This is the Faith Debate, a theological roundtable gab fest, a free-for-all forum with faith community leaders wrestling over the truth. Hoorah! In less than one half hour, learn more about what really matters than what most others learn in a week. Hoorah! The Faith Debate is on the World Wide Web at WFMD.com, keyword faith. Are you ready for the clash of ideas? Are you ready for the sound of freedom? Let's get ready to rumble in this corner. Weighing in with the Master of Divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary, the Faith Debate Master of Ceremonies, Troy Skinner. Welcome to the Faith Debate. Indeed. to listen to a little more of the music that time. My rare treats to you here on the Faith Debate this week. By the way, I probably was remiss, you know, we do record these episodes a little bit in advance, but I try to keep tabs on what's happening with the calendar so that I can say appropriate things on appropriate dates and missed saying something to you so belated, joyous Palm Sunday and a absolutely rejoicing Resurrection Day. Although if you're from the Orthodox tradition, well then I'm a little bit ahead, aren't I? Because the Orthodox celebration of Resurrection Day is May 2nd, so I think we're, what, a week away from that being the case. So I guess in your case, happy Resurrection Day a week early. We are spending some time during this season in the faith debates existence walking through some questions that people have asked of me in my context as the pastor of the Household of Faith in Christ. And last year, around this time, we got a bunch of questions like, should the church be open? Would Jesus wear a mask? That sort of thing. And you've heard those discussions here on the Faith Debate over the last month or so. Last week, we began to tackle a different question, which was, what happens to us when we die? What happens at death? And we didn't quite finish everything we had to say about that last week. And so we're going to pick up where we left off last week with this week's conversation. And you're always welcome to add to the conversation. You're going to find this video posted on social media, on the WFMD Facebook page, on my personal Facebook page. Also, I spend more time, actually, less on Facebook and more on MeWe and Gab and particularly Parler. And so if you want to interact in the comments section in those locations, you certainly can. Or, of course, you can interact with the church where I pastor. Our website is HouseholdOfFaithInChrist.com and you can interact with the stuff that way as well. Or you can just talk about it with your friends. You don't have to involve me if you don't want. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, we're going to pick up where we left off. What happens at death? Good question. Let's see if we have any good answers. When Jesus is talking about, you know, don't touch me, the Greek there, it's really about don't don't grab onto me, don't clutch me, don't cling to me. Right. It's not about, oh, I can't touch you. It's about don't don't hang on to me. And he's saying this is not the time for that. I need to don't hang on to me. I'm going to need to depart and I'm going to send the paraclete, the comforter, I'm going to send the spirit. So don't hang on to me now, you'll have plenty of me for eternity eventually, but don't hang on to me now, that's not the time. I think that's a better way to understand that passage. He's saying, I'm not back to stay. Well then how is he able to walk through walls? Because he can't walk through walls if he doesn't have a body. When he just appeared with them and they were eating. Yes, but Christ has his resurrection body at that time. He did? That's how I understood it. OK. So he has his resurrection body. I thought it was those 30 days in between, like when they were walking on the road to... He hasn't resurrected yet, has he? No, so, OK, this is a large... I think my time frame... No, no, this is good, because this is a large... See, this is why it's important. Everything's interconnected, and it's sometimes hard to talk about one issue without talking about several other issues. And so this is good. So what is heaven? Heaven is not we go up to float on a cloud of harps and we look like little cherubs, right? There's not that. And it's not we do nothing and we just sing praises and say holy, holy, holy nonstop ad infinitum forever. The biblical understanding of what heaven is, remember, it's not so much that we go to be with heaven. Heaven comes to us. Well, again, remember how I just defined it before. heaven is wherever the favorable presence of god is dwelling wherever the favorable presence of god dwells that's heaven well right now it's not exactly here although there's a sense in which heaven is here on earth inside of each believer because we are temples now for god so there's a sense where there's a piece of in articulate language but there's a piece of heaven on earth now but the full expression of heaven isn't here now and look at the news going on around us these days right so But at the end, Heaven comes to Earth, if you will. There's a remaking of Earth. Earth is transformed back into what was pictured in the Garden of Eden. There's a re-perfection of the Earth, a remaking of the Earth. What's old passes away. and it's replaced by something new, but it's not completely and utterly new. It's a remaking of what already is. So when we talk about the end of the world, we're not talking about the earth as we know it now, will completely, utterly, 100% cease to exist, absolutely. We're