FRIDAY SERMON: AFTER DEATH, WHAT HAPPENS?

Job asked: If a man die, shall he live again? ’Job 14:14. The answer came in 2 Corinthians 5:1 ‘‘These bodies…will be replaced by resurrection bodies in heaven.’’

After AD 616, the first Christian missionaries came to the court of King Edwin in Northumbria, England; they presented the gospel. The king listened, then consulted his advisors. One nobleman said: ‘Life is like a banquet hall. Inside is light…fire…warmth and feasting, but outside it is cold and dark. A sparrow flies in through a window at one end…and out through a window at the other end. That is what life is like. At birth we emerge from the unknown, and for a brief while we are here…with a fair amount of comfort and happiness. But then we fly out into the cold…dark…unknown future.’

When we die, we simply leave a lesser form of life and enter a greater one. Consider the First Law of thermodynamics: Neither energy (as in our soul and spirit) nor matter (as in our body) can be destroyed. They can be transformed into other forms, but they can’t be obliterated.

Burris Jenkins said it this way: ‘No single atom in creation can go out of existence, according to the scientists; it only changes in form. We cannot burn up anything; we simply change it from a solid to liquid or a gaseous state. Neither is any energy or force ever destroyed; it is only changed from one form to another.’ If a person ceases to exist, they will be the one thing in the world that does. And that will disprove the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

So, when we die, what happens? We will be replaced by resurrection bodies in heaven.

In his Analogies of Nature, William Jennings Bryan wrote: It would hardly seem necessary that one should rise from the dead to convince us that the grave is not the end. If God could touch with Divine power the cold and pulseless heart of the buried seed and make it burst forth into a new (plant) life, will He leave neglected in the earth the soul of man, made in the image of his Creator?

If matter, mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit to this tenement of clay?

No, I am as sure that there is another life. Make sure you’re ready to go when your time comes!

There has never been a race of mankind that didn’t believe in some kind of future life, whether it’s reuniting with ancestors as some Africans believe, or the sensual abode of bliss of the Muslim. How do you explain that? Long before any evidence for this worldwide belief had been gathered, Cicero and other great thinkers like Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Jefferson, and the German poet Heinrich Heine all argued for it. All these great minds shared the conviction of the Psalmist, ‘good night’ here just means ‘good morning’ over there.

Death in Islam is the termination of worldly life and the beginning of afterlife. Death is seen as the separation of the soul from the body, and its transfer from this world to the afterlife.

Believing in an afterlife is one of the six articles of faith in Islam. The deceased are held to be in an intermediary state, until the Day of Resurrection.

Death is seen not as the termination of life, rather the continuation of life in another form. In Islamic belief, God has made this worldly life as a test and a preparation ground for the afterlife: Death is therefore seen as the gateway to the beginning of the afterlife. In Islamic faith, death is predetermined by God, and the exact time of a person’s death is known only to God. Death is accepted as wholly natural and marks a transition between the material realm and the unseen world.

Akhirah is the term for life after death in Islam. It is believed that when an individual dies, he remains in grave until the Day of Judgement or Yawm al-din, which is the last day when Allah judges them according to the way they lived. That day, the person is lifted from the grave and is brought before Allah to be judged for their deeds. This belief is called the resurrection of the body.

At this juncture it is important to make a distinction between heaven and Aljanna. There is nowhere in the Quran where the location of Aljanna is mentioned except it’s description as a place of bliss. In Islam, Jannah, lit. “paradise, garden”, is the final abode of the righteous. According to one count, the word appears 147 times in the Quran. It is the prize for righteousness. However, heaven is a generic term for the place above us (Samawat). It is said to be in 7 stages with the highest being the abode of God himself (an anthropomorphic conception).

Presumably the grave is the first staging post after death for our physical body after our soul has been extracted and its spirit floats away.

People who perform several good deeds during their life enter Jannah (Paradise) after judgement. There is no pain, sickness or sadness in this place, whereas those who perform bad deeds in their life enter Jahannam (Hell). But Muslims believe that not all bad actions or decisions are punishable as Allah is oft forgiving and compassionate.

Each soul experiences afterlife in accordance with their deeds and conditions in the earthly life. Evil souls will find the afterlife as painful and punishment, imprisoned until God allows them to interact with others. Good souls are not restricted. The spiritual space is not thought as spatial but reflects the capacity of the spirit. The purer the spirit gets, the more it can interact with other souls and thus reaches a broader degree of freedom.

The sinners or disbelievers meet the Angels of hell (Zabaniyya) to take position in front of him. Thereupon, the angels of death start beating the soul and extracts it from the body in a most painful way. The souls of the sinners and disbelievers are kept and punished in a place called sijjin which is said to be located at the lowest level of the earth before the Day of Resurrection. May Allah spare us the torment of the grave. Amen

The Quran discusses the issue of death in several places, wherein it emphasizes that death is inevitable, and that no matter how much people try to escape death, it will reach everyone. See (Q50:19), (56:83–84), (23:99–100). Probably the most-frequently quoted verse of the Quran about death is: “Every soul shall taste death, and only on the Day of Judgment will you be paid your full recompense.”(Quran 3:185)

It is in the light of the foregoing that we have an unshakable belief that there is life after this life, and it is there for the sole purpose of judging man for his life on this divide. It would be the greatest act of spiritual injustice if the iniquity of man goes without being punished.

What kind of justice is it that allows a man who steals 90 billion of the people’s patrimony to just walk into the grave, leaving his offspring washed in unearned wealth? What kind of God will allow less than a thousand men to pension 200 million into penury, wanton deprivation, abject poverty, hewers of wood and drawers of water? No Sir, there must be an encore to this life.

Emmanuel Kant said: “The drama of this life is not complete; there must be a second scene to it . . .. Therefore, there must be another world, where justice will be carried out”.

According to the Islamic beliefs, God will play the role of the judge, weighing the deeds of everyone. He will decide whether that person’s akhirah (afterlife) lies in Jahannam (Hell) or Jannah (Paradise) based on the weight of either good or bad deeds. May we be counted among the dwellers of Jannatul Firdous.