04 - Chapter 04

’THE CONCEPTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE BIBLE.

IF a religious man of to-day, who believes that at death men are either doomed at once to eternal torture as a punishment for sin, or translated as saved men to a heaven of happiness, were to search for this belief in the Bible, one of his surprises would be that he could not find it in the Old Testament. To general Hebrew thought the only future life is life on earth; there is no heaven, and in hell there is no life in any full and proper sense. In the older thought, also, and for the most part throughout the Old Testament, this future life on earth is secured for the nation, not for individuals. This is the general statement; how it must be modified we shall see as we go on. To Hebrew thought death was a descent into the Underworld, called Sheol. If you use the revised version you will find this word in the margin, where the English translation may use ’ hell ’ or ’ grave.’ Pfleiderer suggests that they conceived of the other world as under this one from seeing the sun apparently going down, or from the fact that the dead body was put down in the earth. Now, the first thing to remember about this Sheol is that it was the place to which all mortals went alike, irrespective of character; it was not a place of rewards and punishments. There was a sort of existence there, but not proper life; the dead in Sheol were ’ shades ’ had a kind of shadowy, unsubstantial life. There speech was a whisper or sort of echo; they had no real interest in life; they were cut off from God and men. A psalmist (Psalms 88:10) is eager to get his prayer answered during his lifetime, because there is no revelation from God, nor any human praise of God possible after death. ’ Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the shades that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark, and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?’ To die was to go into the dark and into the land of forgetfulness. Psalms 6:5 says, ’ In death there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol, who shall give thee thanks?’ Psalms 30:9 says, ’ What profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee?’ < The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence ’ (Psalms 115:17). And into this silence the good men went as well as the bad. That is why these good men express themselves so eager to praise God while life lasts, because they know there is no chance after death. Here are parts of the teaching of the Bible which no Christian believes to be true. He may say that the whole Bible is infallible, but he does not believe it. The Bible itself, in other parts, has made it impossible for him to believe these parts. There is no doubt that the conception of Sheol, which I have described, was the prevailing belief. It is brought out very vividly in the Song of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:10-20). Hezekiah is sick unto death. What is death according to this song? It is a going unto Sheol, where he shall not see the Lord, nor shall he see man. According to the margin of the Revised Version he will be among ’ those who have ceased to be ’; he will be ’ cut off from the loom ’; God will ’ make an end ’ of him. He prays to recover, so that he may praise the Lord. ’ For the grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day; the father to the children shall make known Thy truth.’ Here you have an Old Testament saint, of whom it is said that he did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, one who was a great religious reformer, facing death without hope! He knows that death even for him is a hopeless pit! I think we all see that the Bible itself enables us to put aside this part of the Bible as untrue, and how thankful we ought to be that we are not obliged to believe it. Sheol is never spoken of as a place of hope; there was no happiness in it even for the best man.

Neither was it a place of active torment for the bad. In the general conception it was a colourless existence in which those who had been good could not be distinguished from those who had been wicked. We must, however, notice two passages which do make some approach to the idea of a place of punishment, though the idea is not properly and fully reached.

