Life After Death

   It seems to be built into our humanity to embrace this hope that after we die there is "something that goes on" Shakespeares "Hamlet" uttered the famous words "to be or not to be" as he's considering the alternatives of life and death and swinging between the two. He experiences conflicting feelings, whither to carry on in this world of pain and suffering or to end it and embrace the reality of "the unknown".  It seems life brings us more loss than success, more pain than gain and yet, in spite of all that: we fight tooth and nail to hang on 'despite the hardships' to life for just another 5 minutes. Whatever the pain that attends life, we desire to keep experiencing it. Because the other side is shrouded in mystique

we've never experienced, we would rather bear the ills we have, than embrace the uncertainty of the unknown. He then says "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all"  The dialogue of Plato includes the death scene of Socrates. The day he is appointed to drink the fatal hemlock. his students and friends are allowed to visit him one last time and they find him at perfect peace and rest, even of 'eager anticipation' being shocked at this they inquired and he says with all his knowledge gleaned from philosophical and scientific speculation it had yielded no other purpose than to further convince him this is indeed not his last day but the beginning of an eternal existence that is far better than what we experience here.

   A hundred years from now, where am I going to be. If a man dies will he live again? The human race is preoccupied with the idea. Either through horoscope reading, superstition or fortune telling. Throughout America are signs of the 'symbol of the hand' where madam "so and so" will offer 'for a fee' to read your  future. Have you ever noticed these always seem be found in run-down sections of the neighborhood where dilapidated homes are? It seems this 'oracle' should be right around the stock market. In every culture there is some sense of expectancy of life after death whither its the "Norse Valhalla or the "Indian happy hunting ground"

   Yet if this life is all there is. Then life is pointless, insignificant. YOLO, the new slang motto used to justify us doing whatever we want, when we want, makes perfect sense. Yet we were created eternal beings. Unlike animals, who don't experience our range of emotions; given you do not witness them pondering with awe the beauty of a sunset because they are driven strictly by natural instinct. The desires of emotion reason, imagination and to behold beauty were inherently ingrained at birth into our inner being. And that being (soul) yet shrouded and repressed by sinful nature, is always longing for a better, more peaceful existence. Yet we are incapable of controlling "how long we exist" The things you think would be your heaven if you had and the most happy, is a hell instead, because after a hundred years of however long we indulge in that pleasure we'd get bored, the luster would wear off and we'd desire something greater...eternal. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher once said "Of all the creatures on this planet. Man is at the same time the creature of the highest grandeur and the creature of the lowest misery"  

    There are means to help analyze the complexities of our being, by observing the components of our biological bodies; you can break things down to that of a cell, then particles, protons and electrons and find what those are comprised of "matter". Yet when we get all the way down to the smallest construct, that which all material substance is comprised of at its most inner core, the atom; we find we cannot understand the force that is holding this atom together. The only  safe observation would be it is an eternal force.    The first Law of Thermodynamics which states "the total amount of energy and matter in the universe remains constant" thus, it is safe to reason it simply "exists". If the amount of "matter' is not observed to fluctuate, the parallel would be made that it is not possible to accrue something from nothing. The double helix structure of the DNA strand, and all its complexities (essentially the code describing who we are) was found that the possibility of this strand alone formed by random occurrence was 1x10^17 degree.  Einstein once said "The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects." Skeptics point to the stars millions of light years out; that it would take that same amount of time (millions of years for their light to reach earth. Yet it says He "stretched out the expanse of the heavens". meaning all mass occupied one spot and was stretched out billions of light years by the almighty hand of God.

   NASA is powered by the ongoing goal of seeking the extraterrestrial. Yet as Louie Giglio once said "If the universe was here for the sole purpose of housing humanity it is vastly oversized  yet if its purpose was solely to display the glory of the almighty creator, then it is just about the right size." Distances in our universe are quantified by light year, .  because the universe is so vast a mile would seem less than a pinprick.  "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”. It means if God was to attempt to describe our new heavenly existence "in him" it would blow our finite minds to comprehend. We quantity the vastness of the Universe by the fastest speed we possibly know of (light) 186,000 miles a second multiplied by 31,000,000 seconds (a year) then use that increment multiplied 3 million times to reach our nearest galaxy and you begin to realize just how small we are and how incapable our finite minds are in understanding how big God is. If our universe is so big we can hardly quantify it in our vernacular. How much greater and more expansive is heaven going to be. Jesus said "I go to prepare a place for you" and if our sin fallen universe is still filled with Gods fingerprint, how advanced is our understanding going to be when we shed our earthly bodies and receive our eternal ones? We see dimly through the constraints of time and space now. Yet the Bible also says "

    For those still skeptical of regarding the Bible as the infallible God spoken word and thus the absolute truth. It demands of a high degree of faith in things unseen. If you were asked the question do you believe in protons, electrons and the atom? I think allot of us would say yes, of course. When asked if you could see them, "then no, that's ludicrous, their microscopic, of course not". Then, if you haven't seen them why believe in their existence? The natural response would be "scientists have though". Thus taking the eyewitness account of something you yourself, cannot see, as infallible truth. Yet if we believe in the existence of a microscopic world, why is it for some people then, more difficult to believe the eyewitness accounts of the apostles on Jesus existence and works.. That have survived over 2,000 years of relentless persecution and strong desire for obliteration. And Who also is unseen yet exists and right now is at work among us.