Mike Parsons –
Death is a promotion?
The mindset around death needs to change. We have been conditioned to believe that death is a promotion to another realm and state of being, and that this is a good thing. This is how it has been presented to us. However, when it talks about Jesus bringing life and immortality to light through this good news, and Jesus saying in John 6 that you don’t need to die… Because most people have died, it’s so hard to believe that.
Societal Conditioning
From virtually the moment we can talk, we are conditioned to understand that we are going to die one day. This concept is ingrained into everybody, making it not just a religious concept but a societal one. Death is seen as inevitable. Some people try to cheat death through their own efforts, such as seeking ‘eternal’ life through various means like cryostasis, where their heads are preserved after they die, hoping their consciousness can be revived one day. There are also attempts to eliminate death through nanotechnology. All these efforts reflect our best attempts rather than realising that death has no part in us.
We must deal with the physical body because our soul and spirit aren’t going to die anyway. It’s only the physical body that’s the issue. We often accept the idea that from dust to dust, we will return to dust one day as if that was God’s intention from the beginning. However, Jesus rebalanced that notion by saying that you don’t need to die if you eat His flesh and drink his blood. This has become ritualised into taking communion and spiritualised to mean that you won’t die spiritually. But Jesus meant it physically. Eating his flesh and drinking His blood meant fully embracing who He was, not literally eating His flesh and blood. Communion is an element of that, but it goes beyond just the ritual into living with His breath and life, as everything about Him is life and there is no death in Him.
Transformation and Renewal
Now, obviously, our physical body may have things attached to it and within our DNA which reflect our earthly inheritance rather than our heavenly one. So, that needs changing. It’s not just a mindset change; there’s also a physical transformation of any death within our cells. Our cells need to be renewed and not destroyed. The ability of our cells to renew themselves needs to be restored, and they need to learn how to communicate what brings about that change and restoration.
The things within ourselves that, within normal thinking, lead to death need to be dealt with physically as well. Breathing in His life constantly can put us in a state of continual renewal and restoration. But does that mean we will have the same physical body forever? No, because there’s a limitation to our physical body that Adam didn’t have. His spirit was around his body, not the other way around.
There needs to be a restoration of the balance of the relationship between spirit, soul and body that God intended, that our bodies, spirit and soul would come back into the correct balance, harmony and design that God had for them. Jesus, when He died, had a resurrection body. His physical body died, but He had a resurrection body with certain abilities different from His physical body while he was alive. This body allowed him to do things differently, which shows a transformation that we will also undergo to bring about a different relationship between spirit, soul and body than we have now.
He had a resurrection body. We died with Him and were raised with Him, and we are in the process of that being fully formed in us. Our thinking can stop this process because “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he”. If you think in your heart that death is the answer, then you will probably die. Our thinking needs to be in alignment for the outworking to take place. It’s not just about thinking it and it will be; there’s a process of our whole body being renewed and the relationship between spirit, soul and body being transformed into what it should have been. That may have different ways of outworking – I don’t know.
The Nature of Aging
Do I have a resurrection body now? Yes, in one sense, because I have died and was resurrected with Him. But in another sense, my mind is coming into agreement with what that means, and my thinking has an effect on that. Hence, the renewal of my mind to agree with God about my physical state needs to take place. There hasn’t been a lot of history of teaching or experience to draw on regarding this. Some people are said to be alive after hundreds of years because they have embraced this concept, but not many people have met them, making it difficult to provide concrete examples.
I believe it starts with belief, which then brings about the transformation of our physical nature. The cells of our being need to align with God’s intention. This poses the question of aging. Are we going to age? If aging has a consequence with death, then we should not be aging to bring death. Jesus aged from a baby to a full-grown adult. What would he have done if He had not moved into a resurrected body? We don’t know because He didn’t do it.
But nothing in our body should hinder us from fulfilling our destiny in God. There may be some people who, like Enoch and Elijah, might be translated into another state of being without going through physical death.
We don’t know yet. Some people might know that there’s a time when they’re not going to be here. But we don’t need to equate that time with death. It may be that I’ve fulfilled all that I need to fulfil, so this part of my destiny is complete, and I don’t need to be here any longer, therefore I will just move on. But I think there will be a transformation in the nature of our physical being at some stage – or in process – whichever way it occurs.
Mike discusses immortality at length in his teaching series on Unconditional Love.
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Sons of Issachar 