One is a very remarkable funeral dirge over Egypt and her multitude, sung by Ezekiel (xxxii. 18 et seq.). He speaks of ’ Sheol ’ and the ’ pit.’ The pit is probably regarded as the same with Sheol, or possibly as the entrance to it. Ezekiel pictures the great nations which had been a terror on the earth lying in Sheol, slain by the sword. One great grave is in the middle, perhaps for the King, and the graves for the people all round the sides. Here the whole nation is conceived as continuing some sort of existence, a shade existence in the Underworld. It is evident that Ezekiel does not wish to represent Sheol as a place of real life, for he constantly contrasts it with ’ the land of the living.’ At the same time he does represent the people in jt as having some emotion. The nations in Sheol are said to ’ have borne their shame ’; of some it is said that their 1 iniquities are upon their bones. 5 These statements, however, ma^ only mean that in being themselves killed by the sword these old warriors bore their shame; the very helplessness in which they now lie is their own iniquity upon their bones. These statements do not necessarily mean that they are tormented by the memory of their past life. In verse 30 there is a different statement, which says that the princes of the north ’ are ashamed ’; but these words are omitted in the Septuagint, and it is therefore doubtful whether they were in the original of Ezekiel. However, there are here two notes of indisputable emotion in Sheol. When Pharaoh goes down some of the mighty dead speak to him out of the midst of Sheol. It is implied that they know him, and, perhaps, are not sorry that at last he, too, has been broken, and it is definitely stated that Pharaoh would be ’ comforted ’ in seeing all the other mighty nations there. This was the only ’ comfort ’ that he could find in hell that a good many others were there, too. You see that Ezekiel’s hell is not truly a place of torment; it is a hell without any fire, very different from the hell we were taught to think of when we were young. Yet it is easy to detect in this passage the germ of the idea of a place of torment the fire will be kindled by-and-by. In Isaiah 14:9-12 there is a nearer approach to it. The oppressor of Babylon goes down to Sheol, and those already there greet his entrance. ’Sheol from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the shades for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall answer and say unto thee, " Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to Sheol, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst lay low the nations!" ’ Here undoubtedly is depicted conscious life in Sheol. Memory is active; it is not here 1 the land of forgetfulness,’ and there is a kind of malicious satisfaction among the shades, and they at least seek to torment the King of Babylon. Whether he felt it or not we are not told. This is the nearest approach to the conception of a place of torment in the Old Testament, and it is, as you see, still very far removed from our traditional conception of hell. It is pretty certain, too, that even this conception came late. Scholars do not attribute the passage to Isaiah, but to the period of the Exile, or later, when the King of Babylon was a prominent object of thought to Hebrew prophets. The general conception of Sheol, however, remains as a sort of negative existence, with no semblance of joy and no real active pain, and with no separation between good and bad. It was into this underworld all men went at death. The idea of Sheol does contain the idea that death was not the absolute end of man, though it was the end of all real purpose and effectiveness in life. This world was to be the scene of all active principles, human and Divine. God would punish the sinner, and reward the good, in this life. So the blessings and the curses all through the Pentateuch are due here; not one falls on the other side of the grave. Dying was not going to meet the Judge; living was meeting the Judge. The greatest sign of Divine favour is long life, and the greatest deliverance is not to be given over unto death. The only way in which death and Sheol were regarded as penalties and used as motives for right action was through the reminder that at death all action would cease, that in Sheol there would be no communion with men or with God. Nor was there in the general conception any hope of deliverance from Sheol, any hope of resurrection. The common thought is put in such words as these: ’ As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more ’ (Job 7:9). ’ There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again... but man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?’ (Job 14:7-10). Death is a fact, but there is no resurrection. The gloom of this conception, however, was broken by flashes, sometimes of hope, sometimes of positive faith. When the author of Job makes his hero ask, c If a man die, shall he live again? J his answer is negative. No; God changes his countenance, and sends him away. His sons come to honour in life, but the father shall not know it. But this author, while he says it is so, wishes it were not so. ’ Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol; that thou wouldest keep me secret until thy wrath be past; that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me.’ It is in the longings of the heart and in the felt needs of life that great ideas have often been born. And here you have in the form of a desire the germ of the conception of an intermediate state, a set time, and then deliverance.

It is very unfortunate that the text of the famous passage in Job 19:25-27, ’ I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ etc., is so uncertain. What the genuine Hebrew text here is no one feels quite certain. I am not speaking of those words, so sacred to us all, as they have become charged with Christian meaning. Like many other Old Testament words they have come to mean for us what they could not have meant to their original author, because we read them in a light which had not shone upon him. I am only concerned here with the historical meaning. In the face of an uncertain text we cannot be dogmatic about it. But probably this reading would give the meaning best, * I know that my vindicator liveth. You ’ as if Job said to his friends ’ are blaming and charging me with sin; but I know that he who vindicates me is alive, and that he shall stand at last upon the dust; and after my skin hath been destroyed, yet without my flesh shall 1 see God, whom I shall see on my side.’ There is no probability that the words refer to any belief in a resurrection of the body, but contain a grand assertion that a clearer vision of God may be granted to a man after death. If this thought is really in these words, then, though the vision of God is only as the vindicator of Job, yet you have here the germ of a conception that may bring all heaven in its train the conception, viz., of a vision of God and of right after death. Here the author of Job by a flight of faith rises above what he himself has said of Sheol, and contradicts it. It often happens, thank God, when an earnest mind struggles hard with a problem, that in a moment of rare insight it catches the light resting on the gleaming peaks of truth far away, and takes wing for the heights.

