III
Let me now bring to your attention some of the peculiarities of what the Bible does tell us about life after death. The subject is vast, so I can only touch on a few points. When a believer dies, he/she goes to be with the Lord. Paul longed for this. “Now we know,” he writes to the Corinthians, “that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling . . . so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life . . . We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:1–2, 4b, 7–8). And to the Philippians he writes: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain . . . I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Phil 1:21, 23b–24). The state referred to here—the state of “being with Christ”—appears not to be that of resurrection. The general resurrection will happen at the Lord’s return, not before. It would seem that the state being referred to here—and the place being referred to—is what is called elsewhere “paradise,” or the “third heaven,” where Paul at one point was transported in the Spirit (2 Cor 12:2–4). The word has the connotation of a garden, a place of bliss and rest in God’s presence, as in the words of the risen Lord to the church in Ephesus reported in the book of Revelation: “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is the paradise of God” (Rev 2:7b). It is presumably the paradise where Jesus went immediately upon his death, and where the believing thief on the cross would go to join him (Luke 23:43).
In this state, the mortal body has been left behind, the incorruptible body has yet to be given. The human spirit, inbreathed by God, is the soul—the form, if you will—of the body, its vital structure and animating principle. At death it has been separated from the body, which has now become a cadaver—“I” am gone from what was my body, that decaying flesh is no longer “me.” This bodiless state of the human person is impossible for us to imagine, yet Scripture does seem to reveal that it is a stage between our physical death and our ultimate state, our resurrection, when we will be clothed with a spiritual body. Personal identity is retained and recognizable, and communion in love—with the Lord and with those who are his—characterizes this new form of reality; but the plenitude of redemption, the fullness of our hope, when, as Paul writes to the Romans, “the creation itself will be liberated from the bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21)—this plenitude is not yet present. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul declares to the Christians in Philippi. “Already—even now,” he might have added, and surely after our death, when the soul is released from our earthly body. But the plenitude is still to come. “And,” he writes, “we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil 3:20–21).
For the Christian, eternal life cannot properly be conceived without a body, for the body is an essential part of God’s good creation, the means by which the soul—the body’s inner life—expresses itself. Material and spiritual reality are not to be disconnected in a Cartesian manner and set in opposition, as the modernist mindset insists on doing. They are interlocked as a single reality. God, who is Spirit, has created and sustains a material cosmos, and he is immanent within every particle of it, even while being absolutely transcendent to it. Spirit animates materiality and, from a Christian point of view, materiality cannot be properly conceived apart from Spirit. The plenitude of created human being cannot be imagined apart from corporeality, but it must be a corporeality that is incorruptible, not subject to decay, animated entirely by the life-giving Spirit that is God. In a word, the ultimate perfection—the complete realization—of a human person is not an immaterial immortal soul but a spiritual body, as Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 15.
This transformation will be wrought by the power of God at the moment of Christ’s return. Paul longs for this, it is the source of his hope, that for which he “presses on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:14). “We ourselves,” he writes elsewhere, “who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved” (Rom 8:23–24a). And finally, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s extended treatise on the resurrection, he declares: “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:42–44). The perishable, he insists, cannot inherit the kingdom of God: “For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality . . . then the saying that is written will come true (here he quotes from Hosea 13:14): ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (1 Cor 15:52a, 53, 54b).
IV
To conclude, a brief word on the final judgment. “A time is coming,” says Jesus in John’s Gospel, “when all who are in their graves will hear his—the Son of Man’s—voice and come forth, those who have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28b–29). Jesus, echoing a text in Daniel 12:1–3, is presenting himself here as the eschatological Judge entrusted by the Father with the authority to exercise judgment at the time of the end, that is, when he returns in glory. All human beings will be raised up and judged according to what they have done. Christians—let us say all those who have believed in Christ or whose hearts will have been disposed to believe in him—are not under condemnation, because they have received Christ and the benefits of his atoning work on the cross (Rom 8:1). Jesus took our judgment upon himself, in our place. But our works will be judged. The apostle Paul writes: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Cor 5:10). “You, then,” he scolds the Romans, “why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we all will stand before God’s judgment seat . . . So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God” (Rom 14:10, 12). And similarly, to the Christians in Corinth:
But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. (1 Cor 3:10b–15)
John takes up the same theme in the Book of Revelation, in his vision of the final judgment:
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. . . . And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books . . . Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev 20:11a, 12, 13b, 14–15)
We are not saved by our works—we are justified entirely by grace through faith, in accordance with God’s mercy in Christ; but our works on this earth have great importance, for we will be judged and rewarded according to them. What was godly in them will be retained, what was not will be burnt up. Our daily choices and actions have eternal significance. This a sobering thought. Not just our faith in Christ, but the way we live out that faith in historical