08 Believing in life after death

We were all shocked a few years ago when the cricketer Phillip Hughes was hit in the neck by a ball and later died. Following that tragic event, several Australian cricketers developed a habit of raising their bats and looking up. This gesture was accepted as their way of saying that Hughes was looking down on them from “up there”. Is there any basis for this very common belief?

Until they are faced with the reality of death, most people don’t seriously consider if there is something beyond. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple computers, the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and of Pixar Animation Studios, didn’t think there was when he gave a speech at Harvard University in 2005. He said;

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Steve Jobs was saying that we should live a useful life for a few years, and then get out of the way, because there is nothing after you die.

Five years later, talking to his biographer shortly before he died of cancer, he had mixed feelings. Facing the threat of impending death he could no longer be so glib about it.

Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe it's because I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

Then he paused for a second and he said, 'Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone.' He paused again, and he said, 'And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.’

What decision he came to in the end we will never know in this life but it is clear that the prospect of death prompted him to question his former beliefs. This too is evidence that continued life beyond the grave is a deep-seated longing of the human heart; a hunger for something that really exists.

When we face death, many of us wonder to ourselves if there is something more.

But we don’t have to wonder. There is good evidence for life after death; it is found in the historic, bodily resurrection of Jesus. His resurrection was proof that death no longer has the last word. This is really what Christianity is all about.