Life After Death, Is It A Farce?

The question is always there isn't it.  Is there really life after death, and if so what do we imagine it to be?   How does your imagination deal with the subject of eternal life?

Question:  How many of us here today would love to live out the rest of your life free of any kind of physical or emotional pain?   How many of us here today could imagine a life without emotion, sleep, food or drink.  I know what some of you are thinking, you’d have to be dead right!!  Well we are going to take a look at what Jesus has to say about the afterlife in today’s reading.  One of the points Jesus makes for us in verse 38 is that our God is a God of the living, never is He a God of the dead.  On the other hand only Jesus is master of the living and the dead! So what does that mean for us?

Nov 6, 2016:  Psalm 98,   2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5, 13-17 Luke 20: 27-38

Again as I mention earlier on in this morning service, one of the revelations Jesus offers us can be found in verse 38 and it is this:  that our God is a God of the living, never has God ever been a God of the dead [also found in Mark 12:27].

So, we who follow in the teachings of Jesus, who is for us the resurrected Christ, we believe that physical death is not the end and therefore our God is a God of the living not the dead.   That for those who have surrendered to the resurrected Christ shall not die, but have eternal life.    Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 15:55   “Where O death is your victory.  Where O death is your sting” here Paul rejoices with gratitude the victory of God over the powers of death.    Now let us not be mistaken by Paul’s statement, for physical death is a reality, but let us also not make the mistake of thinking that we continue on after physical death in our present physical form.  Our scriptures tell us we are given spiritual bodies to live our eternity.  Because Christianity is the only religion that believes in a day of resurrection; for us, Jesus the Christ, not God the Father, becomes the one who holds the keys to both the living and the dead.  Resurrection is therefor found in Christ.  Revelations 1: 18 “I am the living one! I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I have authority over death and the world of the dead. 
In Genesis 1: 26 we hear: "Let us make humans in our image and in our likeness." May I suggest that the text indicates to us it was the Christ who would come in human form and experienced physical death in the greatest act of love the world would ever know. He would be called the word, the light, messiah, Lord of all and his human name would be JESUS of Nazareth. 

The elite group known as the Sadducee were not believers in the resurrection.  There encounter was with the living man Jesus.  Jesus as man was subject to physical death just as they and we are.  The resurrected Jesus whose physical form was now not recognizable to his friends at first, see John 20: 14 and Luke 24: 15-16 becomes the Christ who was the entity that was there with God in the beginning, Genesis 1: 26.  There are still many in the church today who think Christ is Jesus’ last name.     According to the belief that the Sadducee held, when you die, that was the end, therefore you were to live life to its fullest within the boundaries of the Jewish Law.  Because there belief was in contrast to Jesus’ teachings about resurrection, they were trying to set an intellectual trap for him.   Their hope was to show him and his teachings to be a farce.   So they gave Jesus an imaginary case of seven brothers who married their brother’s widow as was prescribed by the Jewish law. 
The law stated: If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her.  NIV.


This imaginary scenario was meant to embarrass Jesus and make fun of him.  This is where Jesus makes it very clear to both Sadducee and us that eternal life is not simply the continuation of our mortal life beyond death.  Whatever the reality is on the other side of this earthly life, we should not think of it as a continuation of this life.  Nor should we think that we will be able to somehow complete our imperfect human relationships after physical death.     Whatever we do in the here and now is all there will ever be of this life folks.  This is where we need to get it right.  That is why Jesus stresses, do whatever good we can while we have the chance to show goodness as we know it, because it too {goodness} will also come to its end at death.   Goodness as we understand it will not be needed where perfect love rules, that contains perfect joy and perfect peace.  This new existence will be completely void of the ego and its sinful trappings of this world.    A German Hymn writer, tells it like this:  “Death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of everything.  Everything passes away but God stands firm without fault.  God’s thoughts, God’s word and God’s will have eternal ground”.   We live in the moments of time but God is immortal, meaning time does not exist with God, nor does God need time.

When this becomes part of our hope and faith, then we can now make a further step.  You cannot fall out of love with our true parent God and therefore God has never abandoned  any of His creations.  Within God’s compassionate heart, God holds everyone there ever was or ever will be and they will never be excluded from Him.   Hell then becomes not a physical place but a mental state of total darkness, a place where we can choose to hide from our Creator.  We while in physical form are not eternal, but God’s love for us is, it never has, nor will it ever die, because God is a God of the living.  This makes it impossible to fall out of love with God because Gods love for us is eternal.  God’s mercy is also unending for all those who live in Christ and die in Christ.  1 Thessalonians 4: 14

It is because they are one with God in Christ  where illness and sin cannot touch them.  This has been going on since the beginning of time and draws us back to the text verse 37, 38   Here, Jesus reminds us about the burning bush and Moses encounter with the eternal.  God tells him I am the I am, the alpha and omega the beginning and the end, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob not the God of the dead but of the living.  Jesus is telling us that all of these ancestors are alive to this very day and all who have surrendered to the way of the universal Christ will experience their day of resurrection.    Isn’t that incredible, and isn’t that great!!  Let us give thanks and praise to our God, the God of the living.