Yesterday afternoon a friend sent me this link asking if I had thoughts:
I've tried to discipline myself never to react to a headline without first reading the story. As I've come to expect, once I did, reality was a little different than the clickbait title suggested. The 75-year-old Austrian-born actor was responding to a question posed by his "Twins" co-star Danny DeVito, who asked, "What's in the future for us?"
Schwarzenegger likened DeVito's question to the time when shock jock Howard Stern had asked him, "Tell me, governor, what happens to us when we die?"
I said, "Nothing. You're 6 feet under. Anyone that tells you something else is a f---ing liar." I said, "We don't know what happens with the soul and all this spiritual stuff that I'm not an expert in, but I know that the body as we see each other now, we will never see each other again like that."
Even though by virtue of my faith in Jesus and His redemptive work on the cross, I would be one Schwarzenegger labels a "f---ing liar," I can tell you that I don't feel an ounce of anger or resentment towards the man. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia correctly observed, "God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools, and He has not been disappointed."
No, my concern isn't what Schwarzenegger or anyone else thinks of me. What I feel is a pressing burden to somehow find a way to help this man, this son of an abusive Nazi official, know what I know.
I suppose that last statement could come across as arrogant. There are so many opinions about death, after all:
- The atheist says there's nothing on the other side.
- The universalist says there's paradise that awaits us all.
- The Eastern meditation guru says reincarnation will lead us to perpetual existence.
- The New Age philosopher says we'll take a journey into transcendent light.
Who is to say who has it right? Well, with as disparate as all those conclusions are, they do have one thing in common: not one of them is spoken from a position of authority. None of them know for sure.
Now, that doesn't bother some people. There are those who are content to spin the afterlife roulette wheel and indulge themselves with creative speculations. But that's not good enough for me personally. I'm not interested in guesses; I want answers.
And that's the impression of Schwarzenegger I was left with reading the Post's piece. The thought of dying terrifies him and he is desperate. In one part of his interview with DeVito, the two had this exchange:
SCHWARZENEGGER: I know people feel comfortable with death, but I don't.
DEVITO: No.
SCHWARZENEGGER: Because I will f---ing miss the s--- out of everything. To sit with you here, that will one day be gone?
DEVITO: No!
SCHWARZENEGGER: And to have fun and to go to the gym and to pump up, to ride my bike on the beach, to travel around, to see interesting things all over the world. What the f---?
DEVITO: Life! It's the best!
SCHWARZENEGGER: Exactly. What's that all about?
DEVITO: Yeah.
SCHWARZENEGGER: I tell you, there's someone that mixed up this whole thing. Think about it. Who can we blame?
DEVITO: You mean that we don't live forever?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Yeah. That we have to die.
DEVITO: That's tough, man.
SCHWARZENEGGER: I don't know what the deal is, but in any case, it's a reality, and it truly [ticks] me off.
DEVITO: You don't want to die.
SCHWARZENEGGER: No.
That breaks my heart. Not just for Schwarzenegger, but for DeVito, and for everyone else who identifies with that nihilistic sense of hopelessness and despair, because the answers to all those questions are knowable. It's why I want to spend the remainder of my days telling as many people as possible why I'm not among their number.
When it comes to the afterlife, it's true that there are a million different theories, but only one of them comes from Someone who has actually been there and come back alive to tell us about it. Only one man has been where we all are about to go. That makes His testimony far more authoritative, far more reliable than anything else we have.
The word Jesus uses to describe our death doesn't mean "ceasing," "ending," or "stopping." It means "separating." In His word we're told that upon death, "the dust" that makes up our mortal bodies "will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it."
From the beginning, God breathed an eternal soul into our mortal bodies, animating them. And when those bodies are laid back down into the ground, that spiritual soul lives on. It's what Jesus promised a woman named Martha as she grieved the death of her brother: "I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in Me will live, even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die."
Mr. Schwarzenegger, you're right. Someone did "mix up this whole thing" and is to blame for the reality of death. It was us.
But our Creator loved us enough to make it right. To make it so that you can sit and talk with Danny DeVito for as long as you want in a place far more "fun" and "interesting" than this. In Jesus you have nothing but sorrow to lose, and an undeserved glory to gain. How can you resist?
