| Crusty old Harry Truman (no relation to the late
president), who lived near Spirit Lake, Washington, said, "if this mountain goes I'm
going with it." And go he did. But where? Harry allowed as how he had a secret hideaway with a couple of barrels of whiskey near where he lived, "and, if that old blankety-blank goes, I'm just going to sit there and wait." In the awesome blast of Mount St. Helen's—bigger than any other blast known to man in modern times (some say the equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT!)-it is doubtful crusty Harry Truman had a chance to make for his hide-away and his whiskey. He was not alone. Perhaps the death toll will never truly be known, for campers, hikers, tourists and others seeking the excitement of venturing near to the still smoldering mountain were simply buried or blown away by the awesome blast. Like the long-buried citizens of Pompeii, many of those people will never be found, their bodies slowly decaying under tons of ash and rock. But what really happened, when they died? Is Harry Truman actually still alive, sitting now in his own special compartment in heaven reserved for crusty, cantankerous old men? Are the husbands and wives, children, geologists, hikers and campers all evenly distributed between heaven and hell? And how can you know? There is no purely pragmatic answer—no "scientific" answer—possible. The answer to this and other perplexing questions involving life after death, "heaven" and "hell" must lie in the spiritual realm. The Bible is God's handbook to man: that source of knowledge and information which man could not have discovered for himself—revealed knowledge. The Bible is not intended to be the sum total of all knowledge, but it is an outline, or a guide, from the great Creator and Maker of mankind; it explains what man is, where he is going, why he was placed on this earth and what human life is all about! If you ask people to express what death really is, the answers will be quite varied and sometimes very vague. One said, "I guess death is the end of life." Another said, "I don't know. I feel it's the end of something, and sometimes the beginning of something else. I think that you just can't stop living all of a sudden. I don't know. I think there's got to be something after." Still another said, "My definition of death is to leave this earth, and I'd say it would be a termination of your life." But these and countless other opinions like them are merely the sum total of those impressions, traditions, philosophies, teachings and doctrines that have gradually formed and shaped the opinions of their owners. None of these opinions is the result of either scientific or pragmatic investigation; and certainly none is the result of careful research in the Bible, which is the ultimate and final authority on the subject of death. |
