The State of the Blessed Dead.
by Henry Alford.
I.
I HAVE already announced that during this Advent season I would call your attention to the state of the blessed dead. My object in so doing is simply that we may recall to ourselves that which Scripture has revealed respecting them, for our edification, and for our personal comfort. And I would guard that which will be said by one or two preliminary observations.
With Death as an object of terror, with Death from the mere moralist"s point of view, as the termination of human schemes and hopes, we Christians have nothing to do. We are believers in and servants of One who has in these senses abolished Death. Our schemes and hopes are not terminated by Death, but reach onward into a state beyond it.
Again, with that state beyond, except as one of blessedness purchased for us by the Son of G.o.d, I am not at present dealing. It is of those that die in the Lord alone that I speak.
And this being so, it is clear that the first point about them demanding our attention is, the very commencement of their state at the moment of death. And this will form our subject to-day.
We shall be guided in its consideration by two texts of Holy Scripture. The one is that where Our Lord answers the prayer of the dying thief that He would remember him when He came into His kingdom, Luke xxiii. 43: "VERILY I SAY UNTO THEE, TO-DAY SHALT THOU BE WITH ME IN PARADISE."
And the other is an expression of St. Paul, Phil. i. 23, not improbably taken from those very words recorded in the gospel of that evangelist who was his companion in travel--"TO DEPART AND TO BE WITH CHRIST."
Now in both these one fact is simply declared, viz.: that the departed spirit of the faithful man is WITH CHRIST. It is as if one bright light were lifted for us in the midst of a realm brooded over by impenetrable mist. For who knows whither the departed spirit has betaken itself when it has left us here? One of the most painful pangs in bereavement by death is the utter and absolute severance, without a spark of intelligence of the departed. One hour, life is blest by their presence; the next, it is entirely and for ever gone from us, never to be heard of more. One word, one utterance--how precious in that moment of anguish do we feel that it would be! But we are certain it never will be granted us. None has ever come back who has told the story. Where the spirit wakes and finds itself,--this none has ever declared to us; nor shall we know until our own turn comes. Now in such a state of uncertainty, these texts speak for us a certain truth: The departed spirit is WITH CHRIST.
I shall regard this revelation negatively and positively: as to what it disproves, and as to what it implies.
First, then, it disproves the idea of the spirit pa.s.sing at death into a state of unconsciousness, from which it is to wake only at the great day of the resurrection. If it is to be with Christ, this cannot be.
Christ is in no such state of unconsciousness; He has entered into His rest, and is waiting till all things shall be put under His feet; and it would be a mere delusion to say of the blessed dead, that they shall be with Christ, if they were to be virtually annihilated during this time that Christ is waiting for His kingdom. Besides, how then would the Lord"s promise to the thief be fulfilled? What consolation would it have been to him, what answer to his prayer, to be remembered when Jesus came in His kingdom, if these words implied that he should be unconsciously sleeping while the Lord was enjoying his triumph?
Therefore we may safely say, that the so-called "sleep of the soul,"
from the act of death till the resurrection, has no foundation in that which is revealed to us.
It is perfectly true, that the state of the departed is described to us as "sleeping in Jesus," or rather, for the words are a misrendering, a having fallen asleep _through_, or _by means of Jesus_. But our texts are enough to show us, that we must not take such an expression for more than it really implies. Sleeping, or falling asleep, was a name current among Jews and Christians, and even among the best of the heathens, for death, implying its peace and rest, implying also that it should be followed by a waking: but apparently with no intent to convey any idea of unconsciousness. It is a term used with reference to us, as well as to the dead. To us, they are as if they were asleep: removed from us in consciousness, as in presence. The idea also of _taking rest_ tended to make this term appropriate. But it must not be used to prove that to which it evidently had no reference.
The spirit, then, of the departed does not pa.s.s into unconsciousness.
What more do we know of it? It is WITH JESUS.
We have now to consider what this implies. And in doing so we shall have further to make certain that which we think we have already proved. For first, it clearly implies more than a mere expression of safe-keeping, or reserve for a future state of blessedness. "The righteous souls are in the hand of G.o.d, and there shall no harm happen to them." This is one thing: but to be with Christ is another. We might again appeal to the spirit of the promise made to the penitent thief, in order to show this: we might remind you that in the other text, St. Paul is comparing the two states--life in the midst of his children in the faith, and death; and he says, "I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better:" better than being with you, my Philippians.