There are other evidences in the old literature of the triumph of spiritual imagination over the gloom of common thought. There was a story that Enoch had gone to God, not to Sheol; gone up, not down; and that Elijah had passed in a whirlwind to heaven. It is quite possible that these are relics of the old primitive belief that heroes were promoted to places among the gods. But, all the same, they enshrine the thought that extraordinary character was a mightier thing than death. It is true that necromancers were believed to have the power to call back the spirits of the departed, and necromancy at one time was very common. You all remember the story of the witch of Endor. The prophets fought against this practice; they did not dispute that the thing could be done, but denounced it as wicked. Even necromancy, however, shows how the ancient mind kept interfering with the absoluteness of death.

Elisha was believed to have actually waked the dead. Apart altogether from the historicity or otherwise of the tale, it embodies the idea of a resurrection, not in an immortal body, and not to immortality, but back to temporary life in this world. Here is Divine power in the prophet interfering with the reign of death. Ezekiel’s vision of the re-animation of the dry bones in the valley does not, I think, count in this discussion, as it is an allegory of national revival, not an announcement of the literal resurrection of dead individuals. Nor must we count the words of Hosea 13:14 as evidence: ’ I will ransom them from the hand of Sheol, I will redeem them from death.’ Paul quotes these words as meaning resurrection. We can use them in that sense. But Hosea was not in sight of that conception. He meant that, in spite of the terrible danger which threatened the nation, and in spite of there being no King to save it, and that Sheol was putting forth its hand to take it, Jahweh himself would effect its deliverance. The closing words of Ps. xvi. have uncertain meaning. Wellhausen translates thus: ’ Therefore glad is my heart, and my honour rejoices. My body also shall abide in peace, for Thou dost not commit me to Sheol, nor sufferest Thy faithful ones to see the pit.’ According to this, it is the nation that speaks, and it is national safety in this life that is asserted. Psalms 17:15 he translates thus: I, who am righteous, shall look on Thy face, and be refreshed, at Thy awaking, with a vision of Thee.’ The Psalmist is praying for the destruction of the wicked, and declares that when God awakes to do it he will be refreshed with the vision.

There is a remarkable passage in Psalms 49:13-20. The argument is that death is the great leveller of earthly inequalities. The rich cannot take his riches with him, nor enjoy happiness after death. However rich or popular, he must follow his fathers where there is no light, and die like the beasts that perish; his very form will decay in Sheol. ’ But,’ says the Psalmist, ’ God will redeem my soul from the hand of Sheol, for He shall receive me.’ Wellhausen translates this: ’ God alone can redeem my life from the hand of Sheol when it seizes me,’ and, according to him, the man who is redeemed is not yet in Sheol, and is preserved by God from it i.e., from sudden evil death. The wellknown verse in Psalms 73:24, ’ Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterwards receive me to glory,’ reads in Wellhausen’s translation: ’ Thou leadest me according to Thy counsel, and takest me by the hand after Thee,’ and it is a declaration as to the present life. The Psalmist’s conviction is sure and strong that his life is one of communion with God, and one proof of that he finds in the fact that those who break faith are suddenly put to death, which is their destruction. The conclusion here is that there is not in all the psalms one absolute expression of faith either in immortality or resurrection. And the psalms were the hymn-books of the Church. This shows that that faith, so important to us, had not then become the faith of pious people. We have now to consider one more passage Isaiah 26:19 : ’Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for thy dew is as the dew of herbs (light), and the earth shall cast forth the shades.’ Some have held that this is figurative language to denote the revival of a nation as good as dead, like that in Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. I cannot accept that opinion. The prophet’s faith under the pressure of calamity sees the better day coming, and then thinks how sad it is that those who had believed in it and worked for it should not see it, and his faith refuses to be checked by the thought of death. It bursts the bonds of common opinion, and says: ’ Thy dead shall live.’ Here is, as I think, a declaration of a resurrection, a resurrection for Israelites only, and for a future life on earth. This belongs to a group of chapters which are not regarded as Isaiah’s work, and whose date is uncertain, but which were probably written during the captivity in Babylon. The words, however, were one of those wonderful flashes of faith which do not represent any common doctrine.

