Reincarnation?

Posted by owner on November 16, 2009

 

Its hard for people to accept the notion that one day they’ll simply cease to be. Our sense of self is just too strong. As we age, our awareness of an essential “me” remains stable and strong. Nearing 80, with the various aches and ills appropriate to my age, I’m aware that I’m the essentially same person I was at 20, or 30, or 50. At whatever age I’ve been I’ve remained “me,” a unique individual.

 

That’s a common experience for each of us. However our lives and circumstances may change, one thing that remains consistent is this awareness that I’m “me,” and no one else.

 

That’s why it’s so hard to believe that one day there may be no “:me.” Somehow we feel intuitively that the person I am can’t just . . . end. The writer of the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes put it like this:  “He has set eternity in the hearts of men. . . “ (3:11). Somehow God planted in us the conviction that biological death can’t be the end. That the essential “me” must somehow go on and on . . .  forever.

 

That “somehow,” of course, raises the question of “how.” How do we “go on.”

 

The Greeks and Romans pictured a drab afterlife in which “shades,’ pale replicas of flesh and blood individuals, wandered endlessly over a colorless landscape until they ultimately forgot who they had been. Eastern religions postulate a wheel of existence, in which persons are born and reborn again and again until they finally escape into Nirvana, where they are at last able to forget themselves and merge with nothingness. Modern neo-paganism has embraced the idea of reincarnation without the eastern faiths’ sense of the burden of nearly endless cycles of earthly existence. In fact, to many moderns, the idea that we’ve each had “past lives” and that after we die future lives lie ahead, seems an almost ideal solution. It’s intriguing to wonder who we once were, and who we may be again.

 

Except for one thing.

 

Reincarnation doesn’t really help. Whoever “I” once was in the past, that “I” wasn’t “me.” And whoever “I” become in the future won’t be “me” either.

 

Whatever the thing is that persists across incarnations, that thing isn’t a person. A person is a unique, self-aware individual: a being who remains essentially the same at 20, and 30, and 50. A person has an innate awareness that he or she will continue to be the same person . . . forever.

 

This is something reincarnation doesn’t offer. Reincarnation offers only a blank slate on which an endless series of “me’s” are written, only  to be wiped away at death and a new “me” begun.

 

Oh, proponents of reincarnation point to stories of people who under hypnosis
”remember” things about their past lives. But those supposed memories are strangers, not a living part of who “I” am today. Such so-called proofs of reincarnation actually point out the futility of hoping to find eternity in an imagined rebirth. A “rebirth” that at best introduces another and different person into the world, and just as clearly asserts that the individual I am now will disappear, at best to be wisps of lost memories buried in the personality of a totally different “I.”

 

No, the problem is that for the innate sense of our eternity to be meaningful, each of us has to continue to be the real “me.”   I must be “me” at 20, at 30, at 50, and I must be still be “me” a thousand years or ten thousand years after my body dies.

 

According to the Bible, this – not a meaningless cycle of incarnations – is what will happen. My body will die. But “I” will continue. Each individual human is so greatly valued by our Creator that each individual will live on. Forever. And forever, each one of us will be fully self-aware. I will be “me,” and no one else. And you will always be you.

 

According to the Bible there’s an upside to this reality, and a downside. Both are reflected in a verse in the New Testament book of Hebrews. There the writer says, “It is given unto men to die once, and after this the judgment” (9:27).

 

That idea of judgment, like the idea that somehow life can’t end with biological death, is rooted deeply in human nature. We’re blessed and burdened with a sense of morality: with the belief that “right” and “wrong” exist, and that right merits reward while wrong merits punishment.

 

Some argue from our moral nature that reincarnation makes moral sense. In the next life we’ll be called on to pay the unpaid debt of present sins, and rewarded then for any unrewarded deeds of goodness. But this doesn’t resolve the moral question at all. The “me” who is supposedly punished for what I do in this life will, as we’ve seen, be some other “me!”  And the person who is supposedly rewarded for my good deeds won’t be “me” at all, but that other person imprinted when “I” was wiped off the slate we shared.

 

No, if this is a moral universe, and right and wrong are dealt with equitably, I need to pay for my own sins, and I need to reap the rewards of my own goodness.

 

And at this point, the Bible makes a radical departure. For according to the Bible, all humans fall short of the true goodness that God expects and requires. And this left God with a serious moral problem.

 

You see, you are so significant in God’s sight that he can’t simply wipe you out as though you never existed. But he also can’t simply overlook your sins and failures.

 

One way to deal with the moral problem would be to simply say, “Too bad,” and punish you eternally. The trouble with that is that God loves you, and the idea of punishing you eternally hurts him too much for him to simply write you off.

 

God’s solution was unique, creative, and very painful. The Bible captures it in a single verse in John’s Gospel. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

 

God, in the person of Jesus Christ, came into our world as a human being, and died on a cross. In that death Jesus took on himself the punishment due you and me, so that God could promise an eternity of blessedness to those who trust in him.

 

That solution was unique. It was creative. And it was painful. God said, “I’ll take your punishment. And I’ll give you heaven.”

 

Why?

 

Because you . . . that unique ‘you’ that you alone are . . . is important to God.
 

Oh yes. Down deep you know that the person you are can’t just cease to exist. God has planted a sense of eternity in your heart. The person you are is destined to exist forever.

 

And God has done everything necessary to ensure that you – the real “you” – spend that eternity with him.