Honest Look at Catholicism - No.6 After Death - What?

15 and verse 35. Someone may ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come? How foolish. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just the seed, perhaps of wheat, or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. All flesh is not the same.

Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another, and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies, and there are earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another, and the stars another, and the stars differ from star in splendor.

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable, it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory, it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

So it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam, a life giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven.

As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth, and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have been born the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with the immortal, with immortality, then the sign that is written will come true. Death has been swallowed up in victory.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm.

Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. May the Lord bless to us that reading from his word.

Father, our subject is after death. What? Job chapter 14 and or rather, yes, Job chapter 14 and verse 14 gives this question. If a man dies, will he live again? Job 14 14.

If a man dies, will he live again? And then later on in the same book, chapter 38 and verse 17. Chapter 38 and verse 17. Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death? And then finally, from the Old Testament, in the prophecy of Jeremiah and verse, chapter 12 and verse 5. The latter part of the verse, you come across an expression which I referred to a couple of Sundays ago.

A proverbial expression translated in the NIV as this. Jeremiah 12 5, last part of the verse. How will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan? And if you're working from the NIV, you'll see that there's a marginal note down at the bottom which gives as an alternative translation.

How will you manage in the flooding of the Jordan? And that is an expression that the Hebrews used to describe death. How will you manage in the flooding of the Jordan when the rivers pour over you, when you're sunk down into death? How will you manage? Well, these are Old Testament scriptures that challenge us to have a right approach to this subject of death and they can be lined up with that chapter read to you, at least partially read to you, by Brother David earlier from 1 Corinthians 15. Someone has ruefully remarked, I have a great deal of interest in my future as I intend to spend the whole of my life there.

I'll try that again. I have a great deal of interest in my future as I intend to spend the whole of my life there. It's our future that concerns me this evening.

We in this lovely sanctuary have two common denominators. That means there are two things that apply to all of us here. One is actual, the other is potential.

The actual is, and it's speaking what is obvious, we were all born. The potential is this. We shall all die.

We safely made our entry into this world and ultimately sooner or later we shall take our departure. We shall make our final bow on the stage of history and then we will not be seen again here on the earth in this form. Well that's very somber but it's very true.

It's not an issue that you conduct. The whole idea of death is something that we are shielded from, much more in the West and our friends in the East. Something like, I believe it's 20,000 Americans die each week and the majority of Americans have never seen a dead person.

We screen people from the concept of death. You wouldn't find that in India. It's confronting you on the streets.

I've stepped over a corpse before now. At least it looked as though it was a dead man on the streets of Bombay, just where I was staying for a few days not that long ago. But if it's true that we all are going to die and if it's also the case that we've got books to prepare people for virtually everything else in life, you know, how to get educated, what college to go to, what profession to inquire into, how to get married, how to choose your wife, how to ensure that you have a delightfully happy marriage all the days of your life.

If we prepare people for these things and they're important, why or why don't we prepare people to die? Why the screening? Well this evening I have the task, a somber and yet in one sense a wonderful task, of trying to show you a little of biblical teaching about death and how we are to approach it. We make our entrance. We take our exit from this life.

But what happens the moment that you die? Clinically, death is the cessation of the functions of the brain. And it seems to me almost with an indecent haste, the cycle of nature then commences as though it cannot wait for this to be completed so that the body shall decompose and all those rich chemicals that are part of you and me shall be absorbed back into Mother Earth. There's not a humanist, there's not an atheist who could deny the biblical assertion when man is addressed, dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

We know that that is true and it's a very unpleasant business, this decomposition of the body. But is that the end? Is the brain me? Or does my mind use my brain like the violinist uses his instrument? Take away the violin and we've still got a violinist. Take away my brain and the probability is, and I would argue from Scripture, the certainty is you've still got me.

You've still got you. Our souls inhabit our body to the extent that Scripture says that man is born, is made, a living soul. But when that transmitter, which is the way that I like to look on the body, decays when it will no longer function and sustain life, that I put to you is not the end.

We go on and that's the subject matter for this evening. There is more to me than the chemistry of my body. I'm not just a brain.

I don't just operate through my nerves. I don't just function through my skeletal frame and through my muscles. When I die, am I snuffed out like a candle? Does nature go off? And that's the end? After death, what? The answer it seems is fourfold, at least the speculations are.

After death, nothing. After death, the concept of purgatory, an intermediate state. After death, heaven.

After death, hell. Well for starters, let's take the opening. After death, nothing.

You've heard this bluntly expressed. It's a sort of Alf Garner type of comment. When you're dead, you're dead.

