What must it be like when our final moment comes? What is death? Do we remain conscious in any way at the moment of death? Do we feel the journey from time into eternity? Will we know that we are crossing over that threshold?

It has often been pointed out that every second the clock ticks, someone, somewhere dies. Over 30 million people die every year, or 86,400 every day.

Everyone has to keep this final appointment. It is the great destination of life which draws everyone and makes no distinctions. Rich or poor, strong or weak, brilliant or simple, famous or forgotten - all will leave this life through the same dark doorway, for life is short and death is sure.

All through our lives we try to put that final day out of our minds. But from the moment we are born our bodies have already begun the long decay - the preparation for death. The poet Montgomery put it like this:

The arrow that shall lay me low
Was shot from death's unerring bow
The instant of my breath.
And every moment I proceed
It tracks me, with unceasing speed;
I turn, it meets me -
Death!...
Hath given such instinct to that dart
It points for ever at my heart.

Are we feelingfully conscious at the time of death? The answer of the Bible is emphatic. Even if we are unconscious right up to the end of this life we shall suddenly become conscious as we enter the next.

When the light of this world snaps off, the light of the next will come on. Immediately we shall realise that we have passed from time into eternity. The light, the atmosphere around us and the whole realm of sensation will be altogether different.

Our feelings
We shall be filled with an overpowering awareness that time is now behind us for ever, and that we are now disembodied souls. However, our feelings will vary tremendously.

For some, the sensations felt immediately they pass into the next life will be too terrible for words to describe. For others, the sensations felt will be marvellous.

Consider the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ about this final moment. Speaking to a tremendous crowd of people, He once described the death of a very wealthy man in a highly significant way. He described him as an expensively dressed man who dined daily on the most extravagant gourmet meals. He described him in terms of what he had, what he wore, and what he ate.

The Lord made no mention of what kind of man he was, what he did, what he accomplished, or what he knew. He described him by a few external things - possessions, clothes and food! This rich man apparently had no character, no depth, and certainly no spiritual relationship with God.

The Lord told how the rich man's death was marked outwardly by a flamboyant funeral befitting a man of his wealth and ostentatious ways. But his soul was instantly plunged into a state of indescribable anguish, remorse and despair.

There are countless people who will never grasp the value ,of their eternal souls until they have passed through the irreversible experience of death. Then it will be too late!

Time gone
Think of all the energy, all the days of life which they will have spent on external things such as possessions, clothes and fleeting luxuries, only to find that they have thrown away eternity.

Across the line of death everything completely changes. That is the great principle taught by the Lord Jesus Christ. We leave the values of this earth behind. Spiritual values count now.

But suppose we have none? Suppose we have had nothing to do with God, and have never sought Him or come to know Him? The rich man in the Lord's teaching prayed for the first time in his life when he was shut away from God, and it was too late.

He discovered, all too late, that there was a great gulf between Heaven (with the eternal presence of God) and the domain of rejected souls. The Bible teaches that everyone will have to face Chrtst one day, to be accepted or rejected by Him in the final Day of Judgement.

Interestingly, this subject is not only taught in the Bible. It is an undeniable fact that we all have a strong awareness built into us that this life leads towards a day of reckoning. An awareness that we are made by God, and that we are accountable to Him, is imprinted deep into our being.

Every land and nation has some kind of judgement system indelibly stamped upon its behaviour, thinking and literature, and this is a reflection of mankind's deep-seated realisation that wrongdoing must be judged.

But every individual knows it also. Everyone has a conscience. Everyone feels guilt and shame, even if we push such feelings as far away from us as possible. Everyone fears death, and in a remarkable way.

The fear of death which we all possess is not just a rational kind of fear arising from our not wanting to lose the enjoyment of conscious life. It is a far greater fear than that because even people who hate every minute of their lives still fear death (unless suffering from suicidal depression).

