Death

One's view of what happens when a human being physically dies, in the contemporary sense of the word, is inextricably linked to the concept of time as well as to that of birth (see below). It seems plausible that when one physically dies, he steps out of time and (back – see the discussion of birth, below) into the eternity where the God of the Bible, i.e., the Creator of the universe, has always existed. The concept of sequence is also important to this discussion. The apostle Paul provides some insight into what happens next, when he indicates (2 Co 5:6,8), that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. As sequence is (reasonably) preserved in eternity, the next cognitive event in the (now eternal) life of the physically deceased is Christ's the Creator – Second Coming and the judgement. For the non-Christian, these are not good events !

Whether on physical death, one either steps back into eternity or into it for the "first time", depends on how one interprets Ps 139. At conception, is one’s spirit from eternity past given a soul and body, or is the spirit, soul and body all created, simultaneously? Back or not into eternity, one's spirit and soul have no end, from (at least) conception forward. The essential question, in the context of this brief, then becomes where will one spend it !