Why This Apology?
Our family recently experienced the passing of a family member. As I thought about an appropriate eulogy, I remembered there were relatives who were likely to attend the memorial service who may not have confessed Christ as their Lord and Savior, and who may not truly believe that God raised him from the dead. If there were, then death, to their level of belief is simply annihilation rather than a translation from a mortal life to God’s ultimate reality, and “eternal life” may simply be a metaphor for remembrances of passed experiences with the loved one who died. My goal was to impress upon them the reality, the realness of eternal life through Christ Jesus. To that end I wrote this eulogy:
Resurrection and Eternal Life: An Apologetic Eulogy
Mom’s obituary read in part, “moved to live in the mansions of God the Father, and Christ Jesus.” I wrote this, purposefully, as an allusion to Jesus’s exchange with his disciples at the Last Supper, consoling them with the projection of what is to come. In John chapter 14, Jesus said, “Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places; if it were not so I would’ve told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself that where I am, there you may be also. . . . I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me (John 14:2-3, 6, NASB) .”
Sometime earlier, speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus told him, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16, NASB).” “Eternal life” is not a metaphor for death, or a euphemism for remembering our experiences with the one who passed. The promise of our resurrection is not empty. Nor is it an attempt to merely placate us, or console us through the loss of someone we care for. Our resurrection is as real as our next breath.
We have been given an account, and an example, in the Gospels of what “resurrection” truly looks like through Jesus’s resurrection. Skeptics have attempted to dismiss his resurrection account as mass hallucination, or as fabrication. Mass hallucination can be ruled out, because hallucinations are personal aberrations involving a single person’s mental state. Fabrications are unlikely since there is no record of any of the disciples retracting his experience of the resurrection event, even at the point of death. Furthermore, it is highly likely, that even one such retraction, however minor, from any of the disciples of Jerusalem would have eviscerated the nascent Christian movement.
Yet there is another event that serves as an example of resurrection after death. In the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke, there is an account where Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up on a mountain. We commonly call it “the Transfiguration.” It is in this account where we see two people appear, Elijah and Moses. For the moment, Moses is the more significant figure. Elijah was transfigured. Moses was not! We have a very definite account that Moses died, and was buried. Deuteronomy 34:5 tells us that after Moses had been shown the land promised to the descendants of Abraham, “so Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Bethpeor; but no man knows his burial place. . . .” Moses died, and was buried, yet we see him, resurrected, in the presence of God and Jesus on that mountain.
Eternal life is real; it is an event that moves every believer in Christ Jesus from this mortal life into the presence of God the Father, and Christ Jesus. “In my father’s house are many dwelling places. . . . I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2, 3 NASB).