Death’s Dark Vale – Part 2

These 2 articles on Death’s Dark Vale were written with my brother, Barry in mind. Part 2 in particular was meant to try and communicate what the bible says about our eternal destination.

But it was not to be. Barry went home before I could finish the article.

I had many discussions with him, particularly in his last month, and a lot of those discussions ended up being centred around eternity.

The wonderful thing is that he knows a lot more about our eternal home now than we will ever know while we are in this earthly realm. I’m sure, if he could, he would say to me now, “Chris you don’t know a pinprick of what you’re in for, but I am waiting to show you!”

Recap

We saw in part 1 of this article how all of us have faith about what will happen to us one minute after we die, and that it’s not the faith itself that saves us. Faith is the force that gives us the evidence of what we believe but have not yet seen or experienced. It is the substance of the things we hope for. (Hebrews 11:1).
We saw that it is of paramount importance for each of us to be certain that what we base our faith in is trustworthy and true.

God’s Promises for Death’s Dark Vale

In this part 2 of Death’s Dark Vale, we will look at what the Word of God promises to those that have decided to place their faith in it and have taken that one simple step that transforms our eternal destiny. That step is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and as a result to know Him in a personal relationship.

Just a Glimpse

Now before we begin let me say that the Word of God says in 1 Corinthians 2:9 and Isaiah 64:4 that,” Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

This means no eye has seen and no ear heard, including yours and mine. I believe this to be because what we will experience after our death is impossible for us to grasp or even imagine in the four dimensional world we currently live in.

Therefore, anything we try to imagine through our human mind and our earthly understanding about our eternal home will be worlds short of what it is really like. As we try to get a glimpse of our eternal future, we must realise that our human understanding is worlds away from the glory of God. We will always fall short of reality in our vision of home but even that very limited vision is more wondrous than anything this current world can offer.

1Corinthians 13:12 in the New Living Translation says, ”Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

God has given us many tantalising clues toward our coming eternal home and what each of us will be like when we have left death’s dark vale behind us. He has held out a carrot to us, so to speak. He has masterfully encouraged us to extend our thinking past our current world yet He has kept us in the realm of what we can understand.

The Barrier to Belief

There is a barrier in our earthly existence that prevents us from understanding God and His plan a little better.

It will always limit God by dragging Him into our own human thinking and looking at Him as if He were just a human being like us but with a bit more power. I believe we need to be aware of our limited understanding in this area to be able to begin to see God for Who and What He really is and His plan.

This barrier is the four dimensions in which we currently live.

Please stick with me here as I think this is such an important piece of the puzzle that is missing when we try to understand God.

Three + One Dimensions

We live in a four dimensional world made up of three “spatial” dimensions (width, length and height) and time.

For example, we live only on the surface of the Earth. So, when we want to describe where we’re located, we only have to give two coordinates: latitude and longitude. These two values describe where we’re located on the planet in two dimensions. The third dimension, height, is not needed because we know we’re on the Earth’s surface.
However, if you go underground or into the air above the earth’s surface, you’d need a third coordinate to accurately describe your location. That is altitude or depth, or where you are on the “up and down” line.

Think about it.  Someone located at the exact same latitude and longitude as you ⁠— the same two-dimensional position ⁠— could easily be in a tunnel or a cave or overhead in a helicopter or even on top of a skyscraper.

They aren’t really at the exact same location in our world, even though their “left and right” position or their width/length position is the same. You now need three separate pieces of information to pinpoint your exact location. You need all three of the dimensions we live in to accurately describe where that person is.

The fourth dimension.

Let’s imagine you are sitting at a table in a café having a coffee. It’s easy to plot your exact location using our three dimensions. But how about the person who sat at that same table drinking coffee yesterday? Or, how about the person who will sit at that same table tomorrow?

To fully describe your location, you need to know more than just where it occurs, but also when it occurs. You also need a time coordinate.

We are also aware that with the fourth dimension, time, there is no such thing as staying stationary. In the time dimension, we are always moving, and we are always moving forward. We cannot live one moment in the future or one moment in the past, can we?

When we look at our lives here on earth, everything we do is within these four dimensions. They are the only dimensions we, as humans, can knowingly experience with our earthly bodies. Sure, we have senses like smell, sight, touch and feel and sound, but these senses are only good for our four dimensional world.

Can we “see” outside?

Now, we all know that there are many things in this four dimensional world of ours that we know exist, but they are outside of these four dimensions. One of the most obvious is information. We all absorb massive amounts of information every hour of every day. When we read something, for instance, there’s an exchange of information between the book and our brain but we cannot see, feel, or touch that information.

Let’s take it a step further.
Let’s take a cheap flash drive that we can buy over the counter for a few dollars. Let’s say our flash drive has a capacity of 64 gigabytes.
Now, before we do anything to that flash drive let’s place it on a set of ultra-sensitive scales and note what it weighs.
Now let’s insert it into our computer and copy 64 gigabytes of information from the computer to the drive. We copy over movies, songs, documents etc till the drive is full.