There is no reason to believe that there was in Israel any doctrine of future states of happiness and misery up to the second century B.C. No doubt some minds had cast curious glances across the gulf. National immortality on earth had long been believed, but when the doctrine of individualism arose national immortality was not enough. The individual, once keenly conscious of himself, would wonder what was to become of him. So Job longed to be hid in Sheol for a set time, as we saw. And, no doubt, there were some who came to believe that somehow or other they would triumph over death. But there was no doctrine of it, so far as we know, before the second century B.C. This is very remarkable. Many other nations believed in immortality. There was, e.g., a definite doctrine of a double future state in ancient Egypt. Why did it not appear among the Jews earlier than it did? This may have been due to their religious optimism, their intense realization of God’s presence in this life, of His control of all things; their confidence that even here justice would be done, and that they would be lifted into supremacy over all nations, prevented them from speculating about another life. But the recurrence of disappointments, the fact of inexplicable trouble, the rise of the doctrine of individualism, and possibly the influence of the thought of the nation forced them at last to believe that when the Golden Age came the old saints who had hoped for it should come back and see it. The review of the past led the writer of Ecclesiastes straight into scepticism. ’ Who knoweth,’ he says (Ecclesiastes 3:21), ’ the spirit of man whether it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast whether it goeth downward?’ He did not believe this, but declared that the same fate befell man and beast. If the same writer was also the author of the words which occur later in the book, ’ The spirit returns unto God who gave it,’ he may have been only thinking of the Greek idea of re-absorption in Deity, and not of personal life with God. Anyway, in a part of the book he flatly denies immortality. But that means that there were some who believed it. The first Jewish book we know of which distinctly declares for immortality is the Book of Wisdom, which belonged to the second century B.C. There it is said (chap, 2) that the souls of the righteous after death were in the hands of God, that, though they seemed to die, they had in truth entered into peace, and their hope was full of immortality. God had proved them, found them worthy, and now rewarded them. You see this is quite different from the old doctrine of Sheol. And, with this changed view of the future, his view of the present is changed. The great thing now is not to live long, but to live well; in fact, an early death may be a token of Divine favour. God may take a man away from the wicked world early because he pleases Him. To this writer all the problems of life will be solved, and all its wrongs righted, in the life beyond the grave. To this same century belongs the Book of Daniel, and this is the only book in the Old Testament which holds a distinct formulated faith in a real existence after death, and in a resurrection from the dead. ’ Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’ In the Book of Wisdom there is no resurrection of the body; it is only the soul’s immortality that is emphasized. In Daniel there is a resurrection, but, mark, it is a resurrection of Israelites, not of all men Israelites good and bad, and it is to a renewed existence on this earth that they come back. If you come down well into the first century B.C., 63-45, you have a book called the Psalms of Solomon, in which immortality and resurrection are explicit and indisputable doctrines. When we come to the New Testament we find the doctrine of a future existence, in which there are rewards for goodness and punishments for badness accepted. And in this was included the doctrine of the resurrection of the bodies at least, of believers. The Sadduces, however, denied this, but the Pharisees believed it, When we seek to discover the ideas of the New Testament concerning the future we shall soon find their variety and mixture. To set them out with any adequacy is a task which I cannot possibly attempt now. It involves a vast amount of work on the New Testament documents which must be done with great care, and by the help of the best scholarship. Let me, however, indicate some points. The first, and perhaps the most crucial, difficulty rises upon the question, What view of the future did Jesus Himself take? The answer largely depends upon how we answer another question: What did Jesus mean by the kingdom of God? You find two conceptions attributed to Him. By one set of passages He means an external establishment which He Himself is going to set up on the earth. The kingdom is future, and He says that that generation should not pass away without seeing it. This is the old national idea of a Messianic kingdom slightly transformed; the difference is that the subjects are not Jews, but disciples of Jesus. We know that Jesus did not come back within the time mentioned, and we know that that kingdom in which the twelve Apostles were to sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel was not established at all. By another set of passages it could be shown that by the ’ kingdom Jesus did not mean the external establishment at all, but the reign of God in the souls of men, and the fellowship of such men. He who is reported to have said that they should see the Son of man coming in His kingdom is also reported as saying: * The kingdom of God cometh not with observation;’ they were not to believe when men said: ’ Lo, Christ is here;’ or, ’ Christ is there.’ To men expecting the kingdorii in the future, He says: ’ The kingdom of God is in you,’ or, ’ in your midst.’ Many of the parables are hi line with these latter passages, and show us Jesus teaching that the kingdom of God is a Divine principle of life in man, through which God comes to reign in his soul. It comes by no catastrophe, but grows like a seed, or permeates like leaven. Now it is impossible to deny that these are very different conceptions. Could Jesus hold both? Some maintain that the more spiritual view came later than His day, under the influence of His spirit. That I cannot believe. It seems to be certain that the high spiritual view of the kingdom in the soul was the view of Jesus. Then what of the other view? Some attribute all this to the Jewish biographers; they, unable to grasp the spiritual conception of Jesus in its fulness, mixed it up with their own traditional ideas, which they also attributed to Him. I have no doubt that part of the explanation lies here. Every historian puts some colour of his own upon the history. This was especially the case in ancient times, and that the sayings of Jesus, as reported, are more strongly Jewish than they were in fact is probable enough. But there is a third view, which I think the soundest viz., that Jesus did give some expression to the traditional Jewish faith in which He grew up, but that His own contribution was the spiritual view; the kingdom was in the soul. Now the future which Jesus promised in connection with the traditional view did not come no such kingdom was established. In connection with the other view, Jesus gave no details as to what the future life was to be. He made no direct addition to the doctrine of immortality, and He said very little about it, but he made the most overwhelming contribution of history to the faith in immortality. He made men feel that God was so good and man so great, and the union between them so strong, that believers in Him could not but believe in a future life. The inherent potency of the soul itself calls for eternal growth. Jesus magnified man so much that one world could not contain him. His great emphasis was on the present, but it was such a present that a future must be found for it. If it be asked what Jesus taught about the future of the wicked, that again is a question beset with difficulties. It seems to me impossible to avoid the conclusion that He did sometimes teach their destruction. At other times, He so portrayed God as to encourage the hope that sometime, somewhere in the vast wilderness of being, there should not be one lost sheep. I have no time now to analyze the Book of Revelation. If you read Ezekiel and Daniel, and the parables of Enoch, you will find its sources. A Christian writer fitted old Jewish visions into a sort of Christian framework to encourage believers in Jesus at a great political crisis, and, in the old Jewish spirit, he consigned the unbelievers to the lake of fire. The future he describes was to be a future on earth; the New Jerusalem came down, and God dwelt with His people on the earth; they did not go up to live with Him. The book teaches us nothing about the end of the world, and to consult it for dates of final catastrophes and information about the future state, in Mr. Baxter’s fashion, is mere unhistorical fantasy.

