The whole person dies
It's commonly said of someone who has died in Christ, "Only her body died." The suggestion is that the body is the shell and the real person is the spirit or soul of the person. I'm certain that a person doesn't become extinct when the body dies (something survives the death of the body) but to so speak as if the whole person didn't experience death is a mistake. People die; not merely their bodies. Death is a complex experience that robs a person of embodied existence. Humans are not bodiless beings and when a person experiences death that person is robbed of something that is part of his/her humanity. It doesn't matter that what we call the "spirit" doesn't decompose like the fleshly body—death is more than the destruction of the body. We mustn't speak as if the body were not an essential part of humanness. We mustn't think that life after death is the "final" state—it isn't! Humans are embodied beings, they undergo the death experience and at the resurrection they return to an embodied existence. The state after dying but before the resurrection is conveniently called "the intermediate state" because that's precisely what it is.
To confine the word "death" to what happens to the body narrows the word. The body decomposes and the spirit is robbed of the bodily self-expression that is an essential part of humanness. The body experiences death in one way and the spirit (soul) experiences it another way. Glorious resurrection for all those embraced in the saving work of God in Jesus Christ completes the redemption of a human. Mere life after death is not the full picture—resurrection to immortality completes it.
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©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.