Secrets from Beyond The Grave

when is a person actually deceased? At what point can we truly say, "They are gone"? I remember seeing a movie when I was a child of a person who lived at the turn of the century and was believed to be dead but was buried alive. There was not a medical doctor present to examine the body. Although the person was actually in a coma, his heartbeat was so weak that it could not be detected. The man was buried but revived in the coffin. The discovery was made when some old graves were being moved to another location. The coffin lid on the old pine box was opened, and the skeleton's hands had clawed the inside of the box. Trust me, that is not the type of movie you want your children to see! According to numerous scriptures, physical death only occurs when the soul and spirit are separated from the physical body. The next question is: How does this separation actually occur? A very unusual passage of Scripture, written by King Solomon, one of the wisest men ever to live, may hold a clue to how this separating of the spirit from the flesh occurs. For man goes to his eternal home,

And the mourners go about the streets.

Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed,

Or the golden bowl is broken,

Or the pitcher shattered at the fountain,

Or the wheel broken at the well.

Then the dust will return to the earth as it was,

And the spirit will return to God who gave it.

--Ecclesiastes 12:5-7

A full reading of Ecclesiastes 12:1-7 reveals that the writer is describing death, mentioning that a "silver cord" is loosed. Then man shall return to dust and the spirit returns to God who gave it. For many years I was intrigued with the meaning of this silver cord. I understood that when an infant is growing in its mother's womb, the fetus is connected to the mother's placenta with an umbilical cord. All nourishment the unborn receives comes through this cord for nine months during a normal pregnancy. Once the birth time arrives, the baby exits the womb, and a trained medical physician cuts the cord. At that moment the child begins a life of his own, but only after the umbilical cord is severed. I suggest that this "silver cord" is something rather mysterious to us that connects the human spirit to the physical body in the same manner that an umbilical cord maintains life for an infant until the moment of the cord being severed. This invisible yet very real connector must be severed before the spirit can depart from the body. I believe it is at the conclusion of this separation process that a person actually experiences death. When Paul was stoned, he was unsure if he was "in the body or out of the body." Obviously, if his experience was an out of the body experience and his soul and spirit had departed and later returned to his body, then Paul experienced an actual resurrection from the