Life After Death

It’s a general consensus in Christianity that Christ was indeed “raised from the dead.” This is referred to as The Resurrection, of course, and is certainly the turning point of history on which lay the entire foundation of the Christian Church.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty.
1 Corinthians 15:14 NET

Remarkably, there are many who believe in the resurrection, and of everlasting life in Jesus, yet struggle with the idea of or reported claims of near-death experiences (NDE). How do these things relate? Well, when we talk of “life after death,” we’re typically asking about one’s ideas or beliefs regarding the afterlife or, more specifically, Heaven and hell.

Often such conversations are pinned to the deeper philosophical or spiritual concept of “what happens when we die?” Either one is simply asking another their opinion on the subject because they themselves have been unable yet to form one, or the question is posed to stimulate the conversation so that it can be engaged at a deeper level for a variety of reasons.

The stark atheist will simply state that “you die and that’s it. There is nothing else.” Of course, most people actually fall into the realm of agnostic or unconvinced (unknowing), though admittedly their position is likely one born from apathy rather than ignorance. And truth be told, the majority of this latter group do, in fact, believe there is a God, they just reject him because of the implication his existence has on their lives.

It has been long-suggested that Christ himself descended into hell after his death on the cross prior to his resurrection. This idea is commonly derived from the following passages:

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient . . .
1 Peter 3:18-20 NASB

That is why the Good News was preached to those who are now dead—so although they were destined to die like all people, they now live forever with God in the Spirit.
1 Peter 4:6 NLT

Neither of these passages actually say so, but this is at least the basis for the idea. Moreover, the early Roman Catholic Church modified the original Nicene Creed (adopted officially in 381) to include the statement, “He descended into hell.” This addition, while not in the original text, fell into tradition and has stayed with us ever since. But there is a larger point here to make.

And that is that the “hell” spoken of here and suggested in the passages above, is not the hell of eternity (Gehenna in Hebrew, Hades in Greek), but instead refers to the place of the dead (Sheol in Hebrew), that resting place where souls await final judgment on the Day of the Lord.

The conflation of these two “hells” has admittedly caused me some grief in fully understanding the biblical texts, yet now brings great clarity here. I’d never really given much thought to that place between life and eternity, assuming only that upon death, one simply exits the temporal plane (timeline) and moves into a state of eternal existence, be it Heaven or hell. In this way, since there is no time, the dead don’t have to wait around, but instantly find themselves in the presence of the Lord on Judgment Day.

But there must be something more here because, as the gospel of John attests, Jesus was definitely “raised from the dead.”

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Jewish law prescribes that one must be dead for three full days to be declared legally dead. That’s why Jesus waited to raise Lazarus until the fourth day, and why Jesus remained in the ground for three full days. Any premature resurrections wouldn’t have counted as legitimate.

But what this new understanding implies to me, then, is that there is most certainly a place between death and Final Judgment.

I’d recently read Lee Strobel’s book The Case for Heaven, and was struck by the truth of this reality. In it, the author noted a number of folks who each had an out-of-body or near-death experience. Each experience was recorded by an individual who was clinically dead, and yet returned to the place of the living minutes later, recounting details of their experiences during death. In some cases, patients were dead on arrival, and yet were still able to provide verifiable details about staff, objects, and conversations they would not have been privy to while in the emergency room.

Anyway, my point is that I must agree with the historical tradition on this point. While there are no more resurrections in this age, there are certainly regular occurrences of people experiencing clinical death, some who are revived with great effort on the part of the medical personnel, and many who lie indefinitely in a hospital bed on life-support. With this the case, there is indeed a “dead zone” where temporary existence must occur.

It is this very non-physical place that Jesus must also have been a resident of for the thirty-six hours after breathing His last breath on the cross that Wednesday afternoon.

And so when Jesus died, everyone else who had died prior to that was hanging out in that dead zone too. Of course, I still suspect there is no measure of time there, and so those souls would have experienced an instantaneous movement from death to eternity. From those since Noah’s day until Jesus’ day, each and all would experience having “just arrived” at the same time, even though it hasn’t yet happened from our perspective.

So while the outside world waited three days, Jesus had all the time in the world.

For Star Trek fans, this idea was cleverly represented (though unintentionally) in the film Star Trek: Generations. In what would become James T. Kirk’s final chapter, Kirk has been trapped in a galactic energy ribbon called the “Nexus” as a result of an event that left him presumed dead many years earlier. But when the captain of the next generation of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, shows up in that very same Nexus seventy years later, Kirk explains to Picard how he had only “just arrived.”

The implications of this are tremendous. Because we know for a fact that there are daily occurrences of people entering a state of death, for perhaps minutes or seconds, who are then subsequently revived and return to the state of the living. And while this is not an argument for eternity, it is proof-positive of some kind of existence after death, and the clear distinguishing of the body from the soul. The spirit of the dead must go somewhere, if even for a little while—if even, as the atheist insists, before ceasing to exist altogether.

Now, you don’t have to agree with my idea of timelessness in the dead zone, but even the most ardent rejector of God must concede to the truth of that in-between space between life and the everlasting.

“I tell you the truth, those who listen to my message and believe in God who sent me have eternal life. They will never be condemned for their sins, but they have already passed from death into life.”
John 5:24 NLT