch the President. What happens? He is shot dead by the secret service.

In every case the crime is precisely the same, but the severity of the crime is measured by the one against whom it is committed. What comes from sinning against God? Answer: Everlasting destruction.

"Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog." Those are the first words of the final blog post written by Derek Miller at www.penmachine.com.

The second paragraph includes the blogger's autobiography in just two sentences: "I was born on June 30, 1969, in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming." Miller had been battling the cancer for four years at the time of his death, and he asked a friend to post his final words on the blog that had become a public record of his struggle.

The style of Miller's entire blog is honest and open, and he paints the story of his final months with a boldness that is sometimes shocking, sometimes warm, sometimes funny, and sometimes deeply sad.

He asks his friends to bring him cans of Diet Cherry Coke and Easy Cheese, for example, adding: "And if you say that those are horrible food-like substances that will give me cancer, I will just laugh and laugh." He starts another post this way: "I'm at the point with my cancer that the car has finally bumped down off the pavement and we're driving on gravel now. What I mean is, the end of the road is somewhere up ahead, not too far."

Miller's final entry opens a window inside of a man who expects nothing to happen after he dies. "I haven't gone to a better place, or a worse one," he writes. "I haven't gone anyplace, because Derek doesn't exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn't make it through a particularly frosty night."

His final words were for his wife: "I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you."

Derek Miller's story is not exceptional because he was more aware of his oncoming death than others, nor is it unique because of his willingness to talk about it. No, what is distinctive about his words is that they are written for every person who ever lived or will live.

Whether or not friends will post it tomorrow or in 50 years, we can all write our final blog post. We all know this is coming.

We have a faith that does not shrink from death. The fundamental concern of our faith is both to reveal with fearsome accuracy the nature of death, and to draw the sting from it by the victory of the resurrected Christ. We, of all people, need to deny nothing true, the bad and the good. Of all people, we are most able to confess the grand proportions of death: so terrible as to defeat us all!—but defeated, rather, in Jesus.

—Author Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Every once in a while, you hear a stunning story about loved ones who are notified of a death in the family that hasn't actually happened. In this case, Alfred and Geri Esposite of Mastic Beach, New York, had been told that their son, Freddy, had been killed in a collision with a tractor-trailer on a Pennsylvania highway. It was an understandable mistake on the authorities' part. For some reason the man who died was carrying Freddy's driver's license.

Freddy was supposed to be staying with his brother Chris, so when Chris got word of his brother's death, he raced home. Geri, the mother, relates what happened next: "He goes downstairs into his brother's apartment, and he saw something on the couch. Chris poked at the lump under the blankets, and his brother awoke. Chris screamed, 'You're dead! You're dead!' And Freddy counters, 'I'm sleeping!'"

That's the story of our lives as Christians. Thanks to the resurrection of Jesus, we don't die. We sleep. The Bible speaks only of Christians who sleep, and even in our sleep we are alive in Christ, consciously awaiting the day Jesus returns to claim his bride, the church.

You've probably heard the saying, "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." That can be said emphatically of the Japanese man Tsutomu Yamaguchi. On August 6, 1945, just before the end of World War II, Yamaguchi, a maritime engineer, was in Hiroshima, Japan, on a business trip. At 8:15 in the morning, he heard a bomber fly over the city. Suddenly there was a great flash of light, and he was blown over by a powerful force. A U.S. bomber had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed some 140,000 people. Yamaguchi was not one of them, for he survived the blast, though his face and arms were burned. He also suffered temporary blindness, and his hearing was damaged.

He stayed in Hiroshima that night, and the next day, Yamaguchi was able to travel to return to his home city. His home city was 190 miles southwest of Hiroshima. His home city was Nagasaki. Those well-versed in history know that on August 9th, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, a U.S. bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Again Yamaguchi saw a great flash of light, and the building he was in was blown over. He was knocked unconscious, but was not seriously hurt. This atomic explosion killed some 70,000 people. Once again, however, Yamaguchi was not one of them. Again he lived through an atomic blast.

Interestingly, he is not the only one to have lived through the horrific experience. Although approximately 210,000 died in the bombings, some 260,000 people actually survived the blasts, including 165 people who, like Yamaguchi, were believed to have survived the deadly bombings in both cities. Still, Yamaguchi was the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having lived through both.

The man who survived two atomic bombs and the potential delayed effects of radiation poisoning survived the lesser perils of daily life for another 65 years. But even he could not cheat death forever. In the year 2010, at age 93, Yamaguchi finally succumbed to the stubborn, unyielding, implacable power of death. What two atomic bombs could not do, old age did.

Author Doug Mendenhall shares a brief parable that should cause all of us to pause and reflect:

Jesus called the other day to say he was passing through and [wondered if] he could spend a day or two with us.

I said, "Sure. Love to see you. When will you hit town?"

I mean, it's Jesus, you know, and it's not every day you get the chance to visit with him. It's not like it's your in-laws and you have to stop and decide whether the advantages outweigh your having to move to the sleeper sofa.

That's when Jesus told me he was actually at a convenience store out by the interstate.

I must have gotten that Bambi-in-headlights look, because my wife hissed, "What is it? What's wrong? Who is that?"

So I covered the receiver and told her Jesus was going to arrive in eight minutes, and she ran out of the room and started giving guidance to the kids—in that effective way that Marine drill instructors give guidance to recruits. …

My mind was already racing with what needed to be done in the next eight—no seven—minutes so Jesus wouldn't think we were reprobate loser slobs.

I turned off the TV in the den, which was blaring some weird scary movie I'd been half watching. But I could still hear screams from our bedroom, so I turned off the reality show it was tuned to. Plus, I turned off the kids' set out on the sun porch, because I didn't want to have to explain Jon & Kate Plus Eight to Jesus, either, six minutes from now.

My wife had already thinned out the magazines that had been accumulating on the coffee table. She put Christianity Today on top for a good first impression. Five minutes to go.

I looked out the front window, but the yard actually looked great thanks to my long, hard work, so I let it go. What could I improve in four minutes anyway?

I did notice the mail had come, so I ran out to grab it. Mostly it was Netflix envelopes and a bunch of catalogs tied into recent purchases, so I stuffed it back in the box. Jesus doesn't need to get the wrong idea—three minutes from now—about how much on-line shopping we do.

I ran back in and picked up a bunch of shoes left by the door. Tried to stuff them in the front closet, but it was overflowing with heavy coats and work coats and snow coats and pretty coats and raincoats and extra coats. We live in the South; why'd we buy so many coats? I squeezed the shoes in with two minutes to go.

I plumped up sofa pillows, my wife tossed dishes into the sink, I scolded the kids, and she shooed the dog. With one minute left I realized something important: Getting ready for a visit from Jesus is not an eight-minute job.

Then the doorbell rang.

Used with permission from author.