THE THREE STAGES OF EXISTENCE
Section 1
Now, grip with both hands the fact
that this life, as you know it, is but one single
stage in God’s plan for you the Kindergarten
stage, the caterpillar stage of your existence.
That in five thousand years that spiritual being
looking out from behind the mask of your face to-day
will be living still, and feeling still, and thinking
still. That what you call death, the end of
this career, is but birth into a new and more exciting
career, stretching away into the far future, age after
age, aeon after aeon, whose prospect should stir the
very blood within us.
There is nothing which so touches
some of us as a thing with “makings” in
it, a thing with untold potentialities in it, a thing
which may come in the future to God only knows what.
Talk of the caterpillar which is to develop into
the butterfly or the acorn which shall one day be a
mighty oak. Why, these miracles are but child’s
play compared with the miracles potentially wrapped
up in this poor little self. No wildest fairy
tale can suggest the wonder of its possibilities as
it passes out into the new adventure of the life beyond.
Section 2
Thirteen hundred years ago there was
an eager discussion in the court of King Edward of
Northumbria. The old wattled hall was blazing
with torches and a crowd of eager listeners hung intent
on the teaching of the Christian missionaries who
had just arrived. At last a grim bearded old
earl rose in his place. “Can this new religion,”
he asked, “tell us of what happens after death?
The life of man is like a swallow flying through
this lighted hall. It enters in at one door
from the darkness outside, and flitting through the
light and warmth passes through the farther door into
the dark unknown beyond. Can this new religion
solve for us the mystery? What comes to men in
the dark, dim unknown?”
Perhaps he was thinking of his dead
wife or his brave boy killed in battle. The
old earl’s question is the question of humanity
in all ages gazing out into the darkness after its
dead. The full answer can only be had by dying.
But a partial answer can be had now.
The Bible reveals to us that there
are three stages of human existence:
1st. The earthly stage, where
“I,” the mysterious “I,” live
with a body woven around me. The Bible hints
that this stage is of untold importance. In
fact, all the future stages depend largely on how it
is lived. That is what makes this first stage
so awfully important. It is the formative time
whose influence spreads out into eternity. In
this stage Acts make habits. Habits make character.
Character makes Destiny.
2nd. The intermediate life
BEFORE THE JUDGMENT, THE “NEAR HEREAFTER”
WHEN “I” LAY ASIDE THE BODY AT DEATH.
THIS IS THE STAGE BEFORE THE RESURRECTION WHICH IN
OUR LORD’S TIME THE JEWS CALLED HADES, AND IN
WHICH THEY CALLED THE SPECIAL STATE OF THE BLEST PARADISE,
ABRAM’S BOSOM, UNDER THE THRONE, ETC.
3rd. And away after this final
stage the “Far Hereafter” in the “end
of the age,” as our Lord says, where come the
General Resurrection, the Judgment of Men, the final
stages of Heaven and Hell. That stage has not
yet arrived in the history of humanity.
In Part I of this book we are only
concerned with the Intermediate Life, the life of
the near Hereafter which comes after Death and before
the Judgment. We are to study what can be known
about it.
With educated people it should not
be necessary to combat the foolish popular notion
that at death men pass into their final destiny Heaven
or Hell and then perhaps thousands of years
afterwards come back to be judged as to that final
destiny! To state such a belief should be enough
to refute it. Those who hold it “do err
not knowing the Scriptures.” For the Scriptures
have no such teaching.
The Jews in our Lord’s time
believed in a waiting life of departed souls before
the Judgment. Owing to vagueness and contradictions
in the Rabbinical teaching it is impossible to state
their notions about it with definiteness. But
in the main it may be said that when they speak of
that life as a whole without distinguishing between
the states of the good and the evil they call this
whole by the general name of HADES, i. e.,
“the Unseen” (the Hebrew word was Sheol),
but they also distinguished in it the abode or state
of the Blest as PARADISE, or the “Garden of
Eden,” or “ABRAHAM’S BOSOM,”
or “UNDER THE THRONE,” e. g., “Abraham
whom God planted in the Garden of Paradise,”
“our master Moses departed into the Garden of
Eden.” The holy Judah rests this day in
“Abraham’s Bosom.”
Their teaching is of course not authoritative
for us. Doubtless many of their notions on the
subject needed much correction. But our Lord
gives His sanction in the main to their belief and
uses their very phrases in speaking of the new life,
e. g., Dives “in HADES (not Hell, see
R. V.), lift up his eyes being in torment” Lazarus
“was carried by the angels into ABRAHAM’S
BOSOM.” “To-day thou shalt be with
Me in PARADISE” is His promise to the dying thief.
And it is clear that He did not mean the final Heaven
for He says, “No man hath ascended into Heaven
only the Son of Man who is in Heaven.”
Even He Himself did not go to Heaven when He died,
for this is His statement after the Resurrection,
“I have not yet ascended unto My Father.”