talking about it will be so transformed by the arrival of heaven, the full, holy, favorable presence of God invading is the word I have in mind, but that sounds like the wrong word. coming upon and remakes things so much you can't even really recognize the Earth anymore. It's so renewed and transformed. It's as if the old has been completely destroyed. But that's not really what's going on. So anyway, that's important because when that happens, that's when the believers have their bodies to walk the renewed Earth. Christ, as a precursor, the first fruits of that, He's walking the Earth 2,000 years ago. And so He has His body to do that. But that version of Earth doesn't exist until after the Second Coming and the Judgment Day. And so that's why the believers, if the believers die and they have bodies, where are their bodies? Where do they go? There's no physical realm for those bodies within which to exist until Earth is remade. So when we are prone to We're prone to take our eye off of Jesus and pay attention to the waves around us. When we're prone to do that, when there are distractions going on, those distractions can come from within our own minds, our own inclinations, our own habits, our own behaviors. Sometimes we're our own worst enemy. So there can be those reasons why we take our eye off the prize, off the hope that we have in Christ. And when our hope is, when we take our eyes off the hope we have in Christ is when we make poor decisions, when we get more anxious, when we're more prone to sin, You know, bad things can happen when that's the case. So sometimes it's ourselves. Sometimes it's pressures from the world. You have a neighbor who screams and yells at you, and that sets you off. Or somebody on the road cuts you off on the road, and you give them the bird. And that's not a good. So the world brought temptation before you and put you in a bad place. Or just the nature of the news, what's going on in the world today, those sorts of things can happen. And then, of course, it's a spiritual war. And so we can face. attacks or deceptions from the spirit realm to try to, again, take our mind off of what's most important. So if it was indeed a spiritual attack or a spiritual thing that was going on, and then you put your hope and your eyes back on Christ as opposed to the ways around you, and you're doing that when you pray and call out in Christ's name and say, I'm putting my hope and faith in Christ. Jesus, help me. Jesus, cast this away. I'm trusting in Jesus. And I know he says to the cross, it is finished. And you evil entity, whatever, have no power or right to even be here because I'm standing on the righteous blood of Christ. Your hope is fully on him then. Well, the enemy's going to retreat, maybe making a comeback ever some other time, but is going to retreat in that moment because their tricks didn't work that time. Angela mentioned 1 Corinthians chapter 15, just a few verses after what she read. It's in verse 51. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. And this gets to the sleep question. And this is actually important. I almost forgot about this, but it's important that we touch on this. Jehovah's Witnesses believe in something called soul sleep. There's a movement that labels itself as Christian called The Way. believes in soul sleep. Seventh-day Adventists believe in a doctrine of soul sleep. And they point to verses like what Dina mentioned about five minutes ago and the verse I just mentioned saying that we should not all sleep will be changed. You know, in Psalm 13, chapter 3, consider and answer me, O Lord my God, light up my eyes lest I sleep the sleep of death. Daniel 12, verse 2, and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. John 11, 11, after saying these things, he said to them, our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him. First Thessalonians, chapter 4, verse 14, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, even though through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. and first Thessalonians 5, verse 10, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we might live with him. All of these verses should be understood, and if we had time to really dive into the context and look at ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew idioms and terms of phrase, we would see that these are euphemisms for death. We do that even today. Somebody dies, and you're going to relay that information to somebody. And you might say, yeah, my good friend died yesterday. But you also might say, my good friend passed away yesterday. My good friend gave up the ghost yesterday. And we have these euphemisms that we use in the Bible. If you don't think that the Bible has euphemisms, oh my gosh, there are so many. If you read some of the English translations, the way it's phrased, the way the translation reads, it talks about shaving their heads and shaving the hair of their feet. What do you think the hair of their feet might mean? It's a euphemism for pubic hair. I think the king, he's killed while he's in the bathroom. He's in the bathroom. and the Israelites, they sneak in, they kill him, his guards don't realize that happened, and after a long, long time, like, dang! He's been in there, in the way it reads, covering his feet for a long time. We should go check on him. Covering his feet is a euphemism for squatting to make a bowel movement. There are all sorts of euphemisms in scripture, and this sleep-for-death thing is a euphemism. Because there are times when Jesus will say, oh, they're just sleeping. Like, oh, they're