The intermediate state and the last things.

Front matter

THE

INTERMEDIATE STATE

GEORGE S, BARRETT D, D tilt Slrpnlogirai

Contents

THE INTERMEDIATE STATE.

I'AGE

I. INTRODUCTORY - . - . i

II. The Evidence Of Scripture

In endeavouring to form a just estimate of the teaching of Holy Scripture on the Inter¬ mediate State, there is one introductory remark which we shall do well to bear in mind. We ought not to be surprised if we do not find any explicit teaching on this mysterious subject in the Bible. It is not the way of Scripture to satisfy all our curiosity, even when it is legitimate curiosity, concerning the future state. The Bible is the record of the revela¬ tion which God has made of Himself to man, and of His redeeming love and mercy ; and it spends all its strength in setting before us the privileges and responsibilities of this life, the glory and peace of life in Christ, and the guilt and misery of rejecting the salvation Christ offers to the soul. On everything that pertains to ‘ life and godliness ’ the Bible is explicit and

The Evideiice of Scripture 13

unmistakable in its teaching, but on the secrets of the unseen world it preserves a solemn and most significant reserve.

At the same time Scripture does not leave us without some light, even if the light be dim, on the mysteries beyond death. It suggests, it hints, it draws aside the veil that hides the future from us, it allows us one quick glance within the veil, and then it lets the veil fall again ; and it is only due to Scripture, and especially to the reverence we owe to the authority of our Lord and of His Apostles, if we endeavour to gather up and to articulate these scattered hints, and to see what they teach us concerning the state of the dead. It is this task which I propose to attempt in the next two papers of this series.

The teaching of the Old Testament need not detain us very long, for the revelation of w'hich it is the record was necessarily fragmentary and imperfect as compared with that found in the New Testament. The whole subject of the belief of the Jews concerning immortality is far too large to be discussed here, and it may be dismissed with the remark that although it is too much to say that there is no indication of any hope of a life after death in the earlier books of the Old Testament, yet the hope was wavering and uncertain. The familiar word for the ‘ grave,' into which the righteous and unrighteous descend at death, is ‘ Sheol,’ a word unhappily misrendered to our ears in many passages in the Authorized Version by ‘ Hell.’

‘ Sheol ’ occurs sixty-five times in the Old Testament, and whilst in the great majority of instances it is rendered in the Septuagint by ‘ Hades,’ in the Authorized Version it is trans¬ lated thirty-one times by ‘ grave,’ thirty-one times by ‘ hell,’ and three times by ‘ pit.’ On these diverse renderings of the one Hebrew word ‘ Sheol ’ the Revisers of the Old Testa¬ ment remark in their Preface (p. viii.) : ‘ The Hebrew Sheol, which signifies the abode of departed spirits, and corresponds to the Greek Hades, or the under-world, is variously rendered in the Authorized Version by “grave,” “pit,” and “ hell.” Of these renderings, “ hell,” if it could be taken in its original sense as used in the Creeds,* would be a fairly adequate equiva¬ lent for the Hebrew word ; but it is so com¬ monly understood of the place of torment, that to employ it frequently would lead to inevitable misunderstanding. The Revisers, therefore, in the historical narratives, have left the rendering

E.g.^ ‘ He descended into Hell.’

“the grave/’ or “the pit/’ in the text, with a marginal note “ Heb., Sheol,” to indicate that it does not indicate the place of burial ; while in the poetical writings they have most com¬ monly put “Sheol” in the text, and “the grave ” in the margin.’ In one passage (Isa. xiv. g) the Revisers have retained the rendering ‘ hell ’ in the text, and have indi¬ cated by a note in the margin that it stands for ‘ Sheol ’ in the Hebrew.

The teaching of the Old Testament as to the nature of ‘ Sheol ’ may be summarized thus : It is the place into which are gathered the spirits of all who depart this present life : it is that dim and shadowy under-world which the soul enters at death. Sheol is therefore a common designation for the abode of the good and of the evil after death, just as we shall see ‘ Hades ’ is in the New Testament. Thus we read in PsahnHx. 17 : ‘ The wicked shall return to Sheol, even all the nations that forget God ;’ and in Psalm xvi. 10 the Psalmist, rejoicing in God, says : ‘ Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol,’ a verse the Apostle Peter expressly applies to our Lord, of Whom he says that David spake ‘ of the resurrection of Christ, that neither was He left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption’ (Acts ii. 31).

i6

It is perfectly true that in some of the later Psalms and Prophets the hope of immortality burns more brightly than it does in the earlier books of the Old Testament, but it is still true, as Dorner says, ‘ that in the Old Testament the terrors of Sheol are not vanquished by faith.’