Paul’s views of the future life changed and varied a good deal. In Thessalonians he looks for the speedy Second Advent of Christ to establish His kingdom, to put an end to the present order by force, and kill all the wicked. He believed that would happen before he died; that when it did, the believers who were dead should arise, and he and others, who would be still alive, should go up to meet the Lord in the air. This, we know, did not come to pass.

Paul rose to higher views of the future than these, but I have no time to describe them, except to quote what is, perhaps, the most inspiring vision in the New Testament that in which he sees the last enemy of man conquered, and even Christ’s kingdom is delivered up to the Universal Father, and God becomes all in all. If it be asked what is the final verdict of the New Testament on the question whether man’s destiny is sealed at death, or whether there is hope after death, I can only say that no conclusive answer can be given. In most places which could be quoted, destiny is fixed at death; a man is then either saved or lost for ever. But there may be another belief in the story of Jesus going down to Hades to preach to the spirits in prison, and there is in many passages a magnificent faith that a God of love is going to have His own way in a universal victory, which must almost mean that badness cannot be eternal, nor evil ultimate. The fact is that the New Testament does not settle the question. The men who wrote in it had different ideas; the same man had different ideas at different times. The New Testament leaves us with the sacred burden of life on our hands; it calls upon us to live to live at our best. It does not draw out for us the detailed programme of the future, but it assures us that this is life eternal, to know God and Jesus Christ, whom He sent. It is for us to give our present to God; it is for God to assure our future to us. The great function of the New Testament is to inspire life upon the loftiest principles, to guarantee help from the eternal sources, to kindle within us the consciousness of the Divine presence, and to set all natural virtue aflame with a sense of God.