“Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2).

“Then [the wicked] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).

The unmistakable teaching of the Bible is all human beings (believers and unbelievers alike) are immortal and will live forever, whether in heaven or hell.

Therefore there are no ordinary people in this world. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Your nation is mortal—it will die, never to appear on this earth again. Your culture is mortal—it will fade away, so that no one will ever live in it again. Art is mortal—countless millions and billions of pieces of art have vanished from this earth in its history and will not return. But people are immortal.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of immortal people. The dullest and most uninteresting person you’ve ever met will one day be either a creature of eternal glory or a creature of eternal damnation. The poorest and dirtiest person you’ve ever seen will one day be either a creature that if you saw it today you’d be strongly tempted to worship or a creature of such horror and corruption as you’ve only ever thought of in nightmares. It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

All day long, we are—in some degree—helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities that we should conduct our dealings with one another—all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics, all charity. Next to Christ’s own body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your physical senses.

This blog post is paraphrased from C.S. Lewis’s book, The Weight of Glory, 1942. C.S. Lewis was a brilliant British writer and Christian theologian who taught English literature at both Oxford and Cambridge between 1925 and 1963.