You join the ranks of those six foot under the sod that push up the daisies and that's it. Bertrand Russell, never an Alf Garner, sophisticated but saying what amounts to exactly the same. When I die, I rot.

Russell, who was never the greatest of optimists, said of the world in which he lived, there's darkness outside and when I die, there'll be darkness inside. We're told by those who hold this particular viewpoint, yes, that man is the apex. He's on the top of the evolutionary ladder.

He's a remarkable being. You can speak very highly of man. He's got the qualities of an efficient machine.

His skeletal, his muscular system is a perfect example of engineering. He's got a brain which is a superb computer. His eyes are the finest cameras on legs that you can ever discover in the world today.

He's got appetites and instincts that are like an animal and yet it seems as though there is such a distinction between man and the highest form of animal and yet according to this view, after death nothing, man is no more than a freak, a throwout of an evolutionary machine that nobody understands. Somehow there was an accidental coming together of molecules, of neutrons, of protons and suddenly you had life. Suddenly you have the world suddenly you have you and me and the chances of that happening are now reckoned to be so very very slender that almost one to the capacity of the infinite and a man who tries to reckon that life came about on its own and is utterly meaningless is far from these days speaking in scientific language.

If there's a purpose then surely at the end of my life, my physical being, there must be something else that goes on. Anthropology is the study of man. It's a very fascinating study.

It's not something that is a fixed science. There's a lot of speculation about it but it's very interesting to work out the beliefs of our forefathers and I'm not only talking about the Victorians. I'm going back through history.

I'm going down the civilizations. I'm going back to Egypt and beyond. And whenever you look, whether it was a developed civilization or the primitive hot-and-tot civilization, you always discover a belief that when man dies physically that's not the end.

We have in history our own funeral rites. The Pharaohs have these magnificent pyramids with all the interiors designed so that they may be worthy receptacles of some purple blooded individual who was monarch of Egypt. You might see some of the sepulchral vaults in the in the Middle East.

You consider even today the way that the poor old Hindu bury their dead on the tributaries of the Ganges. They carefully erect their funeral pyres and ultimately the cremated remains are swept into Mother Ganges and they believe that somehow or other eternity, immortality, in some sense will clothe the life of the one who has departed. Wherever you look in the modern age or in yesteryear, man has always given a dignity by and large to death.

Why? I have never worried one moment about what happened in this world before I arrived in the 1940s. It's never been a problem to me what Queen Victoria did, what Queen Elizabeth the first did, what the Assyrian Empire did. I've got interest in it because I find history a fascinating subject but I've never been really worried about it.

Well why should I be worried when my slot in this world has been taken up? When I've done my bit so to speak. When 40, 50, 60, however many years I've got have rolled by. Why is it that generally speaking, young and old, if they're absolutely honest, do have a concern and a sort of inbuilt realization that the end is not the grave.

Scientifically you can't demonstrate that it is. If anything the balance is slightly weighed on the other side. Plato put on the lips of Socrates just as he was about to take hemlock these words, I would not positively assert that I shall join the company of those good men who have already departed from this life but I cherish a very good hope.

One modern scientist has said one can only wait and see or wait and not see. Science is relatively neutral and if any bias at all it's on the scales of life after death. Listen to this and I'll tell you the identity of the man when I've read it.

Here is a testimony of someone who seems as though they are dying. On Saturday November the 9th a few minutes after midnight I began to feel very ill and by 2 o'clock was definitely suffering from acute gastroenteritis. By 10 o'clock I had developed all the systems of very acute poisoning.

Pulse and respirations being quite impossible to count. I realized I was very ill and very quickly reviewed my whole financial position. Thereafter at no time did my consciousness appear to me to be in any way dimmed but suddenly realized that my consciousness was separating from another consciousness which was also me.

He goes on to speak about these two consciousness the old and the new. He talks about this new consciousness which now seems to me to be outside the body which it could see. Gradually I realized that I could see not only in my body and the bed in which it was but everything in the whole house and garden and then I realized that I was not only seeing things at home but in London and in Scotland.

In fact wherever my attention was directed it seemed to me. From now on he continues the descriptionism must be entirely metaphorical because there are no words which really describe what I saw or rather appreciated. Although I had no body I had what appeared to be perfect two-eyed vision.

He goes on. I saw a friend enter the bedroom where I'd been lying. I realized she got a terrible shock and I saw her hurry to the telephone.

I saw my doctor leave his patients and come very quickly and heard him say or saw him think. He is nearly gone. I heard him quite clearly speaking to me on the bed but I was not in touch with the body and could not answer him.

