MOST PEOPLE instinctively feel that death is not the end. The Bible says that we have "eternity in our hearts". This feeling comes to us in various different ways.
Take our immensely powerful desire to live. We weren't meant to just breathe for seventy years or so and then stop. Inside we feel it: we want to live on.
Then there's justice - right and wrong. We sense that we live in a moral universe and that there will be a reckoning. People who die having experienced a raw deal - poverty, unfairness, oppression - ought to have something better. And those who've lived to hate and hurt deserve to pay for it.
Not that this means believing in cartoon stereotypes - clouds and harps or devils with pitchforks. But the Bible does describe heaven and hell: a place of bliss with God and a place of punishment apart from God.
Jesus described heaven most often as a party, a celebration; He described hell as being left out of the celebration.
To put it simply, heaven is "totally knowing God" and all His goodness and beauty. Hell is "totally not knowing God" and being separated from all goodness and beauty.
So the crucial question is: do you know God? Those who know Him before death will be those who know Him after, totally. Those who don't know Him now, won't know Him then - and then they won't even know "God's side effects" like love, peace, beauty. It will just be dark and empty.
None of us can answer that question about anyone else with complete certainty: in the end, it is a question we must answer ourselves. One day we all "stand before our Maker".
Jesus has made it possible for us to know God. He has made it possible for us to go to heaven. Through His sacrificial death He has taken away the sin between us and God. We can know Him. We can start heaven now - and look forward to it then.
"God loved the people of this world so much that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who has faith in Him will have eternal life and never really die." (The Bible, John 3:16)
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