Heart of the Matter
From Salt Lake City, Utah, this is Heart of the Matter where we are learning together how to walk as Christians in the age of fulfillment.
And I’m your host Shawn McCraney.
Welcome to the Short Show.
A Merciful Transition
Show 2s A Merciful Transition
Taped Sunday October 11th 2020
Airs Monday October 12th 2020
This is just something for your consideration that I have wondered about. But when we look at our physical births, generally speaking and exceptions aside, most of us enter into this world, knit together in the womb by our creator, and into some sort of gentle care. Whether you are born in India, or Afghanistan, or Detroit or Reno Nevada – babes come into the world and are treated gently – no matter what region of the earth nor the religion of the home they enter. Humans care for newborns and gently protect them from the realities of this life. Muslim parents won’t take their newborn and lay it on a busy city street to fend for itself, but will keep it safe, exposing it more and more to the world around it incrementally and with consideration. With wise and loving child development, everything is metered out according to ability of the babe at hand. That is what loving parents do. Mormons will slowly integrate Mormonism into the life of their children. Muslims, Baptists, Hindus and atheists will all do the same. But all according to reasonable time, and usually gently, slowly, lovingly, right?
Views on Death and Transition
I used to be of the Evangelical opinion that people who die have an immediate rude awakening by God. Even to the point of thinking that at death God would send evil people and put them into the hands of Satan who would be laughing manically at having captured their souls. This view and imagery was created by things I was taught in my younger years about God. But as I’ve matured I have come to see the Lord God Almighty as supremely loving of all of his creations. All of them. Hand in hand with this belief I have also come to wonder if our deaths don’t somehow serve to act as another birth – but this time into the great beyond. This is not to say we are born infants again, but relative to God and the Heavens, perhaps our entering into the “life beyond” may frankly bear similarities to our entering life here, and relatively speaking, perhaps at our death, we enter into heaven as spiritual babes.
Scripture confirms in several places that we bring with us, at death, our souls – our established minds, and our wills, and our emotions – which would have been forged by our life experiences. Taking all of this, and then considering the content of several dozen Near Death Experiences that people of all faiths claim to have had (and I am talking about real, they-were-dead for a while experiences) I want to suggest a possibility to you that makes some sense to me about what we may experience at death.
New Perspectives on the Afterlife
It seems possible that whenever a person dies, our loving Lord God Almighty, brings them into the great beyond, as babes and that he allows their biases and prejudices of things to linger with them a while, out of being gentle with them in the transition. This would account for Muslim people experiencing Muslim things in their NDE, and Mormon people experiencing Mormon things, and Born-again Christians experiencing Born-Again things. Because whether you know this or not, many NDE are consistent with the views of the one who dies. So perhaps, because we are entering heaven as spiritual infants, the Lord God Almighty gently allows us to see and experience these comforting subjective environs that we expect due to upbringing, and then ever so slowly, gently, lovingly, he allows us, as we allow our own children, to experience new things, exciting things, and different things that reveal eternal truths.
Perhaps he allows us to maintain our earthly prejudices and religious biases, all the while continuing to call and draw us to His side, where the Truth with a capital T abides. Perhaps for some there is a long journey to maturity and an ability to receive the Truth and in their case he will allow them, like he allows us here, time to disabuse themselves of the false teachings they have learned. Perhaps those who here received and grew in the faith immediately step into His realm and presence, prepared in mind and heart with the eternal realities of Him. I am more and more convinced that by and through Christ, the living God has
Trust in the Living God
had the victory over sin and death and I subscribe to the passage in 1st Timothy 4:10 where Paul writes
“For therefore we both labor and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, specially of those that believe.”
And that being that God is gentle and loving and that he “will not have any perish but all come to repentance,” I have changed from the notion that at death people are immediately tossed into a burning or freezing tub by a laughing God but that he, as He does with us here, continues to work with us where we are, all as a means to bring us into a genuine relationship with in – whenever that might be.
Reflection
(beat)
Share Your Thoughts
Give it some thought – and write your comments below – we will cover them tomorrow night, here on HEART OF THE MATTER!