I was really cross when he took a syringe and rapidly injected my body with something which I afterwards learned was camphor. As the heart began to beat more strongly I was drawn back and I was intensely annoyed because I was so interested and just beginning to understand where I was and what I was seeing. Once I was back all the clarity of vision of anything and everything disappeared and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness which was suffused with pain.

He goes on to say that unlike most dreams and visions this experience was never erased from his mind. Now I wouldn't have shared that with you if it was just some demented person or I'd picked it up from some cheap book. That was a report given by given to the Medical Association in Edinburgh in 1937 by Lord Geddes or Geeds I'm not too sure how to pronounce his name.

A physician, unqualified man. I'm building nothing on it apart from just sharing with you what is an interesting account of which many many others could be quoted of those who seemed at one stage to be moving through death and yet were brought back. As I say I'm only suggesting this to you merely for information, merely for interest.

But this I can most dogmatically assert from the New Testament. Jesus said he that believeth in me shall never die, never die. Physically you might have to pass through that stage which we call death but as Jesus refers to life he's speaking of eternal life which for him transcends death and continues the other side of existence.

After death what? Nothing? It seems to me that even from an unbiblical viewpoint that's a hard basis to come down on. But let's move on in my consideration this evening. After death purgatory.

Now we could widen this and refer to an intermediary state but I narrow it just for this moment because there are many people who have come under the teachings of the Catholic Church who proclaim, which proclaims that when someone dies they do not immediately go into heaven but they go to purgatory. What is purgatory? Well as I said it's a sort of intermediate state between heaven and this world. Purgatory presumably comes from the word purge.

If you purge something you cleanse it. If I stain this suit I take it to the cleaners and it is dry-cleaned. It is made fit for where again? Well purgatory is a sort of celestial dry-clean factory where people go for an indeterminate period of time and those sins which have not been covered for by the blood of Jesus on the cross are atoned for in purgatory.

It's a very interesting doctrine. Apparently the Pope has some control over purgatory and as you will see this is quite helpful or has been for Catholicism. You can say masses for the dead and those who are in purgatory who have such offered for them will have a number of years lopped off.

Well what are we to say about the concept of purgatory? It's a very profitable doctrine. I'm not wanting to in any way be unfair in any assessment of dogma of Christian groups for which I have little personal support but when you go to Rome on your holidays and you have a look round St. Peter's remember that it and many of the buildings there were financed through people who were terrified as to the notion of loved ones being in purgatory and paid for masses to be said for the shortening of their term there. In one sense also it seems quite a logical idea.

After all we've all muffed lessons in this world. We've all made mistakes. To have some time to right wrongs before we get to heaven it seems reasonable.

It seems logical at one level but the third thing I want to say is this. It's grossly unbiblical. It's grossly unbiblical.

There is not a verse there is not a shadow on any page of the New Testament nor the Old Testament which supports this idea. You'd have to give prizes for fantastic ingenuity for anyone to plunder the pages of the New Testament and the Old Testament to get some butters for the concept of an intermediary state which you and I and others go through until we're sufficiently purged that we can get to heaven. Well the challenge remains so much for purgatory but there is the idea amongst the sects of an intermediate state.

A state in which perhaps you go to sleep. Christadelphians are very hot on the verse of Scripture which says only God has immortality and that is true. Only God has underrived immortality and therefore they suggest that there's no such thing as mortality that's inherent in the in the human frame.

There's a body of opinion within evangelicalism too which seems to suggest that when one dies at the moment of death one sleeps until the second advent although that idea is not testified to by great doctrinal confessions like the Westminster Confession and so forth. But here is the second major view as to what happens after death. The first one nothing.

The second one purgatory. The third one after death heaven. Jesus had a lot to say about heaven.

He spoke to his followers in language that they could understand. He said to them on one occasion in my father's house that was a little colorful way in which he spoke of of heaven in my father's house and many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you.

I've gone to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you I'll come back again and receive you unto myself that where I am there ye may be also. Well those were fine words and no doubt the disciples were comforted by them. But what proof had Jesus got? What proof have we got today? That he wasn't deluded.

That in a nice way he wasn't softening the bitterness of death and yet really he got no solution for man's greatest and last enemy. Well the fact of the matter is this that Jesus did what Neil Armstrong in a different sense achieved. Let's take the latter.

Armstrong was what? The first man who got to the moon. If there's anyone who's qualified to say there isn't life on the moon it's Armstrong. If there's anyone qualified to describe the moon it's Armstrong.