It is when we come to the New Testament that we find fuller teaching on this shadowy state into which the soul enters at death, and although, as I have said, the teaching is pur¬ posely left incomplete, yet there is enough, as we shall see, to warrant us in saying that according to the New Testament the souls of the righteous and of the unrighteous do not enter what is commonly understood as heaven and hell at death, but pass into a state that is preparatory to their final condition, a state that for the righteous is one of unmixed and ever enlarging peace and joy, for they are ‘with Christ, which is very far better’ (Phil, i. 23), whilst for the wicked it is one of awful punishment and anguish (Luke xvi. 23), and to this double Intermediate State the common name of ‘ Hades ’ is given.

I. In the parable to which reference has just been made, of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke xvi.), the rich man is said to be in

The Evidence of Scriptw^e

‘ Hades’ and ‘ in torment,’ whilst in the sermon of St. Peter on the day of Pentecost our Lord is expressly said to have entered ‘ Hades ’ after His death on the cross. Now, as no one can suppose the soul of the wicked rich man and the soul of the Lord Jesus Christ were literally in the___same_ place after death, it is certain ‘ Hades ’ in the New Testament, like ‘ Sheol ’ in the Old, can only be a common name for the place or state of all departed spirits after death- The point, however, I desire here to emphasize is this, that neither did our Lord pass imme¬ diately into heaven at His death : this was reserved for Him at His ascension, after His body had been raised from the grave (Acts ii. 32-34) ; nor did the rich man pass at once into the final place of torment for the lost, but both were in a world of disembodied spirits awaiting their resurrection, the one in inconceivable misery, the other in equally inconceivable blessedness.

2. In Revelation vi. g, 10, we read : ‘ I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held : and they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth ? And there was given to them each one a white robe, and it was said unto them that they should rest yet for a little while, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, which should be killed, even as they were, should be fulfilled.’

I do not wish to press the mysterious language of the Book of Revelation so as to make it fit into any preconceived theory of the future, but certainly these words seem to hint that the martyrs have not yet entered heaven, but rest ‘ beneath the altar ’ in a dis¬ embodied state, their ‘ souls ’ awaiting and longing for their complete satisfaction in God.

3. Other names given to this shadowy world of spirits are ‘ the lower parts of the earth,’ into which Christ is said to have ‘ descended ’ after death (Ephes. iv. g), and ‘ Paradise,’ into which our Lord promised the penitent thief he should ‘ to-day ’ enter (Luke xxiii. 43).

It has always appeared to me very significant that in this gracious promise to the dying thief Christ did not say, ‘ This day thou shalt be with Me in heaven,’ but used a word only found three times in the New Testament, and that is derived from the Persian, literally meaning ‘ a park,’ or an ‘ extended garden,’ to designate the place where the forgiven thief should meet his forgiving Lord. Certainly ‘ Paradise’ could hardly be a permanent restingplace for a departed soul, A park or a garden is not a place where we always dwell ; it is rather a place of temporary resort, and of refreshment and rest.

4. That this unseen and blessed world of souls into which the dying thief and his Lord passed at death, which Lazarus entered, and in which the martyrs are resting, is not what is usually understood by ‘ heaven,’ seems ex¬ plicitly declared by the words of St. Peter concerning David, whose soul was in Hades :

‘ David ascended not into the heavens ’ (Acts ii. 34) — this crowning glory having, as yet, been granted only to one man, the Man Christ Jesus.

5. At the same time this state of the blessed dead, although it is far from being the fulness of blessedness and glory which will be theirs when they receive their resurrection bodies and behold the beatific vision of God in heaven, is one of complete and unspeakable happiness. It is enough here to quote again St. Paul’s own longing for death : ‘ I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is very far better.’

So far we have only examined the more general passages which bear on this subject ; we come now to a more critical and important series of texts which speak of the moral sig¬ nificance of this Intermediate State.

