What happens when you die?

It's interesting that you said there, Niv, that you had that period where you didn't believe in God.

Because often people who don't believe in God can struggle with a Christian teaching on death, heaven, hell, and the afterlife, and I think that's seen in just the sheer number of questions that we've had on the topic, uh, given into Maidenhead's Questions.

So let's start going through some of them.'Cause I'd love to hear your perspective.

We had lots of questions about why do good people die.

Here's just a few examples.

Why do good people suffer and die prematurely? Why do good people die if God is good? Why do good people die and evil people live? So, so Niv, why, why is there death at all? Why do people die?

It is...

This is one of those questions, isn't it, which I think it's easy to come at intellectually, but as so often, I guess, in, in the questions Maidenhead's asking, there'll be a, a deeper level as well.

And I can, I can imagine that some of us are asking that question because people we, we love, members of the family, friends perhaps who we've only ever known good from, it feels like they're taken away.

We end up saying things like, "They were taken too soon." Um, and it always feels too soon, even when they're very old.

Uh, one of the privileges of my job as, as a church minister is, is conducting funerals, and even when it's someone who, quote-unquote, "had a good innings," um, there's always this sense of loss.

And so before we get into sort of some of the questions about good versus evil, which I think we will come to, um, in some of the other questions that I, I saw were, were being asked, I think this is the question.

Why, why, uh, why death? Now, I, I think had you asked atheist me, I would, I'd have had to say death is an inevitability.

We live in a universe in which things ran out on us.

Entropy reigns, and biological processes, fascinating and stunning though they are, are limited in all kinds of ways, and so things die.

That, that's just as it is.

And, and I think my experience of taking funerals now basically would lead me to, to question that as, as something you could say to a, to a grieving person, which just sharpens the question.

When, when we encounter death, um, are, are we basically having to trick ourselves into, into saying that what is clear, biological, inevitable reality is just not something we can bear, and so we look to kind of coddle ourselves? Um, I think the, the question's so helpful because it just, it just forces it for us.

One of the things that I find striking in the, in the Bible is the insistence that death really doesn't belong, that in some senses it's a h- a hostile intruder, and its place in reality, uh, is illegitimate.

That is bizarre when you consider that, you know, death is such a, a common feature of life.

Um, one of, one of the, the, the ancient prayers that the Christians have had has this line about how in, in the midst of life we are in death.

Uh, it is all around us, and we experience it.

In, in the 21st century, we, we see a bit less of it, and we tidy it away in sort of medical settings, but for most of human history, it would've dogged us all over the place.

Um, so what is the Bible doing talking about it as, in some sense, not something that really belongs? Take a step back.

This takes us into the big story of reality that the Bible is telling.