just sleeping. And then Jesus realizes, OK, they're not understanding. I'm using a euphemism. Let me make it clearer. He's dead. OK, I used a euphemism. You guys aren't picking up on that. No, he's not sleeping. He's, in fact, dead. So euphemisms for that. Now, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Seventh-day Adventists, they will point to a verse in Ecclesiastes that talks about the dead know nothing. You know, a person dies and they fall asleep and they know nothing, because they're unconscious. And they say, it's like when we're asleep, we know nothing, we're unconscious, we don't know anything when we're sleeping. And so we use that kind of a verse. And other verses like that. Well, with Ecclesiastes, using that particular verse as just a larger Bible study example, Whenever you read Ecclesiastes, you have to understand the context of the whole book of the Bible. And that particular book of the Bible is talking about our existence on this planet, in the here and now. It talks about, over and over again, about how life is under the sun. Not under the sun of God, under the stellar entity, our sun, the thing that gives us light and heat. What life is like under the sun? What life is like to walk the earth? What life is like from this perspective? That's what Ecclesiastes is all about, which is what makes the final end, the final chapter of Ecclesiastes so cool. He's talking about how everything's vanity, everything's meaningless, everything's nothingness, nothing matters in this life. You can do all the right things and bad things still happen. You can look at people who do all the wrong things and good things happen to them. Life's not fair. uh... you know that what you're still going to die you know there there's there's a seasonality to life it doesn't matter what you do these seasons are going to happen there's a time for this a time for that under the sun there's a time for everything anything and everything can happen under the sun it's just we can't control these things and so why not just give up why not just you know boom be done with it and then you get to the end of the book and it talks about however in god meaning outside of this merely physical, under the sun realm. That's where our true hope is. That's where the true power and authority lies. And so all of this is put in context. All of the here and now is put in context. And that's one of the things, as I lead down, wrapping up, that I want to talk about. Our physical bodies, under the sun, our physical bodies die. Our spirits, our souls, continue to exist when we die. And I think that this should give us comfort, and it should give us perspective on what our life is like in this world. It's true that our physical bodies are wearing out. As my grandmother used to say years ago when she was still around, she would say, ah, it's hell growing old, but it sure beats the alternative. And so we're wearing out. We're getting tired. We get sick. We experience pain and emotional pain and sorrows. And life is hard. And it's particularly hard for a Christian. And I've said this before. I'll say it again now. If you're a Christian and your life is not hard, you're doing something wrong. Because if you're living an obedient life, and you're trying to advance the cause of the kingdom, and you're engaging in spiritual warfare, and you're on the front lines of the battle, life should be hard. If it's not something, maybe you're not fighting the fight the way you could or should. Something's amiss, it seems to me. We were promised suffering. In fact, Peter tells us in the New Testament, not only is there a promise of suffering, but it's a great promise. It's a good thing, because we have the privilege, this is how Peter phrases it, we have the privilege of participating in the sufferings of Christ, of sharing in the sufferings of Christ. We get to experience that part of Christ's experience with him and through him and in him. And if we're not suffering, that's a huge part of Christ's experience that we're missing out on. And so, anyway, that's a bit of an aside. So it's true that it's hard and we wear out and all that sort of stuff. But while that's true, we still maintain the hope that our inner person, the spiritual, the immaterial, that is being increasingly perfected and renewed and sanctified until ultimately it is glorified and will not perish. And so we have this realistic view of things that brings us perspective on what the here and now is really all about and yet gives us great comfort and hope knowing that there's this duality to who we are. And so when we do that, we have what I would call a proper biblical perspective. And this sort of perspective, it can help us, help to keep us from being overwhelmed by the things of the material world, of the physical limitations that we face, and at the same time, while it helps us to have a realistic view of the material world, it keeps us from getting overly focused on that world, and maybe overly confident in what the world can provide, because there are tastes of heaven. what awaits us. And so sometimes we have beautiful homes, or we have a really good day, or we have a fantastic moment in our relationship with someone, or we achieve a goal that gets the endorphins flowing, and you feel like, man, this is as good as it gets. And then you realize, no, it's not as good as it gets, but it's a reminder that there is something that is as good as it gets, and that's awaiting. And so I think understanding that we are both physical and not physical, and that both of those are who we