6. And of these the first I adduce is the great passage in i Peter iii. 18-20, which I will quote from the Revised Version : ‘Christ also suffered for sin once, the righteous for the un¬ righteous, that He might bring us to God ; being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit, in which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison, which aforetime were disobedient, when the long-suffering of God waited for Noah, while the ark was a-preparing.’ Now, these words ex¬ pressly assure us that when Christ Jesus died on the Cross He did not perish, but He was ‘ quickened in the spirit,’ and in the spirit He preached unto certain mysterious beings who are called ‘ the spirits in prison.’ There was only one period in the history of our Lord to which these words could apply, the period between His death and His resurrection. It has accordingly been the all but universal belief of the Church that, during the three days that Christ’s body lay in the grave. His spirit descended into the world of spirits, as the familiar words of the creed declare, ‘ He descended into hell,’ that is, ‘ Hades.’ Yes; but for what purpose did our Lord thus visit this abode of the spirits 1 What a light it casts on the supreme end of the Incarnation, what a new revelation it affords us of the tender and yearn¬ ing pity of the Good Shepherd for the lost sheep still in the wilderness, when we are told that even in the interval between His death and His resurrection our Lord was still occupied in His_jrg deeming work of seeking and saving the lost ! He went ‘ in the Spirit,’ and ‘ preached unto the spirits in prison.’

True, there is only one specific class of the dead to whom we are told He preached, those ‘ who aforetime were disobedient ... in the days of Noah’; but how immeasurable is the significance of this single fact ! These men whose ‘ wickedness ’ is described in the Book of Genesis (Gen. vi. 5) as having been ‘ great in the earth,’ ‘ every imagination of whose thought was only evil continually,’ whose ‘ way was corrupt,’ who had ‘ filled the earth with violence,’ who had despised ‘ the long-suffering of God,’ and who had perished by the just judgment of God in their sins, are visited in their dark prison-house by the Son of God : they see the face of Jesus Christ, they hear the voice of the Saviour of the world, they listen to the Gospel preached by His own Divine lips ! Is it possible to read this single fact, so casually alluded to by St. Peter, and not to feel its im¬ mense meaning ? When antediluvian sinners who had never heard of Christ did hear of Him, and received the offer of His mercy in their prison-house, then I am filled with a new hope concerning all who, like them, live and die with¬ out the knowledge of the Christ who came to be the ‘ Saviour of the world.’

The point of the text, however, on which I now lay special stress is the proof, the positive proof, it affords, that there are some for whom ‘ hell ’ does not commence at death, some who lived and who died in disobedience to God, but to whom, after death, the Gospel they never heard in this life was mercifully made known.

7. And this is what St. Peter expressly teaches us in another passage in this same Epistle. In i Peter iv. 6 we read, ‘ Unto this end was the Gospel preached, even to the dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.’

These words are too explicit to admit of any doubt. That they refer to the statement we have already quoted from the third chapter is now generally admitted by expositors, but it is

The Evidence of Scriphire 23

remarkable that they enlarge that statement even whilst they refer to it. They tell us ‘ the Gospel ’ was ‘ preached even to the dead,’ that is, not to the spiritually dead — for, as Canon Cook says in the ‘ Speaker’s Commentary,’

‘ We may assume as certain the words refer to physical, not, as some have held, to spiritual death ’ — but to ‘ dead men and they also give to us the reason for this preaching of the Gospel to these ‘dead men.’ This was first ‘ that they might be judged according to men in the flesh,’ that is, as I understand the words — and they are not without difficulty — that these dead men who had lived and had died in sin, but who had never heard of the mercy of God in Christ, and who therefore could never have been capable either of the guilt of reject¬ ing it or of the blessedness of its acceptance, might be put, so far as judgment was concerned, into the same moral position as living men who hear of Christ are placed, ‘ that they might be judged according to men in the flesh.’ At the same time — and how completely this is in accordance with all that Scripture teaches us of the purpose of God in the Incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God ! — this preaching of

* That ‘ the dead ’ mean ‘ men who had died ’ is now admitted by all the best expositors.

the Gospel was not intended to lead to the still deeper condemnation and punishment of these ‘ dead men it has a more gracious purpose than this ; it was to save them from the doom of their sins, it was ‘ preached ’ to them ‘ that they might live according to God in the spirit.’

