We are most familiar with death as the termination of life. Atheists want us to think that death is the totally natural and final event of life, and that there is nothing more than that. Agnostics are not sure, but tend to defer to the atheistic notion, and are terrified by it, as are most other people who with Job’s antagonist Bildad the Shuhite regard death as the “king of terrors.” (Job 18:14). But none of us really knows for a fact that the atheistic notion is true. In fact there is no evidence for the atheistic notion, other than what is assumed prior to death. And the majority common sense suspects that there is something beyond the physical terminus of death.
What is death in the sense of terminus? Death is time. In time everything dies. Every moment we live we die to the previous moment. Death draws a final deadline across our times. When this deadline cannot be extended,time terminates for each of us. When the first man and woman disobeyed God, He put them out of His perfect Garden Paradise where they were intended to rule forever as vice-regents over His creation. Where did He put them?
He put them into a cursed earth (Genesis 3:17), a world separate from His Paradise, where they would struggle over personal sovereignty (Genesis 3:16b, 4:8) and sin. Selfish struggles in this life are borne out of congenital traits that each generation passes to the next. God allows rebellious human sovereignty only for a time so that, just as He promised, death became the punishment for sin. Time is death. Though all seek to prolong their times, death reigns over time, and all die.
In this time-cursed world, every moment of life is constantly dying into the next moment. This is what we call the “flow of time.” But physicists tell us that there is no such flow of time, and that this perceived flow is only a stubborn illusion (A. Einstein, P. Davies). These physicists see time as the fourth dimension, in addition to the three dimensions of space in which we live. We live in a big “timescape,” which is like a landscape with the added dimension of time.
We are conceived, gestated, born, develop and die in the time-cursed world. The progression of a complete earthly life—embryo—fetus—infant—toddler—child—adolescent—adult—senior—death–is inexorable. Emergence of each new person requires death of the previous person,as each person forms a nurturing “womb” from which the next person is delivered. Our bodies for a time keep up with our personal development, but in time they fall behind and fail the developed person, which we know as the soul (Greek – psyche).
Our lives in time continually go through a series of little “deaths”and “births.” Each time we die, it is to the old moment. If we never died,there could never be a new moment, and a more developed soul could not emerge. It is incongruous that as the soul is developing through the process of many little deaths and births, that the body cannot keep up. Time is the curse of the body,and its physical depredations run deep until they end in DEATH. But what of the more developed, and hopefully improved person, the soul?
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