Don: The mysteries we are seeking to understand are not riddles that need to be figured out. They are mysteries in which Truth is revealed. The mystery of the transformation on the day of judgment reveals the reversal of the consequences of the Fall, of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Those consequences were that immortality “put on” mortality, the imperishable “put on” perishability, and the incorruptible “put on” corruption; leaving us in our present desperate human condition. Revelation 21:1-6 describes the reversal of these consequences, and the establishment of a new Garden:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. [The spring is the same spring as that discussed in the story of the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well.]
Revelation 22:1-3 has an even more vivid portrayal of our restoration to the state that existed in the Garden before the Fall:
Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him;…
The curse referred to, in Genesis 3, condemns woman to the pain of childbearing and man to an inability to [inaudible], and it results in the separation of man from woman, god from wo/man, and nature from humankind. The curse and its consequences will be reversed, says Revelation. Note that it mentions only one tree—the tree of life—in the new Garden. The reconciliation among men and women (“the nations”) is brought about through the healing leaves of the tree of life.
The reconciliation between humankind and nature is also predicted in Isaiah 11:6-10:
And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.
Then in that day
The nations will resort to the root of Jesse, [i.e., the Messiah]
Who will stand as a signal for the peoples;
And His resting place will be glorious.
In light of these assurances of our return to the Garden, why do people fear death so? As a cancer surgeon, I see such fear in patients every day. All cultures throughout history have some sort of ritual and beliefs concerning death and the afterlife. They are often very different from one another, but they all reflect the same concern.
I am somewhat skeptical of reports of near-death experiences that claim a view of the afterlife that has been predicted in our culture—the appearance of a light, of welcoming song, a sense of weightlessness and so on. It is hard to determine whether the reports are based on actual fact or on preconceived notions of fact.
Fear of death appears related to physical condition. The more infirm we become, the more pain we experience, the older we get, the less concerned we become about death. Elderly people seem generally not to fear death as much as younger people do.
Is the fear of death rational? Is it simply fear of the unknown? Are we afraid of being held accountable for our behavior in our life—are we afraid of the judgment we often associate with death? Most afterlife beliefs have heavens and hells.
Why do people of faith fear death?
Donna: As a licensed senior chaplain I am often called to attend dying people and their families, and help them get through the experience of death. Not many have seen the look in the eyes of dying people. In my experience, it is invariably a look of fear. Even fewer have seen a person come back from apparent death. A year ago I was traveling on a plane when I smelled the unmistakable smell of death. It was a passenger behind me. He was gray, had defecated, had no pulse. He was dead. Almost without thinking, I said this prayer: “Lord, you’ve asked me to pray for this man. I believe that you want to bring him back.” Then I heard someone say: “He’s turning pink!”, and indeed, he came back to life.
Dave: I saw that look of fear in my father’s eyes, a couple of hours before he died. It is an instinctual response and can only be overcome by an effort of intellect—which is more difficult, the more sudden and quick the death process. Being steeped in the bible serves to buttress us in this regard. It builds our faith and helps us overcome our fear. Even the disciples showed fear and lack of faith at times, even after seeing with their own eyes Jesus perform miracles.
Donna: Our intellect is no match for the power of the bible. The master of fear is satan. When I am with someone who is dying, I sense the simultaneous presence of both the evil spirit and the holy spirit, fighting over which one gets the soul.
Kiran: I had a motorcycle accident in India and could see the wheels of a bus coming straight toward my head. Thoughts of my family passed through my mind, followed by concern for my pillion passenger whose daughter was soon to be married. Then, some part of the bus pushed my fallen motorbike which in turn pushed us to one side, away from the wheels of the bus. We were shaken, yet strangely calm.
Dave: It is a commonly reported experience that one’s life flashes before one in split seconds before death.
David: A recent multi-country study of people resuscitated following cardiac arrest (CA), reported in the journal Resuscitation, found that…
Among 2060 CA events, 140 survivors completed stage 1 interviews, while 101 of 140 patients completed stage 2 interviews. 46% had memories with 7 major cognitive themes: fear; animals/plants; bright light; violence/persecution; deja-vu; family; recalling events post-CA and 9% had NDEs, while 2% described awareness with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation. One had a verifiable period of conscious awareness during which time cerebral function was not expected.