8. One more passage that seems to bear on this mysterious preaching of Christ to the dead shall be adduced, and with it I will close this chapter. In John v. 25 we read, ‘ V erily, verily, I say unto you. The time cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.’ I am aware that these words have been held by some expositors to refer to the spiritual results of preaching Christ, ‘the dead’ being supposed to mean the spiritually dead ; but this interpreta¬ tion, although a possible one, certainly does not seem to harmonize with the undeniable reference to the physically dead which follows the text. The words have always borne for me a more tender and gracious meaning since I learnt to regard them as Christ’s own reference to that gracious work of preaching the Gospel to ‘ dead men ’ of which we have seen St. Peter speaks, and on which our Lord was shortly to enter.

III. THE EVIDENCE OF SClUVTmi'E— continued

In our last chapter we endeavoured to review a part of the evidence that may be found in the teaching of Holy Scripture for the existence of an Intermediate State intervening between death and the Final Judgment.

In addition to the scattered hints which may be gathered from the Old Testament, and from isolated passages in the New, we found there were two great passages in the first Epistle of St. Peter* which expressly declare that our Lord, during the interval between His death and His resurrection, was occupied in preach¬ ing the Gospel ‘to the dead,’ and as these dead could only exist in a disembodied state — the resurrection of the body being still in the future — they are called ‘spirits’; ‘spirits in prison,’ for it appears that, on account of their ‘ dis- * I Pet, iii. 18-20; iv. 6.

The I nterniediate State obedience’ to the warnings of God in the days of Noah, they had been punished by being shut up in ‘ prison.’ These passages, moreover, in addition to the light they cast on the moral condition of the dead who have never heard of Christ in this life, and to the hope we shall see later on the}^ permit us to cherish that to all such the Gospel will be made known, as it has been made known to us, certainly warrant us in saying that there are some, at any rate, for whom the final states of heaven or hell do not commence at death, but who are in a state where moral and spiritual change, and that of the most decisive and momentous nature, is still possible.

I propose in this chapter to continue and to conclude our discussion of the teaching of Scripture on this mysterious and yet interest¬ ing subject.

I. x\nd in the first place I adduce a group of passages of a kindred nature, the full meaning of which, it is hardly too much to say, has not yet entered into the thought and teaching of the Church of Christ.

In Eph. i. 9, lo we read (I quote from the Revised Version): ‘Having made known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in

The Evideitce of Scriphire 27

Him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth.’

In Col. i. 19, 20 we read : ‘ It was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell; and through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross ; through Him, I say, whether things upon the earth or things in the heavens.^

So, too, in Phil. xxix. 10, ii we read: ‘ Where¬ fore also God highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the Name that is above every name, that in the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’

Now, I put these three passages together for a purpose. In each of them we find explicit mention of the work of Christ as extending beyond this world into the unseen world of spirits. It is the will of God to ‘ sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens’ as well as ‘the things upon the earth,’ to ‘reconcile all things unto Himself’ through ‘ the blood of His cross’ — ‘ whether things upon the earth or things in the heavens,’ and, ‘in the Name of Jesus every knee’ shall ‘bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth.’ It may be said there is no mention in any of these passages of any Intermediate State, and that the references to the ‘ things in the heavens’ are too mysterious to allow us to build anything on them; but, at any rate, the references mean something, and the least they can mean is that the gracious and redeeming work of our Lord is not confined to those who are on the earth, but reaches even to the invisible world that lies in the heavens. Nor is it true that there is no reference in any of the passages just quoted to the Intermediate State. In the last of the three passages there is an expression rendered in the Revised Version and in the Authorized Version ‘of things under the earth,’ with the marginal rendering in the Revised Version, ‘or, things of the world below,’ of which no less an authority than Meyer — one of the most careful and scholarly of all the com¬ mentators on the New Testament — confidently affirms the meaning to be ‘the dead in Hades’; and then he adds, ‘ The adoration on the part of the latter presupposes the descensus Christi ad inferos (the descent of Christ into the lower parts of the earth), in which He presented

Himself to the spirits in Hades as the Lord’ (‘ Comm, on Phil,’ in loci).

2. In addition to these passages of Scripture there are some texts which, to say the least, seem to have an important bearing on the moral condition of the dead in Hades as imply¬ ing the possibility of moral and spiritual pro¬ gress taking place after death and up to the Final Judgment.