Why? Because he went and he came back. So Jesus three days I'll be in the belly of the earth like Jonah was in the belly of the fish and then I will come back. I will be raised from the dead and the disciples ultimately believed it.

Not because they did at the moment of him telling them but because they actually saw him. Ah you say but those people, those people in the first century they were so gullible. They believed anything.

Legends, myths, Hans Anderson, fairy tales, set it to a religious theme and the first century folks would come along into the shrines and temples. Whoever told you that? Have you ever read any of ancient history or modern history or medieval history for that matter? How sweeping are our conclusions that we make on a basis of absolute ignorance. Do you know what the presiding philosophy of the day was in the ministry of Jesus? I'll tell you.

It was the philosophy of Stoicism. You say you've never heard of the Stoics? Well they gave us the English a proverbial expression, a stiff upper lip. These were stoical men, determined men and they laughed at the concept of life after death.

Paul goes to Athens. He starts to preach. Jesus is raised from the dead.

Did they come running in their thousands? No. They scorned him. Man, you must be mad.

There were two main theological schools in Palestine. Two schools of thought. One were called the Pharisees.

The other were called, was called the Sadducees and they differed in this respect. Well there were many respects but this was the main doctrinal difference. The Pharisees believed in an afterlife.

The Sadducees didn't. That's why you always get the corny comment. It's the reason why they were sad, you see.

There was no afterlife. Far from the Greek world and the Jewish world being conditioned to believe that a man had come back from the dead, the reverse is the situation. They were as rationalistic, as materialistic and as sensual in the first century as we are today and that needs to be said many, many times.

They weren't just the primitive superstitious folk that sometimes we credit first century models as being. But the disciples and the followers of Jesus, 120 of them, 500 of them, another 2,000, another 3,000 as the numbers grew and grew in Jerusalem and elsewhere, they believed that he had indeed come back from the dead. There were witnesses, there was incontrovertible evidence to the fact that what Jesus said was correct.

Jesus taught that when a man entrusted his life to him he would never die and they believed and responded to what he had to say. Well what is heaven like? That's a fair question to ask in this Sunday evening dealing with this subject after death, is it not? And the answer is that there's very little information given in the New Testament for one reason that I'll share in a moment or two. Certainly when you come to the New Testament you don't get any idea of heaven in the materialistic concepts of more primitive people like the Norseman who thought in terms of Valhalla or the Romans who talked in terms of the Elysian fields.

Some people if they lived in Manchester would probably think that heaven was going down to the Mediterranean and days and days of endless sunshine and no rain. Some folks have a sort of cross-materialistic idea of heaven like the Jews had in intertestamental period when they believed that the Millennium would see that each vine produced at least a thousand bunches of grapes on each branch. But the Bible steers the course between extreme materialism and the extreme mysticism of the East where heaven is nirvana and you're swept into it and you've got a sort of consciousness but it's not much.

Heaven says the Bible is where God is and it has to use analogies, it has to use comparisons. You can't be woodenly literal. It speaks of streets of gold but there's no more literal requirement in believing that than believing in the Old Testament when it speaks of Canaan flowing with milk and honey.

It actually meant that literalistically. These are concepts, these are metaphors, these are illustrations. You see the problem with the Bible I speak respectfully is this, when it talks of heaven it's speaking in a language or it requires a language that we just do not have.

One of the most incredible experiences I ever had in my life was dropping down in the Zairean jungle in a little airplane that took only two people and the crazy pilot brought it to land on a mud track. I thought you know I shall soon be testing my belief in heaven as this thing drops out of the sky but we got down safely and within minutes out of the bushes came little tribal people, primitive people, hardly a stitch of clothing on, midgets of men. They understood the gospel but that's beside the point of my illustration.

You imagine me trying to tell them what life is like at 8 Shakespeare Road with our bathroom, a television, our carpets, central heating. I wouldn't have the ingenuity to describe to those diminutive Africans my lifestyle and they wouldn't have the capacity to understand. Try with a blind man blind from birth describing a constable picture.

It's impossible and so when Jesus speaks about heaven he always has to use an analogy. The kingdom of God is like and in the book of Revelation also just analogies but what comes out quite clearly is this, that heaven is where God is. God in the Old Testament is referred to in the Hebrew as Yahweh.

That means the ever-existent one. God never gets a day older and yet he's as young as he always was. Very, very difficult for us in confined to space and to time to to appreciate these things.

We're locked into a prison of dimensions that eternity, that heaven doesn't know. The Bible tells us flesh and blood can't enter heaven but it speaks to us of our Lord Jesus and his resurrection body and one of the most fascinating studies in the Holy Scripture is to think through our Lord when he's been raised from the dead. Now there's a correspondence between his body after resurrection and the body that he had before.

