An Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida was planning to meet his wife, who was on a business trip, the following day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her email address, he did his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before.
When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen: Dearest wife, Just got checked in. Everything is prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Your loving husband
A simple mistake with almost fatal consequences. It seems this elderly lady believed that it was possible for her to receive a message from her passed-away husband. It begs the question whether this is really feasible – for us to ‘receive an email from the afterlife’? If not an email, in the form of an apparition or hearing the voice of someone no longer among the living? Maybe they appear and talk to us in our dreams?
Quite a few people today believe exactly that – the invisible spirits of the deceased roam around us and communicate with the living. In an effort to contact them, some go to fortune tellers/spirit mediums, others use oracles, others pray to the deceased that they believe are watching over them from heaven. Many are the movies which instil ideas about the human soul’s immortality – when you pass away, you soul leaves your body and goes somewhere. Holidays and festivals such as ‘Halloween’ – a day in which it was believed the roaming gods/souls of deceased saints become visible to the living, as well as the Mexican ‘Day of the dead’ (el Día de los Muertos) which is considered to be the only day of the year in which the living can contact their relatives who have passed away, only serve to reinforce these ideas of the immortality of the soul.
In Bulgarian culture, it is believed that there are three days in which the soul of someone who has departed from this life may visit their living relatives – on the anniversary date of their passing, their birth date or on the fortieth day of their departure, when it is believed that the soul leaves this earth and from that point onwards, they may only appear in the dreams of their relatives. 1 ‘Baba Vanga’ also claimed that she spoke with the dead – ‘dark shadows’ would appear which talked to her. 2
All of this seems to paint communication with the dead as something feasible and even normal. However, is that really true?
Is it possible for us to ‘receive an email from the afterlife’? Is there life after death?#
In 1901, Duncan MacDougall carried out an experiment with which he sought to measure the weight of the human soul. I won’t go into the details of how exactly he carried this out, however the results of the experiment published in 1907, even though rejected by the scientific community, popularised the idea that the human soul weighs 21 grams. 3
Even though we can explain and support many of the human bodily functions and processes through science, biology and medicine for a healthier, longer-lasting life, it is necessary to admit that we cannot comprehensively explain how a new life begins or why sometimes fully healthy individuals pass away. There is a secret to life that eludes us.
It is why the human soul cannot be weighed or explained through scientific means. It is not a physical element on Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements. The Bible presents an additional life dimension – the spiritual realm. You may not believe in God, in the Bible’s trustworthiness or what it has to say; still, I invite you to read the following and judge for yourselves.
In order to provide a sufficient answer to the question posed above, we must first define what life is.
The Bible says:
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Here we are presented with two ingredients:
\(Dust\ of\ the\ Ground\ (The\ Physical\ Body) + Breath\ of\ Life\ (Spirit) = Living\ Soul\).
We can take care of the physical body; however, we cannot do anything about the second ingredient, the spirit. If either one of these ingredients is missing, death occurs:
and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
The ingredients go back to their sources. It is important to note that according to the Bible, the breath of life is not in and of itself a living soul. In other words, it does not carry life, intelligence or sensibility – it cannot think, feel, communicate, see, hear and so on:
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun…Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.
The dead do not and cannot partake in our everyday lives. They cannot scare others or seek revenge. They cannot be woken up for a consultation or a meeting with their living relatives. They cannot ‘send us an email from the afterlife’.
The elderly lady who received this email in error did not check the sender and that had its unfavourable consequences in her life. Therefore, the next time we think that a deceased relative may be trying to contact us, let us first check who the sender is.
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
The Bible completely refutes the idea of the immortality of the human soul; however, it speaks of an even greater hope for life after death:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