Now, let’s once again place the drive onto the scales and note what it weighs. Exactly the same!

Something has most definitely been transferred from the computer to the flash drive, in fact, an enormous amount of information, yet the flash drive remains the same weight. No mass of the kind we are familiar with has been transferred.

The information has been transferred in the form of a computer language that has made an impression on the flash drive so we can read that information but the information itself has no mass. It is also timeless. It’s outside of our familiar four dimensions.

Let’s also examine the wind.

Through our senses we can feel the wind on our body, we can see the effect of the wind in the moving trees and plants, we can hear the wind as it moves the trees around us, we can even smell the scents that the wind brings to us from plants and animals or the sea. However, all these senses are only from the EFFECTS of the wind.

Sure, we know that the energy that drives wind originates with the sun, which heats the earth unevenly, creating warm spots and cool spots, however, we cannot actually physically interact with the wind itself. We can use it to drive a sailboat or turn a windmill but there is no way for us to hold out our hand and capture and hold a piece of wind.

These are a couple of examples of where dimensions outside of the four we experience impact our everyday lives.

There are many known facts about these four dimensions that test the understanding of the most intelligent humans, yet we are now aware through the science of quantum physics that there are at least 10 dimensions but only these basic 4 can be knowable or experienced by us humans while we inhabit our body.

By the way, It is rather funny to realise that this discovery was actually made by a Jewish scholar, Nachmanides, over 700 years ago!

What’s the Point?

So, what does all this have to do with what’s on the other side of death’s dark vale?

Well, it has everything to do with it because although we, as humans, are living in a four dimensional world, God is not!

God is outside of time and outside of our spatial dimensions. He created them and is completely exterior to them.

It’s the same as if you had painted a picture or created a story or formed a clay pot. You are outside of that thing you created. Not only are you outside of it you understand it more completely than anyone else because you created it.

This is why it is difficult for the created thing, in this case, us and the world we live in, to fully understand the creator.

If we are going to get even a small grasp on our eternal home we must accept that we are talking about a place that is outside of our known dimensions and therefore it is not easily seen from within our current world.

Accepting Dimension Outside Our Four

Believers in the Bible have no problem with accepting the existence of the many dimensions outside of our four familiar ones.

The whole bible is a collection of sixty six books that are all supernatural. That is to say, it was authored from outside our four dimensions and it portrays God’s interaction with our four dimensional world. It spectacularly introduces us to our God of infinity and eternity, again outside of our natural world.

It also portrays future events that are likewise beyond our four dimensional world.

However, let’s look at our Lord Jesus Christ after His resurrection.

His post resurrection body was able to move into and out of all our known dimensions of width, length, height, and time.
In Luke 24:36, for example, we have Jesus appearing to the disciples in the upper room. He did not walk through a closed door or through the wall as some think, He just appeared. He simply popped into the four dimensional world of the disciples from outside of those dimensions.

The Bible says that Jesus made a number of appearances after His death.

They were to a number of different people over a forty-day period.

The Bible specifically says that on Easter Sunday Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene. (John 20:14-16)
The women that came to Jesus’ tomb (Mary the Mother of James, Salome, and Joanna). (Matthew 28:9)
The Apostle Peter. (Luke 24:34)
The two disciples on the Emmaus road. (Luke 24:13-16)
He also appeared to the remainder of the Twelve Disciples with Thomas absent. (John 20:19,20,24)
Later he appeared to them with Thomas present. (John 20:26-28)
There was also an appearance to seven disciples on the Sea of Galilee. (John 21:1, 2)
Appearing to the eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee. (Matthew 28:16,17).
On another occasion, he appeared to over five hundred people at the same time. (1 Corinthians 15:6).
There is also an appearance to James. (1 Corinthians 15:7)
Finally, Jesus appeared to Saul of Tarsus – the man who became the Apostle Paul. (Acts 9:3-5).

To these he also presented himself alive after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. (Acts 1:3)

These appearances convinced His disciples, beyond any doubt, that He had risen from the dead.

They were all appearances that involved our Lord coming into our four dimensions from outside of them.

What is the most amazing thing about these appearances to me is that the bible says in 1 John3:2 that I WILL BE THE SAME! Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be. But we know that when He shall be revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

Absent from the Body, Present with The Lord

2 Corinthians 5:1, 3-8 in the New Living Translation says this about our destiny after Death’s Dark Vale is behind us:

Verse 1. For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands.

Verse 2. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing.

Verse 3. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.

Verse 4. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life.

Verse 5. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee, he has given us his Holy Spirit.

Verse 6. So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord.

Verse 7. For we live by believing and not by seeing.

Verse 8. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord.

Why Fear Death?

How is it possible for anyone to fear death’s dark vale after these great and precious promises? Yes, we may fear the method by which death comes.

No one wants to linger through a debilitating illness or be disabled in an accident, but we should not fear the moment that we pass from this earthly realm into our new world of multiple dimensions and timelessness and to be ever present with Our Lord and to be like Him.

Next week we’re going to continue this series and try to take a glimpse inside heaven.