By Geoffrey Asimwe
I was raised in a Christian home and so I view the world through the lens of Christianity.
Man is a spirit being with a soul, living in a body. The body is the material casing that enables us to live in the physical realm; without it the spirit/soul remain in the realm of spirits. But because the body has an expiry date when it dies, it goes back into the material it was made from — dirt.
However, the spirit/soul lives on because it was made from the material that makes God, an everlasting being. From a Christian standpoint, the spirit component in a man returns into God. But what came out of the contact between the spirit and the body is eternal. It’s the soul — that is made up of the will, mind and emotions — giving the ability for freewill.
After the separation from the body it’s the decisions that the person made while he or she was living in the flesh that will determine whether destination is heaven, which is in the presence of God, or Hell, which is eternal separation from the presence of God.
What determines where a person spends eternity is whether or not he or she accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and followed Him or not.
As I grew up and started to interact with other cultures, I discovered there were different world views. In fact there were as many world views as there were people groups — tribes, nations, languages etc.
For some, death is the end of everything as in dead-dead. For others it’s a cycle of rebirth where the person returns in the same form or another such as an animal or a plant. Yet for others it’s a transition to the life of spirits that still continues to interact with life on earth in another form.
All these world views contradicted each other, which gave me the impression that when a man is faced with the unknown, his mind quickly conjures up what it can be in order to make sense of it.
So religion is really man’s attempt to understand and answer the mystery of life.
For example, we have African spirituality which considers that the dead return as ancestors to help guide the living through life. Meanwhile the Christian believes that the soul goes back to God, its creator, to be judged — either for entry into heaven, or damnation in hell.
Can they both be right?
I present that all world views should have the same conclusion since we all have to go through death as a rite of passage.
Conforming to a world view without question, simply because its traditions and cultural, makes one live in grave danger of being eternally surprised.
Imagine, going through life believing in soul sleep only to transition and realize its forever. What a shocker it would be.
In my time of observation, I have come to the conclusion that every belief system, with dogmas for guardrails, is the religion which informs a world view to which adherents must align themselves and therefore be defined.
Most worldviews are no more than man’s attempt to answer the question of what comes after we die.
Too many a mind’s eye, its imagination that has led delusions to become realities.
In my opinion therefore, the mystery of life and death or indeed if there is a heaven and a hell, can only be resolved if a person who has transcended this earthly life returned and told us what it is all about.
And this is what Jesus Christ, a man born in Bethlehem, Judea to Jewish parents in the 1st century, did for anyone who will seek the truth.
He came to show us that there was an afterlife and the way to get there.
Historian Will Durant (who was not a Christian when he opined this) had this to say about the Christian world view and its founder Jesus Christ:
“…That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so loft an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the gospel. After two centuries of higher criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature of western man.”
Being that it’s therefore undisputed historically that Jesus was born, lived, died and rose again, his teaching on heaven and hell should guide us on what is awaiting us on the other end of death.
My personal policy in this matter is that I will trust everything that someone who died and rose again says.
Here are seven facts from Jesus’ teachings on Heaven and Hell:
1. Every human being is going to spend eternity in one of two places; Heaven or Hell.
2. Jesus talked about Hell 3 times more than he talked about Heaven.
3. Hell was never made for man but for Satan and his demons.
4. Unrepentant souls go to Hell.
5. Whether a man goes to Heaven or Hell is his choice.
6. To ENTER HEAVEN, ONE HAS TO BE BORN AGAIN.
7. TO BE BORN AGAIN YOU MUST BELIEVE THAT JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS AND CONFESS HIM AS LORD AND SAVIOUR OF YOUR LIFE.
