We read in the paper of accidents, car accidents and young people dying, and there are questions, many questions people have in their hearts, about the reality of what happens after death, and what happens to a person when they die, what will happen in those first five seconds after you die. These are questions people often don't speak out but they wonder about them. There's a tremendous amount of nonsense in the movies to try and explain some of these things. If we want to find out about what happens in eternity, if we want to find out about life after death or what happens at death, the best place we can go is to the one who made it known.
This week I had a very sad task, to take a funeral of a young girl, a 20 year old girl. Very sad when you go into a funeral service, and there's someone who's only 20 years. We would expect most people to live these days beyond 70, and so to have 50 years or more of her life cut off is just nothing short of tragedy; very, very painful for the parents, very, very difficult. I know we had a number of young people there, and every one of those young people was deeply affected by the loss of a friend.
I think this kind of situation happens over and over and over. We read in the paper of accidents, car accidents, motor vehicle accidents, young people dying; and there are questions, many questions people have in their hearts, about the reality of what happens after death; and what happens to a person when they die, what happens in the first five seconds after you die.
These are questions people often don't speak about, but they wonder about them. There's a tremendous amount of nonsense in the movies to try and explain some of these things. If we want to find out about what happens in eternity, if we want to find out about life after death, or what happens at death; the best place we can go, is to the one who made it known.
The Bible says of Jesus Christ: He came from eternity. He came into the earth; and then knowing where He'd come from, and where He was going to, that He was going back to His Father, He served people, laid His life down as a sacrifice for people; then went into eternity again. So before He did, he appeared to many people; so if you want to know about eternity, then it's quite good to find directly from the person who's been there, lived there, experienced it, and has gone to be there now.
If we look through the gospels, the stories of Jesus, He taught many things, and many times He taught parables. A parable is just a story. It's not a true story, not a real story. It's just a story to get interest, but in it there's a spiritual principle.
What I'm going to read to you is not a story, and we know it's not a story for two reasons: one is, He doesn't tell us it's a story. Everywhere else, if it's a parable, they say it's a parable; so it doesn't say this is a parable, and Jesus is talking directly to His followers. He wants them to understand something.
The second thing is, there are two people who are mentioned in this story. They're mentioned by name. There's a third one who's not mentioned by name, and probably very well that we don't mention his name, but these are real people, who once lived on the same planet we do. They lived in another time, but these people are very real.
I want to just go through and read what Jesus had to say about these people. At times, Jesus, it's almost like He rolled back eternity, and gave people glimpses into it. There are a number of ways that He did that, sometimes with miracles; miracles are manifestation of the eternal power of the kingdom of heaven, coming into the earth. Sometimes He did it through miracles. Sometimes He did it through confrontation of demons, and suddenly for the first time, people become aware of an invisible spirit world.
So when you look at Jesus' ministry, He made the spiritual tangible and real. Not only that, He talked about it. He taught things about the eternal kingdom. He talked about things that would come. He made it very clear, that He would not return until the gospel of the kingdom had been preached through every nation of the earth, and we still have a lot to do.
Then He spoke one story, which gives you a window into eternity. It's not a very pleasant window. It's not a very happy window, but Jesus had seen this. Jesus knew this, and Jesus could teach it like no one else could teach it; so we're going to look in Luke, Chapter 16.
What I want to do, is for you to just open your heart to look for a moment, not just at something in the Bible, but to look, just glimpse into eternity, to discover something you may not have been aware of before. We want to ask the question: what happens in the first five seconds after a person dies? One, two, three, four, five. There's some things happen in those five seconds when a person dies.