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Surely, when you die, that’s it?

There’s a quirky song in Yorkshire called, ‘On Ilkley Moor bah t’at’. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It describes a man dying after walking on the Moor without his hat! He’s buried, eaten by worms, the worms eaten by ducks, and then us eating the ducks! The final verse starts with the line, ‘Then we will all have eaten thee…’

Alright, it’s slightly bizarre and a bit of fun, but on a serious note change and decay affects us all; our bodies will one day die and decompose. Was Bertrand Russell was right, though, when he said ‘When I die I rot’? The Bible teaches that view is profoundly wrong. We are not just bodies, but have an eternal existence.

When someone says something that ‘hurts’ you, it is not your body they have hurt, but your feelings, the real, inner you. The Bible teaches that each of us has a soul and a spirit, and that it is the soul that they have hurt. The Bible insists that the soul and spirit live forever. That is why the Bible can say, ‘…people are destined to die once and after that face judgement…’ – Hebrews 9:27. The Bible states that when our earthly body dies that is not the end; the real us will continue eternally.

Some people say, ‘But no-one has ever come back from the dead to tell us about it.’ Of course, this is not true – Jesus did that very thing. Jesus died, and rose again, and when He did He spoke of heaven and warned of hell.