hen I was 18 years old and not a Christian, I believed that when human beings died; they just rotted and disintegrated into the ground. To me it was madness to believe in a spiritual realm or eternal life of any kind. I thought that a person who believed in God or heaven was totally deluded, and I used to say to folks who were Christians- Can you not just accept the truth; when we die, we rot and are eaten by worms.
So, for me, this idea of dying and rotting and being eaten by worms’ served two purposes.
It helped me to justify my actions in life, because I believed they were only my business. I did not believe that I needed to answer to God for how I was living. This idea of life on earth being limited to the day of death also allowed me write off what ‘crazy Christians’ believed and allowed me get my own back at people who in my mind were just hypocrites.
But the Bible says, that God has set eternity in the hearts of human beings. Human beings sense deep down that death is not really how life is meant to end. Human beings grieve so much when they lose people they love. Death is a part of life that we do not like to face.
In the culture of the West, we try to avoid death and even aging. People often want to live forever. Why is this? I believe it is because we all know deep down, that we are eternal beings.
The Bible also tells us that though we are physical, and made from the dust of the earth to which we return; we are also spiritual. God breathed life into Adam the first human being He created. This life was spiritual life : the capacity to know God, and to live forever.
In the garden of Eden, God made Adam and Eve to live in a state unsevered relationship with Him. It is said in the Bible that Adam walked with God in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve were created to be perfect, as God was perfect and without sin. But this perfection and relationship was broken when Adam and Eve listened to Satan in the form of a serpent, and disobeyed God by eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
They rebelled against God and disobeyed His command. He had told them that they could eat from any tree in the garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He had given them free will, and free choice to obey Him or disobey Him. They chose the latter and at this point sin came into the world, and so did death. This meant that Adam and Eve were no longer eternal beings, but would face physical death eventually. But this is not all, they also experienced spiritual death because their relationship with God was destroyed and He threw them out of the Garden where they had known perfect relationship with Him.
As human beings we are created to know God; to worship Him, and to live forever. This is wired into the way we have been made.
We will either live forever in heaven after we die, or our spirits will live in a state of eternal torment and separation from the God who made everything good that we have ever known in life. Many people say they are not afraid of hell, or that they would be happy to be there because their friends might be there. However, people usually have a distorted perception of hell. The Bible tells us that hell is a place where there will be weeping and nashing of teeth, and that it is a place where the fires never go out. It is a place of perpetual torment, and not somewhere anyone in their right minds would desire to be.
So, the key problem with the view that we die, rot, go to the ground and are eaten by worms is that this view denies the fact that we as humans are eternal beings. We are created to live eternally with God, but if we do not accept His free offer of grace and relationship with Him, we will be in hell forever
This offer of grace and forgiveness is through the Lord Jesus Christ. When we put our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s perfect Son who lived a holy life; died a sacrificial death, and was resurrected to life, we receive forgiveness for our sins because Jesus took on the sins of all the world when He hung on the cross and died for us. This can mean that the sin that separates us from God can be paid for, by the death of Jesus when we believe in Him and in all that He has done for us. We can also trust in Jesus to give us eternal resurrection life because He was raised from the dead and went ahead of us to prepare a place for us in heaven if we believe in Him.
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