Wednesday’s Column: Third’s Words

Gary Pollard

My favorite show is Scooby Doo (the originals, of course). It’s packed with ghosts and monsters, most of which are exposed as frauds or criminals. Mankind has been fascinated with ghosts and other postmortem apparitions for a while. They make great stories and nearly every culture has ghost stories. We point to widespread legends of dragons as one evidence of man’s coexistence with dinosaurs. Since so many cultures have these ghost stories, is it possible they’re true? 

Life and death are God’s jurisdiction, so let’s see if he’s said anything about the subject. Who better to ask about the other side than the one who controls it? 

Look at Luke 16.19-31. Whether this is literal or figurative is immaterial, I just want to look at something Jesus described in detail. A rich man neglected Lazarus (an impoverished man) and ended up in torment after death. He lets Abraham know that he has family on earth who don’t believe and he wants to prevent them from sharing his fate. 

Abraham points out that a large abyss acts as a barrier, preventing anyone from moving between realms. He’s specifically talking about passing from torment to paradise and vice versa, but the rich man was nonetheless incapable of leaving under his own power. 

Hebrews 9 says that we die one time and face judgment. This seems to indicate some permanence to our destination. We know that some spiritual entities are capable of interacting with our world (angels/demons) in some capacity, but the Bible doesn’t give us much detail. 

We can state with a decent degree of confidence, though, that the dead are stuck where they are. That’s a major comfort, too, because our future is secure if we die in Christ (I Peter 1.3-7). They make for great plots (and the best cartoon ever), but ghosts remain solidly in our awesome imaginations.