Awareness
The apprehension which surrounds death is something which cannot be explained, except by the fact that buried deep in every soul there is an awareness of a coming day of account. The inner being knows that there is something more to fear than the end of life and consciousness. There is an uncertain eternity, and there is God to face.

There is other evidence of a coming day of reckoning in the natural world around us. The way living creatures are 'designed' shows that there is an ultimate goal towards which everything is steadily moving. All living things are built to fulfil a definite purpose and follow a preset course of life.

Take the obvious example of the germ cell which is the beginning of every human being. Locked into that microscopic cell is all the design-data for the finished adult. A complete record of the future personality, physical aptitudes, intellect and appearance is there. It is almost a parable about destiny. Growing up from childhood is a journey to something definite.

Wherever we look we see in this world numerous similar indications of order and destiny. Everything has a definite, unfolding future.

How can we meander down the pathway of life as though there is no meaning or destination, when we are surrounded by so much evidence that it is a journey to somewhere?

The teaching of the Bible is that there must be a day of judgement because God is absolutely holy. He is both perfect and just and is therefore bound to judge and punish sin. All the selfishness, pride, deceitfulness and wretchedness which is in everyone of us must one day be eradicated from God's presence, together with all the sinful acts, words and thoughts which our sinful condition generates.

But because God is also full of love and mercy, He has made a way of escape for us if we seek it while here on earth. The Lord Jesus Christ (Who is God - a member of the eternal Godhead) came into this world Himself to make it possible.

He left the royal palaces of Heaven to enter into a body of flesh. He suffered and died in indescribable agony to bear the punishment of sin for all those people who seek His forgiveness.

Having done this He has the right to forgive and convert all the millions of people throughout history who are drawn to seek Him for pardon and new life.

Hidden memory
What will happen to us on the last day of life - when the light of this world is turned off? In that day there will be no hiding, for all must be completely exposed before the Judge of all the earth.

We live in an age of video, of 'instant replay'. But when we stand before God's throne of judgement, our whole lives will be replayed before us in seconds. We shall be aware of every sin we ever committed. We shall see the kind of people we really were. We shall be aware of our guilt in a way which we could not possibly imagine while here on earth. When our souls are naked before Almighty God absolutely everything will come back to us.

Sometimes we get some hint of the equipment of the soul within us. Everyone has experienced amazing tricks of memory. Sometimes when we have been day-dreaming by ourselves some recollection from way back in childhood has suddenly and strangely come to mind. Perhaps it was an event of no great significance at all, yet it has come back in vivid detail.

Sometimes it is as though we can taste the very atmosphere of some far off event, so strangely realistic has been the memory.

Such moments give us some hint of the amazing amount of data locked into our minds; the amazingly accurate pattern of events which is stored and maintained there. One day everything will be reviewed, everything will be known, as we stand before God while the history of our life passes before us.

Do we realise that in that day, if we have never repented of our sin and sought the forgiveness of Christ, we shall have no defence, nothing to say? We shall be speechless before God, and we shall realise that we systematically, wilfully, sinned away our entire life.

It will be shown us in that day how God on numerous occasions pulled at our hearts, moved in our consciences, and by various means urged us to seek Him and find Him. But each time we shrugged off these influences and went our own way.

For countless people death will mean that the spirit will make its terrible journey into a lost eternity away from the presence of a loving God and Saviour. In that tragic moment every good thing must be withdrawn from the soul - for all good things are only on loan from God.

For rejected souls, no beauty will ever meet the eye again. No happy sound will ever reach the ear. No peace of heart and mind will ever be felt. The soul will be gripped with unimaginable fear as those who die as rebels against God sense with unspeakable horror that they are now under the just sentence of condemnation from the Judge of all the earth.

They must pass into the moral blackness of anti-values, an everlasting swamp of selfishness and lies, anguish and despair. They must bear their own punishment. The value of an eternal soul will be learned too late.

But if we are among the great company of people who have sought and found Christ, and we know Him and live for Him, then it will be so different.