So that more must be meant than mere safe keeping in the Redeemer"s hands. We may surely say, that nothing less than conscious existence in the presence of Christ can be intended. And if that is intended, then very much more is intended also, than those words at first seem to imply. Remember the contrast which this same Apostle elsewhere draws. "We know," he says, "that while we are present in the body, we are absent from the Lord: for we walk by faith, not by appearance: we are willing rather to be absent from the body and present with the Lord." That is, if we follow out the thought, this present state of dwelling in our home the body is a state of severance from the Lord; but there is a better state, into which we shall be introduced when this house of the body is pulled down: and from the context in that place we may add, much as we wish to be clothed upon with our new and glorious body which is from heaven, yet even short of that, we have learned to prefer being simply unclothed from the body, because thus we shall be present with the Lord.
So that we may safely a.s.sume thus much, my brethren: that the moment a Christian"s spirit is released from the body, it does enter into the presence of our Blessed Lord and Saviour, in a way of which it knows nothing here: a way which, compared to all that its previous faith could know of Him, is like presence of friends compared to absence.
Now let us take another remarkable pa.s.sage of Holy Writ bearing on this same matter. St. John, in his first Epistle says, "Beloved, now are we children of G.o.d, and it never yet was manifested what we shall be; but if it should be manifested, we know that we shall be like Him: for we shall see Him as He is:" for this is the more accurate rendering of the words: meaning, if any one could come back, or come down, to us, and tell us what our future state is to be, the information could amount for us now only to this, that we shall be like Him, like Christ; because we shall see Him as He is. And in treating these words at considerable length last year, I pressed it on you that this concluding sentence might bear two meanings: either, we shall be like Him, _because in order to see Him as He is, we_ MUST _be like Him;_ or, _we shall be like Him, because the sight of Him as He is will change us into His perfect likeness_. For, our present purpose, or indeed for any purpose, it matters little which of these meanings we take. At any rate, we have gained this knowledge from St.
John"s words, that the sight of the Blessed Lord which will be enjoyed by the Christian"s spirit on its release from the body, will be accompanied by being also perfectly like Him.
Now, here, my brethren, are the elements of an immediate change, blessed and joyous beyond our conception. Let us spend the rest of our time to-day in dwelling upon it.
And I will not now insist on the deliverance of the spirit from the infirmity, or pain, or decay of the body; because this is not so in all cases. Many a Christian"s spirit is set free from a body in perfect vigour and health. Let us take nothing but what is common to all who believe in and serve the Lord. Now what is our present state with reference to Him whom all Christians love? It is, absence. And it is absence aggravated in a way that earthly absence never is. For not only have we never seen Him, which is a case perfectly imaginable in earthly relations, but also, which hardly is, we have no absolute proof of His existence, nor of His mind towards us. Even as far as this, is matter of faith and not of appearance. We have no token, no communication, from Him. I suppose there hardly ever was a Christian yet, living under the present dispensation, entirely dependent upon his faith, who has not at some time or other had the dreadful thought cross his mind--overborne by his faith, but still not wholly extinguished, "What if it should not be true after all?" And much and successfully as we may contend with these misgivings of unbelief, yet that frame of mind which is represented by them, that wavering, fitful, unsteady faith, ever accompanies us. The distress arising from it is known to every one who has the Christian life in him. Only those never doubt who have never believed: for doubt is of the very essence of belief. But some poor souls are utterly cast down by the fact of its existence--shrink from these half-doubting fits as of themselves deadly sin, and are in continual terror about their soul"s safety on this account: others, of stronger minds, regard them truly as inevitable accompaniments of present human weakness, but of course struggle with them, and evermore yearn to be rid of them.
Now if what we have been saying be true,--and I have endeavoured not to go beyond the soberest inferences from the plain language of Scripture,--if so much be true, then the moment of departure from the body puts an end for ever to this imperfect, struggling, fitful state of faith and doubt. The spirit that is but a moment gone, that has left that well-known, familiar tabernacle of the body a sudden wreck of inanimate matter, that spirit is with the Lord. All doubt, all misgiving, is at an end. Every wave raised by this world"s storms, this world"s currents of interest, this world"s rocks and shallows, is suddenly laid, and there is a great calm. Certainty, for doubt--the sight of the Lord, for the conflict of a.s.surance and misgiving--the face of Christ, for the mere faith in Christ--these have succeeded, because the departed spirit is "with the Lord"--companying with Him.
