12Then Job answered:

14‘A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
²   comes up like a flower and withers,
   flees like a shadow and does not last.
³ Do you fix your eyes on such a one?
   Do you bring me into judgement with you?
⁴ Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?
   No one can.
⁵ Since their days are determined,
   and the number of their months is known to you,
   and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass,
⁶ look away from them, and desist,^*
   that they may enjoy, like labourers, their days.
⁷ ‘For there is hope for a tree,
   if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,
   and that its shoots will not cease.
⁸ Though its root grows old in the earth,
   and its stump dies in the ground,
⁹ yet at the scent of water it will bud
   and put forth branches like a young plant.
¹⁰ But mortals die, and are laid low;
   humans expire, and where are they?
¹¹ As waters fail from a lake,
   and a river wastes away and dries up,
¹² so mortals lie down and do not rise again;
   until the heavens are no more, they will not awake
   or be roused out of their sleep.
¹³ O that you would hide me in Sheol,
   that you would conceal me until your wrath is past,
   that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!
¹⁴ If mortals die, will they live again?
   All the days of my service I would wait
   until my release should come.
¹⁵ You would call, and I would answer you;
   you would long for the work of your hands.
¹⁶ For then you would not^* number my steps,
   you would not keep watch over my sin;
¹⁷ my transgression would be sealed up in a bag,
   and you would cover over my iniquity.
¹⁸ ‘But the mountain falls and crumbles away,
   and the rock is removed from its place;
¹⁹ the waters wear away the stones;
   the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;
   so you destroy the hope of mortals.
²⁰ You prevail for ever against them, and they pass away;
   you change their countenance, and send them away.
²¹ Their children come to honour, and they do not know it;
   they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed.
²² They feel only the pain of their own bodies,
   and mourn only for themselves.’

is there life before death?

Yesterday I mentioned in my blog that anyone who believes in the resurrection life will have taken into account the weight of evidence against it. But just in case you haven’t, listen to Job’s eloquent lament over human mortality. These are the facts that we so often like to ignore. Resurrection is not some hocus-pocus with corpses, even with the corpse of Jesus. The empty tomb is a symbol not a historical fact. If as I believe, Jesus is alive, he is alive with a new body, not the old one, just as I will die and my body will decay, but I will be alive in a new, unworldly body, if God gives me this gift.

What does it mean to have a new body? It means to share the life of Christ in the love of God. More than that we cannot know, although I like Paul’s speculation in I Corinthians 15, and Dante’s grand vision in the Divine Comedy.

Biblical faith sees death as an enemy to be overcome. Jesus shares human suffering and mortality while sharing God’s life with human beings. If mortal people live God’s life in their mortal bodies they will also share God’s life after death.

Is all this more than a metaphor and a cry in the dark? Yes, I think it is.