Last journey
When that last moment comes the soul will be overwhelmed with inexpressible anticipation. Excitement is far too small a word for this. The journey into eternity will be a million times more spectacular and amazing than any adventure or experience we could possibly known on earth.

New sights, new sounds and all the breathtaking scenery of the eternal realm will move us to ecstasy. We will find ourselves suddenly filled with a rush of knowledge and understanding, and we will know what life was all for.

All pain and disability will disappear and we will be filled with emotions such as we never imagined - amazing fulfilment, peace, happiness, love, and security. We shall mix and mingle with all God's people from every day and age.

All sin and weakness will be gone, and we will see and hear our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, Who we came to know and feel and love while here on earth. Death will prove to be not only a conscious experience, but the gateway to everlasting life.

Time: the Mysterious Dimension
by Dr. Peter Masters


Time is something which dominates us all. We are held in by time rather like goldfish in a bowl. Our entire lives are just brief moments in the rolling ages of time - just flecks; tiny passing seconds.

No-one has any power over time. We like to think that ultimately man will be able to control more or less everything in the universe, but there are certain things which mankind has no power over at all. He cannot make the slightest impression upon them.

Time is one af these 'unconquerables'. It is as though a great Creator has organised such things to keep the human race in its place. We cannot tamper with time even to the extent of a milli-second. It is a whole dimension which we are utterly unable to alter.

We may dream of time machines but they remain pure fiction. Not a single step has ever been made towards building one. Mankind is firmly stuck in time, and under its authority.

All we can do with time is to make clocks and measure it. We cannot rush it, nor can we slow it down. We certainly cannot step back in time to re-live or revise events. Things happen to all af us which cause so much pain and regret that we would give anything to have our time back and do everything differently. But once something has happened no-one can bring that moment back. It has gone for ever.

An unknown future
Time also dominates and humbles us as far as the future is concerned. We can guess at future events and make short-term forecasts, but we really have not the remotest idea what our lives will be like a few years from now.

Similarly, we have no idea what the world will be like in twenty years time. Will there be global war soon, or will economic catastrophe shatter our lives? We have no control over the past, and no capacity to either predict or avoid the future.

And who can extend his lifespan? Soon we shall leave this life behind and all too soon we shall be forgotten. Time will take its toll of us, erode away our youth, speed on the ageing process and finally claim us in death.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all her sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

We are just here today and gone tomorrow. Change and decay rule!

Time is like a large room. That is how God has designed it. It is a container for the human race.

For God, however, it is altogether different. He is not boxed into this dimension of time but stands outside it and above it. Time, to God, is like a modern, semi-circular organ console where every key and every stop-tab is at the same distance from the organist. God has that kind of relationship with time, for every event which occurs in history is at an equal distance from the Lord of time.

Above time
Imagine a group of travellers trekking on foot across difficult, hilly countryside. Because of the hills they can only ever see a few hundred yards ahead. Every time they crest another hill, all they see is another small phase of their journey, and so their journey seems endless.

But imagine a helicopter climbing above the hills and, hovering high above these travellers. Its pilot can see the place they have came from and the point which they are making for. He can watch their every step and see the end just as clearly as the beginning.

That is how God stands at an equal distance from all time, as Lord over it. Being above time God obviously does not change. He will always be perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful. He cannot be affected by time as we are. He cannot grow old and weary, nor can He became out of date in any way. God's message to man never changes either, so His way of saving souls will be unaltered to the end of time.

If God can observe everyone's entire life at a scan, it is obvious that no sin will ever pass unnoticed, no act of rebellion, no misdemeanour against God, no slander of Him. Our most secret sins will always be exposed to His searching sight.

At twenty years-of-age we already have many years of sin to account for when we stand in the presence of God. At the beginning of our adult lives we have already polluted His moral universe and decided to spend our lives entirely upon ourselves. We have quickly become taken up with pride, arrogance and selfishness, and have completely turned our backs on our Creator and God.