Where, then, did His Spirit go? The whole Church
throughout the world repeats every Sunday, in the
creed, “He was dead and buried, and descended
into HADES” the life of the waiting
souls. St. Peter tells us in his first Epistle
that in those three days Christ’s living Spirit
went and preached to the spirits in safe keeping who
had been disobedient in the old world. For which
cause he says, “was the Gospel preached to them
that are dead.” The same thought was evidently
in his mind in his first sermon (Acts i.
“David,” he says, “prophesied of
the resurrection of Christ that His soul was not left
in Hades.”
Section 4
And this is the point of view of all
the New Testament Scriptures. Heaven and Hell
are always spoken of as states after the Judgment
and the Judgment is to be in the “end of the
world” or the “end of this age.”
The great crisis of expectation set
before men is not death, but “the Day when the
Lord shall appear,” e. g., “That
ye may be saved in the Day of the Lord,” “The
Day of the Lord is as a thief in the night,”
“Looking for and hasting to the coming of the
Day of God,” “Keep the commandment till
the appearing of our Lord,” “To be found
with praise at the appearing of Jesus,” etc.,
etc. Warning, reproof, exhortation, encouragement
are all directed to that great day at the end of the
Waiting Life the Judgment at the second
coming of the Son of Man.
Naturally this belief passed into
the thought of the early church. “The souls
of the godly abide in some better place and the souls
of the unrighteous in a worse place expecting the
time of judgment.... These who hold that when
men die their souls are at once taken to heaven are
not to be accounted Christians or even Jews”
(Justin Martyr, A. D. 150, Dialogue with Trypho).
“The souls of Christ’s disciples go to
the invisible place determined for them by God and
there dwell awaiting the Resurrection” (Irenaeus,
Against Heretics, A. D. 180). “All
souls are sequestered in Hades till the Day of the
Lord” (Tertullian, De Anima, A. D. 200).
“Let no man think that souls are judged immediately
after death; all are detained in one common place of
safe keeping till the time when the Supreme Judge
makes His scrutiny” (Lactantius, Div.
Institutes). “During the interval between
death and resurrection men’s souls are kept
in hidden receptacles according as they severally
deserve rest or punishment” (Augustine).
Does it not all give a fuller meaning
for us to the words of our Lord, “In My Father’s
house are many mansions” (or abiding places).
This whole teaching about the Intermediate
Life has been obscured in our day by the fact that
most people read the Authorized Version of the Bible
where the word Hades has been unfortunately translated
“Hell,” just the same as the darker word
Gehenna. At the time of the translation of the
Authorized Version the old English word hell the
hole the unseen, had not yet stiffened into
the awful meaning that it has attained in our day.
It was not then a word set apart to designate the
abode of the lost. It simply meant the “unseen
place,” “the covered place.”
In the south of England still a thatcher who covers
in a house is called a “hellier.”
Even in games it was used. In the old English
games of forfeits, on the village green, the “hell”
is the hidden place where the girls ran away to escape
being kissed. You can see it had no awful meaning
necessarily connected with it. Therefore it
did not seem repulsive to translate the Greek word
“Hades,” the Unseen, by the English “Hell.”
But it has become very misleading in later days,
and our own conservative instincts which prevent our
altering the word in the creed has helped to perpetuate
the error.
The revised version has put all this
right, e. g., “His soul was not left
in Hades (not hell), nor did His flesh see corruption”
(Acts i. “I have the keys of death
and of Hades” (Rev. . At the end
of the world “death and Hades gave up the dead”
(Rev. x. In Hades (not hell) “the
rich man lifts up his eyes, being in torment”
(St. Luke xv.
Section 5
The Bible, then, teaches to every
careful student that there is the Intermediate Life
beyond the grave, a vivid conscious life. That
all men go there when they depart this life.
No man has ever yet gone to Heaven. No man
it would seem has ever yet gone to Hell. No man
has ever yet been finally judged. No man has
ever yet been finally damned. Thank God for that
at any rate. The Bible teaches that all who have
ever left this earth are waiting yet from
King Alfred to King Edward; from St. Paul to Bishop
Westcott; from the poor struggler of the ancient days
in the morning of history to the other poor struggler
who died last night.
We are now to study this next stage
of our history, beginning at what we call death which
is really birth into the next stage of life, just
as the death of the caterpillar is the birth of the
butterfly. In this next stage are living to-day
our dear children and brothers and sisters and wives
and husbands within the veil. In a very few years
we shall all have gone through each of
us just the same “I.”
The Bible does not reveal very much
about it as was to be expected. The Bible is
intended to guide our conduct and prepare us for a
final Heaven. Therefore it busies itself with
the responsibilities of this present life and the
glories of the final prospect touching very
lightly the intermediate stages, just as we press on
a boy the importance of his school days and the high
prospects for his manhood, touching very little the
stages between. But there is much more to be learned
from Scripture about this Intermediate Life than most
people think.