What Happens When You Die

There is a question underneath every other question in this book, and it is not really a question about theology at all. It is a question you will ask, someday, standing in a hospital corridor, or sitting in a car outside a cemetery, or lying in a bed yourself with a diagnosis you were not expecting. The question is simple enough that a child can ask it and old enough that it has never once been answered to everyone's satisfaction: when I die — or when the person I love dies — where do we go?

This book is going to spend its later chapters on the corporate, cosmic scale of prophecy — what happens to the whole world, to history, to the church, at the end of the age. But before any of that, there is a smaller and more urgent question, the one that will actually find you at three in the morning, and it deserves to be answered first, carefully, and honestly, before we ever get to Revelation's larger canvas.

A woman named Ruth — the name has been changed, though the grief has not — sat in a hospital chair for eleven days beside her husband's bed, watching a body that had carried him through fifty-two years of marriage slowly stop being able to do the ordinary things bodies do. On the twelfth day she went home to an empty house, and every well-meaning person who came through her door in the weeks after had a version of the same sentence ready for her: he's in a better place, he's looking down on you, he's an angel now watching over the family. She did not doubt any of it out of stubbornness. She doubted it because nobody had ever actually shown her, from the pages of her own Bible, where any of those sentences came from — and a grief that large deserves better than borrowed comfort nobody can locate. If you have sat in that chair, or you will, this part of the book is for you before it is for anyone arguing about charts.