By forty years-of-age the record of guilt is twice as long; by sixty, three times as long. All that we do is seen and marked by our God Who is absolutely holy, and we must one day be held to account for the lives which we have lived.

The Bible tells us that - 'one day is with the Lord as a thousand years; and a thousand years as one day.' This indicates that God can review a thousand years with the ease with which we can reflect on the events of a single day, or even a few moments.

However, it also gives us an insight into how God evaluates human history. A thousand years may, in God's sight, possess only the value of a single day!

Take an approximate thousand years of history like the period from William the Conqueror to the present day. To become an expert in such a period of history would take several lifetimes of study, but what is it worth by Heaven's estimation?

Apart from the fact that God touched the lives of many people who came to know Him and who are now with Him in Heaven, what is all the human struggle and toil worth in the sight of God? When it is all past, what will it have brought to Him? It will be worth no more than a single day, because all life lived away from God is lived in vain.

Value of a life
An entire millennium can be played through on the 'video' of Heaven within a day, and to God it may not be worth any more than a passing glance.

What about an individual life? Suppose we never seek and find the Lord, what is any one life worth in God's sight? Barely a second. Our seventy years are worth nothing from God's perspective. One day they will all prove to have been a tragic waste of time.

We may protest that we try to live good lives and to bring up our children well. But our feeble claims look pathetic from God's viewpoint. All our waywardness and self-seeking over the years, and all our ugly deeds far outweigh the few good intentions and the fleeting moments of righteousness we may have had.

In every day and age God will call men, women and young people to turn to Him for forgiveness and conversion. Many will seek and find Him, and this is the whole point and purpose of time. This alone will bring significance and value into life.

Returning to our biblical quotation, if a thousand years can be worth no more than a single day in God's sight, in what way may a single day be like a thousand years?

This reminds us that God is not fickle and forgetful like us. If God loves and forgives a sinner, He does not lose interest in him after a day or two. God's affection and mercy will never die or fade.

The quotation also teaches us that every act of God has lasting significance. Think of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross of Calvary. When Christ came into this world to suffer and die on the Cross, He accomplished in a single day something which was worth far more than a thousand years. His personal sacrifice for sin lasts for all eternity.

Just consider the 'mechanics' of bringing one lost soul to an experience of true conversion. That person's lifetime of sin had to be paid for by Christ on Calvary's Cross. All the punishment which that person deserved to suffer had to be taken instead by Christ. What He did on the Cross was an act of atonement.

Then think further of the millions of people who have been and who will be converted to God through the long history of this world. Think of the sum total of all that guilt. All of it was dealt with, wiped out, and purged away, when the Lord Jesus bore its terrible punishment.

In a single day Christ made possible; forgiveness, conversion and eternal life, for all who ask Him. The accomplishment of that one day was worth a thousand years multiplied by infinity!

The most important issue of life is to face up to this: What is my life worth? Will it turn out to be meaningless - a mere speck in the timescale?

The greatest day
It could be so different, because anyone who seeks the Lord sincerely will be received by Him. Jesus said clearly enough, 'Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.' If we will only admit to Him what a mess we have made of life, and what sinners and failures we are, He will wash away the guilt of all our sin and infuse spiritual life into our souls. He will totally change our lives and bring us to know and serve Him.

When the last Day comes and the 'record books' of God are opened all the inhabitants of this world from every period of history will be divided up into two categories - those for whom life was worth nothing but dismissal from the presence of God, and those who one day earnestly sought the Lord and came to know Him. That day will prove to be worth a whole eternity.

The following is one of the promised articles from the Unseen World, published by the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The article is written by Prof John Whitcomb.

For many years the general public has been given the impression that the theory of evolution is a proven fact accepted by all scientists. But in recent years a growing body of scientific opinion in the USA and Britain has been pouring doubt onthe most basic teachings of evolutionism.