It's a glorified body. There's no remains of our Lord in the tomb. He's been raised from the dead.

He's gone through a process, if you please, of metamorphosis. He's got a glorified body. It's a much more convenient body.

It can pass through buildings. It can materialize. It can be dematerialized.

He can speak. He can understand. He thinks.

He communicates. But he's got a much better transmitter than ever he had when confined to the body before his resurrection. And it's these sort of hints that the Bible starts to give us.

Page, not so much page after page, but maybe book after book. Enough hints to indicate that heaven is the most remarkable, spectacular place that one can ever conceive of. The Bible says of Christian people, one day we shall see him, Jesus.

And when we shall see him, we shall be like him. And when it speaks about heaven, its geography, and its location, it wraps its language up in terminology that indicates it's trying to convey what is impossible really to get across clearly. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, the things that God has in store for them that love him.

You'll be linked into the very heart of God, the very nature of the Lord Jesus Christ will belong to, to those who have trusted him, who have made him Lord and Savior. When does that happen? The moment of death? Well, I know there are those who differ from me, and I'm not prepared to argue this out in terms that I have just suggested that we're outside of space and time. I do believe that when the Apostle Paul faced death, he was in a problem because he believed that when he stepped through death itself, he moved into an area where Jesus was.

And he desired to be with Jesus, which would be far better. When Paul was confronted with the fact of death, it didn't frighten him. He wanted to move over.

What happens in term of time and space? I don't know. The nearest I can get to comprehending this is the one occasion or two in my life when I had a general anesthetic because of some back problem, and after I'd had the manipulation, I came back to life so to speak. And I didn't know what had happened in the meantime.

I woke up and continued as I was at the time when I'd gone down. And all I remember in my fuzzy, fuzzy fashion coming out of the anesthetic was with revivalistic passion telling the surgeon that he ought to watch Morcombe and Wise that evening on the television. When you come through death, physical death, into the conscious presence of God, there's no fuzziness.

You go there to behold the King in His glory. Final question, and I'm nearly through. Well then, do we all go? It'd be lovely to be able to say that.

I wish I could. But you see, there's a fourth part to our study. After death, what? Nothing.

After death, an intermediary state, purgatory. After death, heaven. What about hell? Hell is a place where God is not running through the Scriptures or the idea of judgment.

It is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment. Our own lifestyle is punctuated by the thought of judgment. You spend time at the sixth form college, two years will elapse and they'll test you.

They'll judge you with your A-levels or whatever it is that you're doing. You'll be an architect and put up the building. Eventually the customers will come and they'll judge you.

So with this whole business of responding to our Lord Jesus Christ, He will balance the scales. There's a lot of injustice in this world. The poor sometimes are extremely badly treated.

Evil doesn't seem to gain. It's just desserts. In this life, sovereignty of God has decreed that there are not balancing of the scales, but sheer logic carries us through death itself to the concept of eternal life where right is vindicated and where wrong is punished.

Jesus says nothing unclean shall enter into heaven. Only those whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life. There's no evil allowed in heaven you see.

You ask Paul Brown about buying apples and he'll tell you that he wouldn't have a bad apple in one of the boxes that he buys for his granddad and his father. Why not? Because if they didn't sell their apples within a few days, that one bad apple was sent all the rest bad. That's the same with heaven.

No sinner can enter heaven. Flesh and blood as we now know it cannot enter heaven. The distinguishing feature between those who enter heaven and those who are consigned to exclusion, that is to hell, is this.

The former have recognized that Jesus is Lord and Savior. They're incorporated into his victory. How can you be sure that when you die you will go to heaven? Prepare now.

God has set eternity in our hearts. That's what the Bible says. In other words, we've got an inbuilt indicator that we're made for more than just these three score years and ten on this earth or whatever our allotted period might be.

We know full well that one day we will have to face the first cause, whatever we call it or him. But the Bible tells us that that first cause is the Lord God. The Bible tells us and there's reasonable historical evidence that Jesus Christ, God's Son, came into this world, bore our sins on the cross, died and was raised again.

And as in Palestine they have two harvests, he was the first fruits, the first harvest, so there will be many, many other harvests. Are you so linked into Jesus Christ and his life that you will be raised on the last day, in the moment, in the twinkling of an eye? You haven't yet seen what God has in store in his creative abilities. This world has yet to regain the form of beauty that it lost when Adam sinned.

God has a program that is so mind-blowing.