WHAT THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH SAY ABOUT THE NEAR HEREAFTER
Only three hours later the Lord passed
through into that Unseen Land. “Father,
into Thy hands I commend My spirit, and having said
this He gave up the ghost,” and departed on
the mysterious journey. If we could know anything
about what He saw and did on that mysterious journey
surely it would give some hints about our dear ones
departed.
Section 1
That journey of the Lord into the
world of the dead has been made a great article of
the Christian faith. We all repeat it regularly
in the Apostles’ Creed, “He descended
into Hell.” I need not translate that
clause. Every well taught Sunday-school child
knows its meaning. “He descended into Hades,”
into the world of the departed in the great waiting
life before the Judgment. But there is a great
deal more than this to be said about it.
Now, let us consider this statement.
Clearly it deals with the three days between our
Lord’s death and resurrection. Where did
His spirit go? “To heaven, of course,”
somebody says. “No,” says the Lord
Himself after the resurrection, “I have not yet
ascended to My Father.” Where, then, did
His spirit go? “Nobody can tell,”
you say. Yes, one person could tell, and only
one the Lord Himself. He only could
have told of His solitary temptation in the wilderness,
and He evidently told it. He only could have
told of the solitary scene in Gethsemane, it would
seem that He told it. He only could have told
of His visit to the world of the dead, and I think
that He told it. You remember that after the
resurrection He was with them “forty days teaching
the things concerning the Kingdom.” I
think He must have told them then of those three days.
Why? Because the knowledge of it was so wide-spread
in the early Church, and there was no one else to
tell it. Some people seem to think that there
are only some obscure verses of St. Peter and a few
references of St. Paul in favour of such teaching.
Not at all. It was the belief of the whole Church.
St. Peter and St. Paul were only two in a crowd of
teachers of early days who proclaimed triumphantly
the visit of the Lord into the world of the dead.
St. Peter seems to be thinking of it in his first
sermon when he quotes: “His soul was not
left in Hades” (Acts i. Therefore
St. Peter knew that it was into that intermediate
life not into that final Heaven that
our Lord went at death. This statement by itself
would not prove much, but when I find the same St.
Peter long afterwards telling so circumstantially
in his first epistle (ii that when his Master
was put to death in the flesh He was made more alive
in the spirit, in which spirit He went and preached
to the spirits in prison who had been disobedient
at the flood. “For which cause (chap. i was the gospel the glad news preached
to them that are dead,” I think it is a fair
inference that St. Peter had some definite information.
And then I find St. Paul, in Eph. i, when he is
writing of the gifts bestowed on the Church by her
ascended Lord. The word “ascended”
causes him to pause abruptly. Men must not think
that His work in the unseen was limited to that work
for us in Heaven after His ascension. “Now
that He ascended, what is it but that He descended
first into the lower parts of the earth (i. e.,
the world of the departed) that He might fill all
things.” Hades and Heaven had alike felt
the glory of His presence.
And then immediately after the Apostles’
days I find the knowledge wide-spread in the Church.
I read the writings of the ancient bishops and teachers
of the Church, beginning at the death of St. John,
the very men to whom we refer for information as to
the Baptism and Holy Communion and the authenticity
of the four Gospels, and there I find prominently
in their preaching the gospel of our Lord’s visit
to the world of the departed.
Section 2
The earliest is known as Justin Martyr.
He was born about the time of St. John’s death,
and he feels so strongly about the Descent into Hades
that he actually charges the Jews with mutilating a
prophecy of Jeremiah foretelling it.
Irenaeus, the great Bishop of Lyons
in France, a little while later tells how the Lord
descended into the world of the dead, preaching
to the departed, and all who had hopes in Him, and
submitted to His dispensations, received remission
of sins.
Then away in Egypt comes St. Clement
of Alexandria, born about fifty years after St. John’s
death. I have been greatly interested in some
little touches in his chapter on the descent into the
world of the dead. He asserts as the direct
teaching of Scripture that our Lord preached the Gospel
to the dead, but he thinks that the souls of the Apostles
must have taken up the same task when they died, and
that it was not merely to Jews and saints, but to
heathen as well as was only fair, he says,
since they had no chance of knowing. Don’t
you like that honest appeal of his “as was only
fair”?
