All About Heaven - What Happens When We Die?Sample

In a number of ways, Paul makes it even clearer. He says, ‘Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord … We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.’ In Philippians, Paul says, ‘For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: 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.’

 Summarizing this, we can see:

 at home in the body we are away from the Lord

•away from the body and at home with the Lord

to live is Christ and to die is gain 

I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far

These four statements can only be made if Christians are immediately in the presence of the Lord.

Over the years, I have heard it expressed in different ways: death is a temporary cessation of bodily life, and death is a divine anaesthetic, as God performs an operation changing us from one body into another. In other words, death opens up a temporary state or an intermediate state before body and spirit at some future point come together again.

At death, the immaterial invisible part of man is released from its earthen vessel. In other words, we become disembodied. And after death, there is a complete and permanent separation between the spirits of the people who love God and follow him and those who don’t.

At death, as the carpenter himself made clear, choices on earth determine locations at death. Famously, Jesus turned to the dying thief and said, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’

Pauline scriptures remind us that ‘absent from the body’ is synonymous with being ‘present with the Lord’. After death, the martyrs in Revelation are pictured alive and fully conscious in heaven, crying out to God to bring justice on earth. Read the book of Revelation and discover that every reference to human beings moving, talking and worshipping in heaven before the resurrection of the dead is living evidence, obvious evidence, of the reality that we will be conscious and enjoying a fantastic new home.