What Happens When We Die?
When a believer dies, that believer immediately begins his or her second life.
The Sadducees didn't believe God when he said that the souls of dead people continue living, and will be joined with their dead bodies on Judgment Day. These men thought they set the perfect trap for Jesus based on an Old Testament regulation called "the Levirate Law." This law stipulated that "if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother" (Luke 20:28). This allows the family name to continue, and was a law of God expressly intended to maintain the family line of the coming Savior.
Now, what if this happened, and the second man died, and then the third and fourth and up to the seventh, so that this woman would have legitimately had seven husbands before she also died. In heaven, the Sadducees ask Jesus, "Whose wife will she be?" They are making fun of the teaching of the resurrection, but Jesus doesn't let them have the last laugh.
He gently rebukes, rightly corrects, and warmly encourages those who doubt with his firm promises of grace. To the question of the Sadducees, he replies that in the second life, our eternal life, we will not be married. Why? Because we will no longer "be fruitful and multiply." We will not be making babies in heaven. Instead, the number of believers who enter heaven by faith will continue forever. None will die, none will perish. All will live eternally like the angels, "since they are children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36).
Death will no longer have power. Sin will have lost any influence. Like Jesus, who rose from the dead in full glory, children of God will inherit the mansion of heaven and never give it up.
Jesus goes beyond the intent of the Sadducees' question, and seals up his argument with more plain words from Scripture. He explains that believers who die aren't just left "floating around" or told to remain in some fictional waiting room before being transferred to heaven. No, Jesus himself tells us that when a believer dies, that believer immediately begins his or her second life.
How does he prove that? By pointing out that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob all died, and later God spoke to Moses at the burning bush. At the bush, God said to Moses, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6). If Abraham and Isaac and Jacob would have been "lost" out there somewhere, or had ceased to exist after they died, they would have been beyond God’s reach. But, the very fact that God, at that moment, was their God indicated that they were alive and well. They were living as children of the resurrection. They were still within the loving embrace of a heavenly Father.
God continues to be the God of all believers, whether they live or die, as the Bible describes in Romans 14:8-9, "If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord."
Our God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. All who belong to him by faith are alive and well.
PRAYER: Alleluia! Thank you, God, for giving me the victory over death through Jesus Christ! Give new life to my faith, and raise up my confidence in your promises, that I might live today and tomorrow with resurrection joy. Amen.