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And what did Jesus mean when he cautioned the apostles to allow the 'dead' to go and bury 'the dead'? ... I think that verse means that Christ read the heart of the man and saw that he wasn't ready to follow him. The Lord spoke of the condition of the soul and spirit of the young man going to bury his dead in body father ... mercifully, Jesus didn't speak of the father's spiritual state, but he spoke clearly of the son's. The son was walking away from the invitation, alive in body and soul and dead in spirit in his trespasses and sins. The soul is the vitality, or life, or a man or animal. The spirit is something that only man and God possesses. Please, don't leave out the Angels, who are spiritual. And that begs the unspoken issue: if the spirit is not corruptible, then the spirit will be eternal in some where/when, Heaven or elsewhere. As Christians we are to have a new body, real, physical, but incorruptible ('for we shall not all sleep, but we will be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye' ...). I take that to mean that our body then will be 'time-transcendent'.

The Lord spoke of the condition of the soul and spirit of the young man going to bury his dead in body father ... mercifully, Jesus didn't speak of the father's spiritual state, but he poke clearly of the son's. The son was walking away from the invitation, alive in body and soul and dead in spirit in his trespasses and sins.

That's what I was trying to say.

The soul is the vitality, or life, or a man or animal. The spirit is something that only man and God possesses. Please, don't leave out the Angels, who are spiritual.

An oversight...sorry.

And that begs the unspoken issue: if the spirit is not corruptible, then the spirit will be eternal in some where/when, Heaven or elsewhere. As Christians we are to have a new body, real, physical, but incorruptible ('for we shall not all sleep, but we will be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye' ...). I take that to mean that our body then will be 'time-transcendent'.

I don't disagree substantially. I think the bible clearly illustrates that our spirit (not soul, or life force) returns to God at death. But I think the bible doesn't explain much about the state of the spirit between death and resurrection other than that death is likened to sleep...i.e. an unconscious state. I also believe that Christians will resurrected with a spiritual body...a body that exists outside of our normal physicality.

if the spirit is not corruptible, then the spirit will be eternal in some where/when, Heaven or elsewhere.

The spirit is not the conscious, living being. The spirit is not you. The spirit is the breath of life. The "eternal spirit" of which you speak goes back to God when the person dies. God keeps you in his memory, so in that sense you haven't been destroyed. But you are actually "sleeping", conscious of nothing and doing nothing. That is death.

Psalms 146:4 - "His spirit goes out, he goes back to his ground; in that day his thoughts do perish."

Animals and humans, all living souls, have the same spirit, the same "breath of life".

Eccl. 3:19 - "...and they have the same eventuality. As the one dies, so the other dies, and they all have but one spirit."

As Christians we are to have a new body, real, physical, but incorruptible ('for we shall not all sleep, but we will be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye' ...). I take that to mean that our body then will be 'time-transcendent'.

But that obviously has nothing to do with what happens when we die now, the subject of the article.