The Natural History Museum in London - the world's foremost museum of life science - recently mounted an exhibition which exposed many of the weaknesses of evolutionary theory. The Museum's principal biologist described much of Dr Richard Leakey's proevolutionary television programmes as 'sheer fiction'.

This article outlines some of the highly improbable things which must be believed (like an act of faith) if we put the theory of evolution in place of belief in a Creator God.

The evolutionary perspective insists that life began with marine creatures - tiny, simple, marine forms of life - and that only vast ages later did the highly complex organisms appear on dry land.

Evolutionism is totally committed to the view that all living things appeared on this planet when the ingredients necessary for life floated together by chance, in a liquid environment, millions of years ago. Let us examine these tremendous claims.

We are told that long, long ago, the world was totally different from its present form. Two or three billions of years ago, or so evolutionism teaches, oceans were totally different from their present appearance. They were packed with just the right biochemical ingredients to come together to form micro-organisms. Of course, we have no geologic evidence in the earth's crust today that any such ocean ever really existed., This is a faith projection on the part of evolutionism - a hypothetical dreamworld, a strange, fantasy world, totally different from our Own.

We are also told that the atmosphere was altogether different from its present form in that it was a reducing atmosphere, with absolutely no oxygen present, because if oxygen had been present it would have destroyed or oxidised the life forms and then there could have been no evolution of anything.

According to evolutionism, the atmosphere millions of years ago consisted of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. Great lightning bolts lashed through this soupy mixture, seething with biochemical ingredients waiting to become alive.

Furthermore we are told that in this totally unique, strange, wonderful world, the second law of thermodynamics did not operate. Now this is a law which is universal so far as we can tell in all galaxies and other planets in the universe.

The law states that through the passage of time a closed system (that is a system closed from outside interference) will tend downward toward disorder. In other words, in all highly ordered systems, the tendency is that disorder always increases as time passes. There are no significant, known exceptions to this process.

We are told by evolutionism, however, that in that marvellous world of long ago simple things, namely lifeless chemicals, with the passing of time became complex things. In fact they became living, self-reproducing organisms, and ultimately human beings.

This is an astounding contradiction of all that we see happening in the present universe. A beautiful, polished, new car, left to the vicissitudes of the total environment will tend toward rust, decay, ultimate collapse and uselessness. Eventually it will join the enormous, endless parade of vehicles deposited on the junk heap.

We are also told (by evolutionism) that in that wonderful world of life origins, the ingredients for life not only floated together by chance, but they stayed together. Today they float apart again! But we are told that in those days, things that floated together stayed together and became greater and greater in complexity until they attained the level of amazingly complex, self-reproducing, living organisms.

We must now consider the remarkable organism which supposedly resulted when all kinds of lifeless chemicals floated together in that wonderful world where the second law of thermodynamics did not operate, where reversible movements within a liquid environment did not operate, where there was a totally different kind of ocean and an -altogether different, atmosphere also. After making all these enormous faith projections or extrapolations - what kind of organism does evolutionism say was produced when 'life' first dawned?

Darwin used to say (and his earlier followers also emphasised this) that the end product was a simple little thing. It was a protozoan, an amoeba, a single-celled organism. It seemed reasonably feasible to think that something very simple might have resulted, from chance events occurring in the wonderful world of long ago.

But now that 125 years have passed and knowledge has advanced, we realise that the single-celled organism is not so simple after all. The National Geographic Society has published a 'geography' of the living cell; an atlas which embodies the fruit of biological advance in recent decades. One of their 'maps' of a single cell is reproduced here.

Our bodies contain hundreds of millions of single cells which are programmed in various ways to produce the fantastic complexity of the human body, and every one of them has within it all the information of a living system. The living cell has come under intensive study in the last couple of generations, and we now know that each tiny component part is vastly more complex than Darwin and his colleagues could ever have dreamed.

For example, it is now known that the outer membrane of each cell is so complex that it can breathe in and out of the cell materials needed or not needed, as the case may be, for its proper function.

