Reincarnation

At church this morning, the pastor preached about the Joseph story and how God worked good out of bad in that situation. The pastor said that life is unpredictable---that things do not necessarily turn out as we plan or foresee---but that God is still at work. He appealed to his own life to support this. He said that, in college, he wanted to become a pastor, but things did not initially turn out that way. But he stated that he would not have traded those years of waiting, for he met the lady who became his wife (who later passed on) and had a son, and, eventually, he pastored a church.

How would that account, however, for people's lives being cut short? Off and on, I'm reading a book called Soul Mates, by Richard Webster. Webster believes in reincarnation, and the evidence he offers is that people who remember their previous lives usually do not recall them as glamorous, which is realistic, plus there are cases in which the information that they offer about their previous lives can be verified. I seriously doubt that my church would embrace reincarnation, perhaps because Hebrews 9:27 affirms that human beings are destined to die once, and afterwards to experience the judgment. But, in my opinion, reincarnation might allow God to be working good, even when people's lives are cut short.

Reincarnation shows up in Judaism. On Rachel Held Evans' blog, an Orthodox Jewish couple (Ahavah and Michael) answered questions about Orthodox Judaism (see here). Michael stated his own Orthodox Jewish conception of the afterlife, which is based on Jewish sources and mainstream Orthodox Jewish opinion:

"When a person dies he undergoes a series of judgments in order to purify his soul from his unrepentant sins of this life. The first of those is the judgment of the grave. Soul stays with the body for 1yr and suffers as the body undergoes the initial stages of decay. This is a judgment that even most of the righteous go through. After that there are a series other judgments dependent upon one's deeds. If one was not completely righteous, but is fortunate enough to be mostly so, he will be beaten a certain number of times by an angel with a fiery rod, in order to purify his soul, and then be able to ascend into Gan Eden to await the resurrection. If one was in between, or even wicked, he will descend into hell for one year. After which he will be given the choice of either being reincarnated into another body for a second go, or he can choose to descend into hell again for the full expiation of his sins. A wicked person (who is wicked in each subsequent life) will only be reincarnated three times, a person who improves each incarnation, up to 1000 times."

Richard Webster quotes the Koran as saying that "God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him." But he does not offer a specific citation for that, and I couldn't find a place on the Internet that provided a specific citation (but see this site). Many Islamic sites that I saw emphatically disagreed with reincarnation, and this site quotes the Koran as saying that God will not send a person back to work righteousness, for his soul is separated from the world until the resurrection.