Spirit Daily
'At the Moment of Death You Are Conscious of the Separation of the Body and Soul'
By Michael H. Brown
Christ came to remind
us that we’re spiritual and not physical beings and that our consciousness does
not cease upon earthly death.
Earth is temporary. It lasts but seven or eight decades. And that’s a grain of sand on the beach of eternity. While on earth we’re in exile. We’re away from home. We’re on a mission and we’re in a kind of school and we’re being tested for something much larger than anything you can see with your eyes or hear with your ears or even imagine.
I don’t think there could possibly be better news
than that: after death there is life. The soul doesn’t end with the body. Our
bodies are not us. Our souls are us. One day we’ll look at our earthly
bodies as nearly foreign matter when we find our true selves in the spirit world
at a time of fantastic wonder.
That’s the news of
Jesus. After death there’s another existence and if
we prepare, it’s a splendid existence, an incredible existence, an infinite
situation that will engage us for all eternity.
Death is a transition. It’s a shedding of the
physical shell. It’s the transcendence of a body which had been used as a sort
of instrument in the physical realm. There is nothing to fear if we have Jesus.
There is nothing to fear if He awaits us. In fact, when scientists have studied
the attitudes of dying patients, they’ve been amazed at
the large number of people who, in the hour of death, are happy and even
elated. There was evidence, said one study in New York, “that
considerable numbers of patients meet death not with fear and despair but rather
with elation and exultation.”
The fact that death is less intimidating than many
think was shown clearly by the way Jesus endured the worst possible death-- only
to quickly rise above it. If there was one lesson from His Resurrection, it was
that the supernatural exists and the spirit moves beyond the body. We also see
descriptions from Paul, who in 2 Corinthians 12:4 said, “I know this
man—whether in or outside his body I do not know, God knows—was snatched up to
Paradise to hear words, which cannot be uttered, words which no man may speak.”
Elsewhere in the Bible we’re told that “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor
has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1
Corinthians 2:9).
Since the time of the
caveman there has been belief that the human soul is transcendental, and it’s a
belief that is common to every people and culture, in every age, no matter how
modern or primitive. From the beginning of recorded history people have had
experiences that indicate the eternal nature of the soul and in our own time,
with reports of apparitions and other religious phenomena, we have only seen an
affirmation of those ancient beliefs.
The soul lives after death. It cannot be destroyed.
It is not made of a physical substance. It exceeds anything physical. In fact,
it controls the physical. It controls your body. And upon death it moves
on to eternity. It heads for its true home. Those who are dying in the grace of
God sense this—sense their homecoming—and know they are at the end of a
difficult and dangerous journey.
Physical pain and the reliance on money—the bondages
of flesh that make life one constant struggle—end with death.
There’s no more limitation. There’s no more doubt.
May 2004
[excerpted from After Life]