Thus, for example, in Phil. i. 6 the Apostle says : ‘ Being confident of this very thing, that He which began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.’ It is enough here to quote the commentary of Calvin on this passage : ‘ Although those who, freed from this mortal body, no longer fight with the lusts of the flesh, are, so to speak, beyond the reach of harm, yet there is nothing unrea¬ sonable in saying they are in a state of pro¬ gress, because they have not yet attained to that to which they aspire, they have not 3^et gained the blessedness and the glory for which they hope, and the da}^ has not yet dawned which shall reveal the treasures hidden in their hope. Moreover, when their hope is inquired of, their eyes must be fixed ahvays on the blessedness of the Resurrection, as on its final end,’

So, too, in I Cor. i. 7, 8 there appears to be a similar hint of spiritual progress taking place beyond and after this life : ‘ Waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye be unreprovable in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ I am aware that it may be said that as the Apostle expected the Second Advent — the Parousia — of our Lord to take place in his own day, these words only mean that he be¬ lieved that Christ would preserve from falling His own people up ‘to the end^ — that is, up to His own coming again ; but if they mean as much as this, they must certainly mean still more, for, since Christ has not yet come, and St. Paul’s words are still true, they must certainly imply that all who are Christ’s are still being ‘ confirmed ’ — that is, ‘ made firm ’ — ‘ to the end’ ; and it is difficult to see how this is possible in the case of either living or dead, unless spiritual progress in grace is assumed to be theirs.

Nor is it the righteous alone who are waiting for the Second Advent of Christ and the Day of Judgment as the completion and crisis of their present state. There are three passages in the New Testament which refer to the doom of the wicked, in each of which it is expressly stated that their present condition is pre-

The Evidence of ScripUire 31

paratory for, and in expectation of, the great day of account.

In 2 Pet. ii. 9 we read : ‘ The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the Day of Judgment;’ and in Jude 6 we are told that ‘ the angels which kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.’ The same truth concerning the fallen angels is taught in 2 Pet. ii. 4: ‘For if God spared not the angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness to be reserved unto judgment.’

In these three passages it appears that neither in the case of the ‘ unrighteous ’ nor of the ‘ angels when they sinned ’ is the final state of punishment reached now, but they are ‘ kept under punishment,’ ‘ kept in everlasting bonds,’ ‘reserved unto judgment,’ a judgment we are expressly told will take place at ‘ the great day.’

Looking in the same direction, and pointing to the possibility of spiritual change for the better or the worse, even up to the Day of Judgment, are the familiar words of our Lord recorded in Matt. xiii. 30 : ‘ Let both grow together until the harvest ; and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them ; but gather the wheat into My barn.’ Here again we find the same truth which has appeared in the group of passages we have been considering, that growth is possible up to the ‘ harvest,’ and that both the tares and the wheat share in this growth after their kind ; that is, neither the wicked nor the righteous reach complete development of character at death, but continue to grow until the final award of the Judgment Day is made.

3. There is one further argument in favour of the Intermediate State, only inferentially derived from Scripture, it is true, but which is of so speculative and uncertain a character that I have been in some doubt whether to adduce it or not. Perhaps, on the whole, it will be better simply to state it, leaving each reader either to reject it altogether, or to give to it such weight as may seem good to him. The argument to which I now refer is derived from our Lord’s three raisings from the dead. It has always seemed to me that if the souls of the righteous entered heaven immediately after death — that is, if they reached full and perfected blessedness the moment they left this life, if they were permitted to see the unclouded glory

The Evidence of Scriphire 33

of God, and to behold the beatific vision — if, in a word, all that the New Testament means when it speaks of ‘the glory’ to be revealed is already theirs, then for our Lord to have recalled any soul from that high state of perfect and overflowing blessedness to this sorrowful and sinful world was, at least, not like the infinite tenderness and mercy of the Lord. I do not for one moment doubt that even if Christ had seen fit to do this He would have done well, for ‘ all the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth to them that keep His cove¬ nant and His testimonies ’ ; but it would have been harder for us to have seen the mercy and the goodness in this mysterious act. On the other hand, if the righteous are not fully ‘ per¬ fected ’ at death — that is, if they have not reached the consummate and overflowing blessedness which will be theirs when they receive their resurrection bodies, and have been formally acquitted by their Judge, and are received into the glory of God — if they occupy for the present a state of lower bliss, perfectly happy because they are ‘ with Christ, which is very far better,’ and yet conscious there is greater blessedness and greater glory yet to come, then the difficulty occasioned by the exceptional recall of any from this Intermediate State of peace and blessedness to the present world, if not wholly removed, certainly seems to be considerably lessened.