Conquering Death: Heaven's Journey Into Now and Forever
From the moment we are birthed into this world, our bodies immediately decay on the cellular level. The hourglass gets flipped over, emptying our beach of choices and memories until it all hits the bottom as planned by God. The lights of this world go out, and a glimmer of a new light can be seen in the distance. That light is the source of creation and the answer to perception-altering questions accumulated over a lifetime.
Once God turns His hourglass upside down for each creation, we pass the starting point of life toward the finish line that takes our last breath away. All creation called into existence by the voice of God has a set expiration date during our physical experience on Earth. Everything that is manifested by the will of God eventually returns to the ethos of His will, and that is a blessing.
To quote one of my favorite movie series of all time, The Matrix, “Everything that has a beginning has an end.” Well, in our lives, away from the Hollywood script, the end is just the beginning for us as children of the Lord. Through our spirit, the real us, made in His image, we can live a life after this one in peace and harmony with the creator of everything. The fact that we don't continue our physical experience is a gift because returning to our true home is the grander part of life itself.
Death is the side effect of sin from man being seduced by the devil. From the bite of the fruit came spiritual death, which is separation from God. When God walked through the garden of Eden looking for a shamed Adam and Eve, he could not find them, not because He didn’t know where they were, but because our connection was severed. Our sensitivity of spirit to spirit became petrified and remained rock-hard for millennia. The moment we are conceived into the world, sin takes its blood-stained blades, and cuts are ties to the Father. When that happens, we are on a collision course to eternal damnation.
Until we say yes to Jesus, we are mere flesh and bone for the devil to devour in this world. Jesus is the key to being saved and fending off the hungry lion, the devil. True purpose is awakening spiritually to our true identities and who we are called to be in this temporary life and the next one.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16
One of life’s many questions that can keep a person up all night is what happens when we die. The believer knows that this physical experience is not our final stop. The life that awaits the family of God makes this one seem like a short-lived dream compared to the glory of Heaven. Behind the pearly gates into divine freedom and unfathomable love is Jesus with His hand stretched out, waiting for us to come home to where the angels sing on streets made of gold. Coming home is believing in Christ by renewing our minds and hearts to be set on Him. This verse echoes the true definition of love that reverberates on a scale that is hard to measure based on our limited standards of thought processing and comprehension.
The fires of hell raised and burned the first bridge from Genesis into a smoldering pile of ashes that blew around the world, blocking out God's original blessings for us. A curtain of darkness the evil one used for a circus that would reciprocate the harsh conditions of history, but a new bridge was made that can't be broken through redefining the meaning of sacrifice. The Son lifted the black smog from the world and shined bright so we would not suffer a fate far exceeding being lowered six feet under soft dirt.
God the Father loves us so much that He did the hardest thing a parent can do. For the sake of humanity, blood and water spilled on Calvary and leaked all over the Book of Life, with countless names to be called for another chance at eternity in Paradise. If you or I sacrificed the most precious thing we could ever imagine, like our own child, for the greater good of a cosmic cause that would span for generations to come, wouldn’t you want that cause to be not just remembered but loved, and appreciated in our everyday lives? For God so loved the world that instead of us being stuck in an infinite loop of spiritual death, experiencing the traumas of our sinful nature on a hamster wheel, our Father broke the unmerciful paradox to obliteration with unfailing mercy and gave us the greatest blessing of all. When we accept this gift of salvation, we are born again as a new creation, freed from death.
“Then Shall the dust return to the Earth as it was; and the Spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” Ecclesiastes 12:7
Human beings were created from the soil of the Earth. Our temples were constructed from the natural world. Our organic outer shell represents a unique order of creation, which reveals the beauty of having bodies as spiritual beings. We are spirit in a precious temple the Father constructed carefully with His own hands. Our consciousness is symbolic of the essence of the Lord, allowing us to be aware and interact with reality as He saw fit. The physical manifestations of God's will and His breath of life blew forth His children into existence, and our seeds, like the pollen of a dandelion, spread about to reap and sow.
Without the Spirit of the Lord in us, we are just a clay model that is lifeless on the shelf, numb to purpose and devoid of meaning. When we pass on from this life we exist in right now, our physical bodies revert to the past ingredients that molded our flesh and bones. From dust to dust, spirit to spirit, we disassemble from the very elements we were created that date further back than our definition of time. We never truly die since we are spiritual beings in a vessel of clay that is only here for a little while. The body will expire, but the spirit lives on forever, and that is when we make our way to the place we can piece together with imagination and biblical truths.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The mind, body, and spirit. This cycle of three replicates the immortal endless similarity we have to the creator relative to His likeness and the natural order. The blue blanket that is the firmament holds precious water particles that reflect the Lord's home, attracting our spirit upwards to a fate that surpasses the concept of death as we know it. By diving into the written word teaming with life, we can drown ourselves in the living scripture and return the surface to a surface-level world needing the same baptism.
“For whoever would save his own life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 16:25
We often put ourselves on a pedestal as people who need to be in control of everything that happens in our lives via cultural influences that ultimately negate spiritual growth and enhance sinful habits. That pedestal we idolize ourselves on is like a foundation of quicksand that we can easily sink into what is beyond our control, which is God working the balance of life and death on a spectrum that we can only accept not with common logic but through spiritual maturity and faith. Jesus remained on the cross purposely for the bigger picture of God's plan for us. That pedestal at Calvary was used as a mockery of excruciating pain for Christ, but he won the fight at that moment, finishing the prophecy and putting us on a new pedestal we can choose to step on to finish first.
We cannot save our own lives spiritually speaking, and in most cases physically, because we can only do so much as humans. Although our will can allow us to do amazing things, there are works going on behind the scenes that we cannot influence. We can make healthy and responsible choices to preserve the temple God blessed us to live in. We can workout, eat clean, and get rid of toxic addictions. We can do all of those things that are necessary to do. However, none of that will mean anything if we don't submit our sinful egos to Jesus Christ, which is to accept Him as Lord and Savior and ask Him to cleanse our sins.
If you were to describe what hell is to non-believers, it is a place that most people would not want to find themselves in. Even the non-believer knows hell is a place where they would rather avoid, even if they think it is a place of fiction, which it is not. Our fight to conquer death is to start right now. It's never too late to accept Jesus Christ so we can start fighting the right way. It won’t be easy, and God doesn’t expect a perfect Christian to walk the path of faith. The journey of now and forever is accepting the gift of salvation that Christ gave to us that will last from now and forever.
There will come a time for each of us when the last bits of sand fulfill their purpose by falling to the bottom, allowing us to empty out of the present and to the presence of God, who exists outside of our parameters of time. We are no longer confined to the hourglass but to being judged by the Almighty. Death revives us to our source of creation, the loving Father, and we are given our next life, which is eternity in Heaven. Death is not to be feared as a void of nothing, yet another part of the grander story of destiny from the Almighty when we believe in Jesus' promise.
Author Bio
My name is Michael Colon born and raised in New York City. Me and my wife attend a non denominational church as we both explore and grow in our faith together. Creative writing has been an amazing journey so far, and my mission is to continue to impact the lives of others through my written craft. Faith, hard work, and consistency is the motto I live by and with the help of the Lord we can fulfill living a fruitful live in Jesus name. I look forward to always sharing my work.
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