Essential functions
Just inside the outer membrane the cell possesses such marvellous things as a messenger system, boiler houses and a vacuum cleaning system (the mitochondria and various vacuoles), together with numerous 'factories' which do things that modern science is only beginning to comprehend. All these functions are absolutely essential for life.

Inside the cell is the brain of the system, the nucleus, containing the astonishing deoxyribonucleic acid system of nucleic acid information units which are arranged like a double helix or double spiral staircase, intertwined around itself, which has more information programmed into it than may be found in a one hundred volume encyclopaedia in which each volume has a hundred thousand pages!

That blueprint, or template, which provides all the necessary information for determining what the next generation in the reproductive process is going to be like, has to be transferred from the nucleus to the outer cytoplasm by RNA messenger molecules that tell the enzymes which amino acids to build up into polypeptides and proteins by the thousand.

That is what all floated together by chance! Evolutionism believes that chance can do staggering things if only it has enough time in which to operate.

Mathematicians in recent years have issued an increasingly discouraging response to evolutionists in their constant appeal to time to bring about all these improbable events. In Philadelphia there was a great symposium held between some of the world's leading mathematicians and some of the world's leading neo-Darwinian biologists.

In this symposium the mathematicians said, in effect, 'We are sorry but you cannot endlessly appeal to the probability statistics of time and chance to allow impossible things to happen biologically in origins . You cannot use mathematics to solve your problem. '

Could the simple cell, which turns out to be highly complicated after all, really have come into existence by a chance coming together of all the necessary ingredients? Does the possibility of an enormous amount of time help to make the concept credible?

Picture a typewriter with only twenty-six keys and a monkey poking blindly at it, producing an endless stream of absolutely meaningless letters. How long would it take this monkey, poking away at fifteen keys a second, night and day, without ever getting tired, to spell out, say, the first verse of the Bible?

The monkey has only forty-four letters to accomplish - In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. How long would it take, according to known probability statistics, for that monkey to spell this out by pure chance?

The likelihood of the monkey achieving this feat is actually much greater than the likelihood of the vast number of complex chemical reactions occurring (in absolutely the correct order) to produce a highly complex single cell.

Yet, according to probability mathematics, the monkey's much easier task would take 190,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000 times longer than the entire age of the universe according to cosmogonists.

Chance takes too long
How much time does the evolutionist need for his chance processes? According. to evolutionary ideas the early history of this planet takes up 4,500,000,000 years. This is all the time evolutionism has available to accommodate its entire process of evolution to the level of the human race, let alone the original beginning of a single living cell.

Actually, evolutionism does not even have this much time, for according to evolutionary ideas about earth's history, the earth began as a highly molten mass of rock and metal, and it would have taken an enormous segment of the available time to cool down sufficiently for steam to condense so that things could start to float in the primeval ocean.

In other words the evolutionist is trapped in a negative time slot; he has no time for chance to achieve anything.

Clearly, evolutionism cannot explain life. It has no answers whatever to the origin of life. Every new biological discovery underlines the enormous complexity of self-reproducing organisms, rendering evolutionary theory utterly incredible as an explanation of how life arrived on planet Earth.

The only alternatives left to the modern mind are complete agnosticism, some form of occultism, or acceptance of the view that it was created by God. The last alternative will never be readily accepted by the natural man, because he is haunted by the proximity of his God. If he is created, then there must be a Creator and it is highly probable that man will have to answer to Him some day. Tragically, the rebellious heart of man always tends to recoil from this concept.

Sorry for the Silence!

To anyone who may have been reading this blog, I apologise for the long gap in the postings (I have been very busy). I finished off my last post with the promise that I would be dealing with the SAB's objection of whether a plurality of Gods is taught in the Bible. I still intend to cover that topic. But not just yet. First I would like to post a series of articles published in a small magazine by the Metropolitan Tabernacle (I am first hoping to be allowed permission to do so by Dr. Masters) titled Unseen World.

Watch this space.

Bye for now.