Closing on Abide

This part of the book has walked through hard territory — the word "hell" and everything it hides, a dying man's promise, a rich man's regret, and the strange non-time of the intermediate state — and it would be easy to leave all of that as pure information, filed away as facts about what happens after the heart stops. But remember the measure this book opened with. None of this matters if it does not drive you back to abiding.

Paul's "far better" is not a pause in the relationship this book keeps calling you back to. It is not a gap between the knowing of John 17:3 in this life and the knowing of John 17:3 in the next, as though death interrupts the vine and the branch have to find each other again on the other side. It is the same abiding, deepened — the same menō, the same remaining-in, continuing without the fog that a body still subject to decay lays over every relationship, including the one that matters most. The dying man on the cross next to Jesus was not promised a doctrine. He was promised a Person, present, today. That is what "far better" means. That is what this whole book means, every time it uses the word abide. Whatever else you take from these pages, take this: the vine does not let go of the branch at death. It simply removes, at last, everything that was keeping the branch from feeling how close it had been the entire time.