Before we follow this out farther, let us carefully draw one great distinction. We must not make the too common mistake of confusing this sight of the Lord which immediately follows on the act of death, with that complete state of the glorified Christian man, of which we shall have to speak in a subsequent sermon. Though greater than our thoughts can now conceive, the bliss of which we are speaking to-day is incomplete. The spirit which has been set free from the body is alone, and without a body. This is not the complete state of man. It is a state to us full of mystery--inconceivable in detail, though easily apprehended as a whole. We must take care, in what we have further to say, that this is fully borne in mind. And, bearing it in mind, let us proceed.
This sight of Christ, this calm of full unbroken a.s.surance of His nearness and presence, what does it further imply? As far as we can at present see, certainly as much as this. First, the entire absence of evil from the spirit. It would be impossible to be with Christ in any such sense, unless there were entire agreement in will and desire with Him. It would be impossible thus to see Him as He is, without being like Him.
Let us imagine, if we can, the effect of the total extinction of evil in any one of our minds. How many energies, now tied and bound with the chain of sin, would spring upward into action! How many imprisoned yearnings would burst their bonds, and carry us onward to higher degrees of good! And all these energies, all these yearnings, can exist in the disembodied spirit. It is in a waiting, a hoping state: the greater the upward yearnings, the greater the acc.u.mulated energies for G.o.d and His work, the higher will be the measure of glory to be attained after the redemption of the body, and the completion of the entire man.
Well--as another consequence, following close on the last, all _conflict_, from that same moment, is at an end. Conflict is ordained for us, is good for us, now. If it were to cease here below, we should fall back. We have not entered into rest, it would not be good for us to enter into rest, in our present state. Here, this little platform, so to speak, of our personality, is drawn two ways, downward and upward: and it is for us who stand thereon, to keep watch and ward that the downward prevail not; but from that moment, the dark links of the downward chain will have been for ever severed, and the golden cord that is let down from the Throne will bear us upward and onward, unopposed. So that as to conflict, there will be perfect rest.
And let us remember another matter. If the departed spirit were during this time dwelling on its own unworthiness, casting back looks of self-reproach, weighing accurately G.o.d"s mercies and its own requitals during life past, there would of necessity be conflict: there would be bitter self-loathing, there would be pangs of repentance. It would seem, then, that during the incomplete and disembodied state, this is not so; but that all of this kind is reserved for a day when account is to be given in the body of things done in the body: and we shall see, when we come to treat of that day specially, how its account will be, for the blessed dead, itself made a blessing.
Again, as all evil will be at an end, and all conflict,--so will all labour, "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours." Now labour here is a blessing, it is true: but it is also a weariness. It leads ever on to a greater blessing, the blessing of rest. Christ has entered into His rest; and the departed spirit shall be with Christ: faring as He fares, and a partaker of His condition. Any who have lived the ordinary term of human life in G.o.d"s service (for it is only of such that we are now speaking) can testify how sweet it is to antic.i.p.ate a cessation of the toil and the hara.s.sing of life: to be looking on to keep the great Sabbath of the rest reserved for the people of G.o.d.
What more may be reserved for us in the glorious perfect state which shall follow the resurrection, is another consideration altogether: but it clearly appears that the intermediate disembodied state is one of rest.
And let none cavil at the thought, that thus Adam may have rested his thousands of years, and the last taken of Adam"s children only a few moments. Time is only a relative term, even to us. A dream of years long may pa.s.s during the sound that awakens a man; and a sleep of hours appears but a second. What do we know of time, except as calculated by earthly objects? Day and night, the recurrence of meals,--these const.i.tute time to us: shut up a man in darkness, and administer his food at irregular intervals, and he loses all count of time whatever. Surely, then, no cavil on this score can be admitted.
