Life After Death

Dr. Billy Graham, world-renowned speaker who is well-known for his mass crusades, radio and television programs, has said that the question most often asked him is, "Is there life after death?"

This is an age-old question. From earliest times people have believed that life does not end with the grave. "Indeed," writes Dr. Raymond A. Moody, Jr., in his book, Life After Life. "graves from very early sites all over the earth give evidence of the belief in human survival of bodily death."¹

Is man's desire for life beyond death just wishful thinking? Or is there evidence to support this belief?

Modern science seems to support it. For example, many people who have been pronounced "clinically dead" have come back to life and given vivid accounts of being fully conscious after they had been pronounced dead by medical personnel.

For over a half-decade, Dr. Moody, who is also a psychiatrist from the University of Virginia Hospital, made a study of more than a hundred of these cases.

One of these persons described his experience this way: "I heard the doctors say that I was dead and that's when I began to feel as though I were tumbling through this blackness, which was some sort of enclosure. Everything was very black, except that, way off from me, I could see this light, but not too large at first. It grew larger as I came nearer and nearer to it.

Many people who have
been pronounced 'clinically dead'
have come back to life.

"I was trying to get to that light at the end, because I felt that it was Christ, and I was trying to reach that point. It was not a frightening experience. For immediately, being a Christian, I had connected the light with Christ who said, 'I am the light of the world.' I said to myself, 'If this is it, if I am to die, then I know who waits for me at the end, there in the light.'"²

Another explained, "The first thing he (the being of light) said to me was, that he kind of asked me if I was ready to die, or what I had done with my life that I wanted to show him."³

Others experienced a deep sense of loneliness immediately after death. One person said, "I was aware the whole time of being alone—very alone—almost like I was a visitor from someplace else. It was like all relations were cut. I know—it was like there was no love or anything."⁴

While these experiences are interesting, the most reliable textbook we have on life after death is God's Word, the Bible, which says, "Yet we have this assurance: those who belong to God shall live again! Those who dwell in the dust shall awake and sing for joy! For God's light of life will fall like dew upon them!"⁵

In the New Testament Paul wrote, "I am telling you this strange and wonderful secret: we shall not all die, but we shall all be given new bodies ... For our earthly bodies, the ones we have now that can die, must be transformed into heavenly bodies that cannot perish but will live forever."⁶

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