are, helps us to keep everything in balance or in blend. I prefer the word blend more than balance. Is everything blended in an appropriate way when our thinking is correct on that? I think that could be helpful in a pastoral sense to talk about death as people are at rest. And to your point, it's a fine line, and I'd want to be careful how far we wanted to push the line. I tend to think in terms of, it's mostly like, in the Bible, people who want to accuse the Bible of not understanding how the world works don't understand how the Bible works. And they'll often, too often I've heard this argument, it talks about the Sun revolving around the Earth idea, as opposed to the Earth revolving around the Sun. But all it's talking about is the way we even speak today about the Sun, it rises in the East and it sets in the West and it travels across Well, we know the sun's not traveling anywhere. The sun is in the center of our, well, maybe traveling, but it's not traveling the way we're talking about it, in the center of our solar system, and we're traveling around it. And we know that, and yet we still talk about the sun moving across the horizon or whatever. So again, the Bible is written in a way that we can understand from our perspective in words and ideas that make sense to us. And so I think that's part of what's going on with this sleep language, too, because when somebody dies, and they're laying there, particularly if they've just died, You've probably done this. I did it with my dog the other day. Our dog's getting old. She's going to be 15 next month. And I went in, and she didn't stir at all when I opened the door. She was laying there. And I thought, is she dead? Or is she sleeping? And I looked really close. I was trying to see if there was any breathing. And it took me a minute to really be sure. OK, she's breathing. She's not dead. So the point is, somebody who's dead gives the appearance of being asleep. You know, so when Paul is basically yelling at the congregation because they're not making good choices, he said, and so, you know, some of you will fall asleep. And some of you made such bad choices, you died as a result of your bad choices. That's what he's saying there. So I think it's just a way to talk about death in a way that, a euphemistic way that makes sense. I'd have to study that out. I haven't thought about whether or not there's any examples of somebody who we would have reasonably wasn't among the elect who died and was referred to as being asleep. That'd be a fun little side study that I'll tackle. But I haven't heard that before. So I like that. That's good. Something else popped in my head, and it popped back out. So it must not have been that important. Yeah, it wasn't that important, because it never did pop back into my head anyway. Well, I thank you for listening to the Faith Debate, not just today, but for all these many years. If you've been listening for a long time, then you know some of what I'm about to tell you. But if you haven't been listening for a long time, then this might be new information to you. There are a lot of ways for you to connect with what we do here on the Faith Debate. The primary way, probably, would be to go to wfmd.com. Find the Faith Debate page there. And there you're going to find a blog. The blog basically is just talking about the shows and the guests and what the topics were that were covered and that sort of thing. And then links to the podcasts and that sort of thing. You can also find the podcast in the WFMD audio vault. But beyond that, of course, WFMD posts the podcasts on the station's Facebook page. And I also post the podcasts on my Facebook page. And speaking of Facebook, you might know I'm the pastor of a church, a house church. It's called the Household of Faith in Christ. And we have a portion of what we do together as a church that we do live on Facebook. And I make it public. Anybody can jump in to see what we're doing. And that happens every Saturday. at 6 p.m., usually wrapping up around 7 p.m. It involves a message and then a group discussion about the message and the topics and things that were covered in that message. So you are encouraged and invited to participate in that if you like. And if you can't catch it live, you can watch it later on Facebook and then also on YouTube, because we archive all of those Facebook Live videos on our YouTube channel. So you go to YouTube and you find the Household of Faith in Christ. And we have a House of the Faith in Christ YouTube channel where all of those videos are stored. And you can interact either on Facebook or on the comments section of YouTube as well. And I try to interact with people when they reach out. Also on MeWe, also on Gab a little bit, and also on Parler. I probably spend most of my time on Parler. My second most amount of time is probably on MeWe. I pretty much only use Facebook at this point for the live feature and also for posting video and audio podcasts, and that's pretty much about it for me on Facebook. Anyways, you can find me in all those places. I would love for you to connect with me. I will tell you this, on Parler and on MeWe, you connect with me, I'll connect with you. You follow me, I'll follow you. I feel like it's the polite and friendly thing to do. So, anyway, thanks so much for listening. We're going to tackle more great questions, I'm sure, on future episodes of The Faith Debate. We've now wrapped up this one, though, looking at what happens to us when we die. Till next week, 167 and a half hours from, oh, I don't know, right about now. God bless.