In that presence where the departed spirits are, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
Let us conclude with a consideration, to a Christian the most glorious of all. The spirit that is with Christ in nearest presence and consciousness, knows Him as none know Him here. Here, we speak of His purity, His righteousness, His love, His triumph and glory, with miserably imperfect thoughts, and in words still more imperfect than our thoughts. We are obliged to employ earthly images to set forth heavenly things. The revelations of Scripture itself are made through a medium of man"s invention, and are bounded by our limited vocabulary. But then it will be so no longer. The Apostle compares our seeing _here_ to that of one who beholds the face of his friend in a mirror of metal, sure to be tarnished and distorting: and our vision _there_ to beholding the same face to face,--the living features, the lips that move, the eyes that glisten. That spirit which has but now pa.s.sed away, knows the love that pa.s.ses our knowledge; contemplates things which G.o.d has prepared for them that love Him, such as eye has never seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.
Therefore, beloved, let us be of good cheer concerning them that have fallen asleep through Jesus: and let us be of good cheer respecting ourselves. Good as it is to obey and serve G.o.d here, it has been far better for them to depart and to be with Christ; and it will be far better for us, if we hold fast our faith and our confidence in Him firm unto the end. If to us to live is Christ, then to us to die will be gain.
II.
WE stand to-day at this point in our consideration of the state of the blessed dead. They depart, and are with Christ. "This day," the day of the departure, they are consciously, blissfully, in His presence.
Their faith is turned into sight: their misgivings are changed for certainty: their mourning for joy. Yet, we said, their state is necessarily imperfect. The complete condition of man is body, soul, and spirit. The former of these three, at all events, is wanting to the spirits and souls of the righteous. They are in a waiting, though in an inconceivably blissful state. Of the precise nature of that state,--of its employments, if employments it has, we know nothing.
All would be speculation, if we were to speak of these matters.
Our concern to-day is with the termination of that their incomplete condition. When shall it come to an end? We have this very definitely answered for us by St. Paul, in a chapter of which we shall have much to say, and in a verse of that chapter which we will take for our text, 1 Cor. xv. 23. Notice, he is speaking of the resurrection of the dead: and he says, "BUT EVERY ONE IN HIS OWN ORDER: CHRIST THE FIRST-FRUITS: AFTERWARD THEY THAT ARE CHRIST"S AT HIS COMING."
Well then: from these words it is clear that the end of the expectant state of the blessed dead, and the reunion of their spirits with their risen bodies, will take place AT THE COMING OF CHRIST. Here at once we are met by a necessity to clear and explain that which these words import. In these days, it is by no means superfluous to say that we Christians do look forward to a real personal coming of our Lord Jesus Christ upon this our earth. I sometimes wonder whether ordinary Christian men and women ever figure to themselves what this means. I suppose we hardly do, because we fancy it is so far off from ourselves and our times, that we do not feel ourselves called upon to make it a subject of our practical thoughts. To this we might say, first, that we are by no means sure of this; and then, that even if it were true, the interest of that time of His coming for every one of us is hardly lessened by its not being near us, seeing that if we be His, it will be, whenever it comes, the day of our resurrection from the dead. It is evidently the duty of every Christian man to make it part of his ordinary thoughts and antic.i.p.ations--that return of the Lord Jesus from heaven, even as He was seen to go up into heaven. Now, our object to-day is to ascertain how much we know from Scripture, without indulging in speculations of our own, about this coming, and this resurrection which shall accompany it. The latter of these two we made the subject of a sermon a very few Sundays ago; but it was not so much with our present view, as to lay down the hope of the resurrection as an element among the foundations of the Christian life.
Now one of the first and most important revelations respecting this matter is found in the fourth chapter of 1 Thess., ver. 13-18. These Thessalonians had been, as we learn from the two epistles to them, strangely excited about the coming of the Lord"s kingdom. Perhaps the Apostle"s preaching among them had taken especially this form; for he was accused before the magistrates of saying that there was besides or superior to Caesar another king, one Jesus. And in this excitement of the Thessalonians, fancying as they did that the Lord"s kingdom would come in their own time, they thought that their friends who through Jesus had died a happy death were losers by not having lived to witness the Lord"s coming. Indeed, they sorrowed for them as those that had no hope: by which expression it seems likely that they even supposed them to be altogether cut off from the benefits and blessedness of that coming by not having been able to see it in the flesh. Thereupon St. Paul puts them right by saying,--using the same argument as in that great resurrection chapter, 1 Cor. xv.,--that "_if we believe that Jesus Himself died and rose again, even so also those who through Jesus have fallen asleep will G.o.d bring with Him_," that is, will G.o.d bring back to us when He brings back to us Jesus.
