What Happens After We Die?

Question: What happens after we die?

“I know the ones who love us will miss us,” Keanu Reeves

"It is appointed to man once to die, and after that, the judgement." Hebrews 9:27

Keanu Reeves has endured loss. He knows the grief of losing a significant other. He knows the tears of weeping for a lost child.

But he doesn't appear to have any idea at all regarding that endless span we call eternity.

Oh, he's certainly correct--the ones who love us will miss us. Those of us who have lived long enough to attain a 'ripe old age' can attest to the on-going sense of loss when beloved parents or godly friends go to their reward.

But he expresses that sad human emotion without any of the attending comfort of the spiritual truth that there is a day of grand reunion coming.

JESUS has promised that HE has gone "to prepare a place" for us. HE assures us that "In my Father's house there are many rooms."

The implication is clear. Life does not end with our last breath.

When a gestating child comes to birth, it is thrust forcefully into a painful situation. It is pushed and prodded forward into the narrow birth canal where the babe can no longer snuggle comfortably in the nest within its mother's warm body.

The baby feels pain and, no doubt, confusion until being unceremoniously smacked on the posterior by hands that make him cry. Not cruel hands, but hands that administer the compulsion for the child to begin breathing on his own.

And once he has seen light, tasted food, felt the warm embrace of his adoring parents, the child would never wish to return to the confining nest of the womb.

And, so is death.

The end of life brings confusion and pain. The life that is ebbing away is thrust from its comfort zone toward a realm that has been shrouded in secrecy for a lifetime.

But when temporal life has ended and eternal life has begun, the believer in CHRIST would never wish to return to this Vale of Tears, for he will have begun to enjoy the promise, "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what GOD has prepared for those who love HIM." I Corinthians 2:9