…and concluded that…
CA survivors commonly experience a broad range of cognitive themes, with 2% exhibiting full awareness. This supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present despite clinically undetectable consciousness. This together with fearful experiences may contribute to PTSD and other cognitive deficits post CA.
Apparently, none of the patients reported “out of body” experiences. The scientific findings thus do not seems to support the common belief in visions of light and feelings of bliss. Perhaps the belief is just the result of wishful thinking.
Charles: I tend to think that the fear of death is more fear of spiritual death than of physical death. As a doctor, being present at many deaths has helped take away from me the fear of it. It is somewhat ironic that we fear the one thing in life we know for a fact we can absolutely count on. The precise moment of physiologic death is actually very hard to state—such manifestations as defecation and lack of pulse can be unreliable evidence of death.
I have seen dying persons in fear, and others at peace. The latter tend to be people of faith, and this is why I conclude that our fear is more about spiritual than about physical death. The faithful find peace in the knowledge that their corruption is about to turn into incorruptible and their mortality into immortality.
The choice between the trees of life and knowledge is a choice between the corruptible and the incorruptible, between the physical and the spiritual. Our fear of death may be fear of having made the wrong choice. Mortal life is such an infinitesimal pittance compared to immortal life. It’s hard to believe that’s all there is, and faith dispels that belief.
Dave: It’s hard to tell how spiritual a person is. An elderly relative who was dying after a good, long life as a devout Catholic was terrified of her impending death. She was a beautiful person, and seemed to have led a very pure and bible-centered life. Why she should have been so fearful is a mystery.
Kiran: Don noted that the new Garden has no tree of knowledge. This would seem appropriate, since at that point all is god’s will—there is no longer any human will left to choose between life and knowledge.
Charles: Jesus’s admonition to become more like a child, to have total trust in and dependence on the will of the adult (god) comes to the fore in the new Garden. The finality of having chosen the tree of knowledge—the tree of spiritual, eternal, death—in the original Garden is perhaps what evokes such fear in us when we are about to die. We know we must die physically, but it only now dawns on us that we may die spiritually also. It might be that fear of Original Sin, rather than of the petty sins of our mortal lives, that gets to people like Dave and Donna’s dying relative.
Donna: I think that at the very last moment, the evil and the holy spirits do battle. I feel their presence, and if I feel it as a mere onlooker, what must the dying person feel?
Jay: The issue of will—ours versus god’s—seems central in all of this. Faith helps us accept god’s will, though we can never achieve full acceptance in our lives on earth—we accept it partially at best. With either total faith or total lack of it, death holds no fear. With total faith, it means we enter a new life; with no faith, it means there is nothing (therefore nothing to fear) after death. But our partial, imperfect, indecisive faith is what creates the fear. We worry about how we will be judged.
Alice: Perhaps the ego—the will—is the last thing we give up. The struggle is between the ego, the will to live, and the spirit, that wants to give itself totally to god.
Donna: Those observed to die a peaceful death have reached that understanding and have placed themselves in god’s hands. We face this same decision every day we awake: Will I live for god today, or for myself? Our decision will be manifested in everything we say and do that day. It may make a difference to the peaceful acceptance of our death if we die on a day we decided to live for god.
Charles: In scripture, Jesus constantly asks us to give up everything, to trust completely. There is no halfway—no walking halfway on the water. Total faith, complete trust, is the challenge; a bit of it won’t hold you up on the water. I don’t necessarily believe that this faith can only come through the bible.
Jay: It is a challenge because it is hard to trust completely something one does not completely understand, and we cannot completely understand god. We may try hard to do so, but ultimately peace comes only from accepting that we cannot understand, that only god has the answers.
Dave: So the best way to understand god is to read what he told us in the bible.
Chris: I think of physical death as spiritual life. Physical death seems selfish: It hurts the loved ones we leave behind, and we fear we are losing something. But it is final, and at the last moment the only issue left is to decide between spiritual life or spiritual death. In Lazarus, the constant refrain from Jesus was “Do you believe?” Faith is at the core of the Lazarus story. Its acceptance at the point of physical death is why some people die in peace.
Don: In the final verse 58 of 1 Corinthians, Paul wrote:
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.
This is a call to do something in the here and now that is predicated on an understanding of something about how the promise of the reversal of death will propel us into some kind of effective action now.
David: What if science succeeds in enabling immortality?
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