You may just observe, by the way, that the whole force of what the Apostle says is very commonly lost, by a wrong method of reading these words. We very commonly hear them read, "will G.o.d bring _with_ him."
But thus we, as I said, lose the force of the argument, which is:--If Jesus, our first-fruits, our representative, died and rose again, so will all who die in union with Jesus rise again. And in order to that, the same power of G.o.d which brings Jesus back to us, will with Him, with Jesus, bring their spirits back, in order to that resurrection.
Well, what then? "_This we say unto you by the word of the Lord_"--thus the Apostle introduces, not an argument, not a command or saying of his own, but a special revelation--"_that we, which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord_" (for notice that at first, at the early time when these Thessalonian epistles were written, first of all St. Paul"s letters, the Apostle looked forward to that day of which neither man nor angel knoweth, as about to come on in his own time) shall have no advantage, no priority, over them which have fallen asleep. And why? For this reason--that "_the Lord Himself shall come down from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of G.o.d; and the dead in Christ shall rise first:_" that is, shall rise before anything else happens--any changing, or summoning to the Lord, of us who are alive.
Now here let us pause in the sacred text, and consider what it is which we have before us. Mind, we are speaking to-day, as the Apostle is speaking in this pa.s.sage, entirely of the blessed dead; of those of whom it may be said that through Jesus their death is but a holy sleep. We have clearly this before us:--at a certain time, fixed in the counsels of G.o.d, the Father, known to no created being,--mysteriously unknown also, for He Himself a.s.sures us of this in words which no ingenuity can explain away, to the Son Himself in His state of waiting for it,--at that fixed time the Lord, that is, Christ, shall appear in the sky, visible to men in His glorified body; and His coming shall be announced to men by a mighty call, a signal cry, and by the trumpet of G.o.d.
Now let me at once say that as to such expressions as this, when we are told that they cannot bear their literal meaning, but are only used in condescension to our human ways of speaking, and thus an attempt is made to deprive them in fact of all meaning, I do not recognise any such rule of interpretation. If the _words_ are used to suit our human ways of thinking, I can see no reason why the _things signified_ by those words may not also be used to affect our senses, which will be still human, when the great day comes. As to the sound being heard by all, or as to the Lord being seen by all, I can with safety leave that to Him who made the eye and the ear, and believe that if He says so, He will find the way for it to be so.
Now let us follow on with the description. With the Lord Jesus, accompanying Him, though unseen to those below on the earth, will be the myriads of spirits of the blessed dead, And notice,--for it is an important point, since Holy Scripture is consistent with itself in another place on this matter,--that at this coming none are with the Lord, no spirits of the departed, I mean, except those of the blessed dead. In other words, this is not the general coming to judgment, when the whole of the dead shall stand before G.o.d, but it is that first resurrection of which the Evangelist speaks in the Apocalypse, when he says, chap. xx. 5, "_The rest of the dead lived not again until_ (a prescribed time which he mentions, whatever that may mean) _the thousand years were finished This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of G.o.d and of Christ_."
Then, the Lord being still descending from heaven and on the way to this world, the dead in Christ shall rise first--the first thing: the graves shall be opened, and the bodies of the saints that sleep shall come forth, and, for so the words surely imply, their spirits, which have come with the Lord, shall be united to those bodies, each to his own.
Here, again, I can see no difficulty. The same body, even to us now on earth, does not imply that the same particles compose it. And even the expression "the same body" is perhaps a fallacious one. In St. Paul"s great argument on this subject in 1 Cor. xv. he expressly tells us, that it is not that body which was sown in the earth, but a new and glorified one, even as the beautiful plant, which springs from the insignificant or the ill-favoured seed, is not that which was sown, but a body which G.o.d has given. Whatever the bodies shall be, they will be recognised as those befitting the spirits which are reunited to them, as they also befit the new and glorious state into which they are now entering.
This done, they who are alive and remain on earth, having been, which is not a.s.serted here, but is in 1 Cor. xv., changed so as to be in the image of the incorruptible, spiritual, heavenly, will be caught up together with the risen saints in clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: to _meet_ Him, because He is in His way from heaven to earth, on which He is about to stand in that latter day.