"If a man die, shall he live again?" (Job 14:14 KJV). To rephrase Job's question, when a person dies and their life ends on earth, is there an afterlife, a life which they live after their life on earth ends? In other words, is there life beyond the grave? Are those who passed on before us still living, and if so, what is life like for them? To understand death as it really is, we must get our explanation of death from the Bible (KJV), for no one explains death any better than God, for no one knows more about death than Him. To understand death, we must also understand the constitution of man and what happens to that constitution when he dies. When our loved one dies, do they cease to exist? Are they, through death, annihilated? Did they, by default or automatically go, to the "sweet by and by" though they were wicked people? Did they die only to come back to earth as a form of lower or higher life than their previous life? The truth is that no one actually dies. There is no such thing as a dead person, there are only dead bodies. The body, which is mortal, dies, but the spirit of man, which is immortal, never dies. Everyone that has ever lived is still alive in either Heaven or Hell, based on what they did with Jesus Christ; accepting Him as Savior or rejecting Him. When a person dies, their body dies, but their spirit is released at death to another realm of existence. Death is leaving our earthly condition of existence for another condition of existence that is either better or worse than our earthly condition of existence. King David said of the first baby that was born of Bathsheba and died, "I shall go to him (when he himself died), but he shall not return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23). David knew the child still existed though the child's body was in the grave and he knew he would see the child again one day. Paul tells us that while "we are at home in the body (spiritually residing in our bodies), we are absent from the Lord" simply because we cannot be in two places at the same time, and that to be absent from the body or not at home, we are present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:6-8). When a lost person dies, their spirit also vacates their body, and their spirit goes to Hell. The story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 is a depiction of a saved man, as with Lazarus and a lost man, as with the rich man in an out-of-body afterlife experience. They bore the same identity with their soulish body as they did with their physical bodies and knew each other. The rich man in Hell was able to recall his past and remember his previous life. He could think presently and converse with Abraham. He could imagine the future and what it would be like for his brothers to come to Hell, and he sought to prevent it. This demonstrates that all the powers of our being are fully intact and fully functional in the afterlife as they are in this life because those powers reside in the spirit of man and not in his body and are necessary to be conscious of self and conscious of our surroundings for our existence in the afterlife.