St. Clement’s great disciple,
Origen, comes next. His evidence comes in curiously.
A famous infidel named Celsus, knowing of this
wide-spread creed of the Church about the preaching
in Hades, laughs at the Christians. “I
suppose your Master when He failed to persuade the
living had to try and persuade the dead?” Origen
meets the question straight out: “Whether
it please Celsus or no, we of the Church assert
that the soul of our Lord, stript of its body, held
converse with other souls that He might convert those
capable of instruction.”
Then away in Western Africa, the Church’s
belief is represented by another great teacher, Tertullian.
In Jerusalem, Cyril the Bishop, teaches the people
in his catechetical lectures this faith of the Church
with a ring of gladness and triumph. He sees
Christ not only amid the souls who had once been disobedient,
but also in blessed intercourse with the strugglers
after right who had never seen His face on earth.
He pictures how the holy prophets ran to our Lord,
how Moses, and Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and
David, and Samuel, and John the Baptist, ran to Him
with the cry, “Oh, Death, where is thy sting?
Oh, Grave, where is thy victory, for the Conqueror
has redeemed us.”
I cannot go on to tell of St. Athanasius
and the rest. I have said enough to show you
that in the early ages of the Church the
pure loving ages nearest to the Lord and
to the Apostles, the Church rejoiced in the glad belief
that Christ went and visited the spirits in the Unseen
who had never seen His face on earth.
Section 3
This was one of the gladdest notes
in the whole Gospel harmony of the early Church for
five hundred years, in the purest and most loving
days, the days nearest our Lord and His Apostles.
It was a note of triumph. It told of the tender,
thoughtful love of Christ for the faithful souls who
had never seen Hun. It told of the universality
of His Atonement. It told of victory, far beyond
this life. It told that Christ, who came to
seek and save men’s souls on earth, had continued
that work in the world of the dead while His body lay
in the grave. That He passed into the unseen
world as a saviour and conqueror. That His banner
was unfurled there and His cross set up there in the
world of the departed. That the souls of all
the ancient world who had never known Him, and WHO
WERE CAPABLE OF TURNING TO HIM (i. e., who in
their earthly probation, in spite of all their ignorance
and sin, had not irrevocably turned away from God
and good), might turn to Him and live. That
the spirits of the old-world saints and prophets had
welcomed Him with rejoicing. That even men of
much lower place had yet found mercy. That even
such men as those who had perished in the flood in
God’s great judgment, BUT HAD NOT HARDENED THEMSELVES
AGAINST HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS AND LOVE, were not shut
out from hope. In the “many mansions”
was a place even for such as they. To the teachers
of the early Church, I repeat, it was one of the most
triumphant notes in their gospel the wideness
of Christ’s Atonement.
Section 4
That is what we mean, then, by the
descent into Hades. Does it not give a vivid
reality to that world that we think of so vaguely?
Think of it. Was there ever before or since
such a scene, such a preaching, such a preacher, such
a congregation? Could the wildest flights of
imagination go further? Yet it is all sober fact.
Try to picture it for yourselves for a moment.
The Lord hanging on the cross, with His heart full
of pain for that humanity that He was redeeming; and
yet surely full of triumph, too, and glad anticipation.
He was going to show Himself to the poor souls who
in the dark old world days had loved God and Right.
He had finished the work that was given Him to do.
He was leaving His Church with that blessed gospel
of salvation to preach through the centuries to all
souls on earth. But what of the souls who had
gone out of earth from the beginning of the world without
knowing Him? The Church replies, through her
Bible and through her Creed and through her early
teachers, that the Lord was not forgetting them.
He was about to go forth in a few moments, “quickened
in His spirit,” to bring His glad gospel to
the waiting souls. That was the first great
missionary work of the Church. May we not reverently
see His own anticipation of it in His departing words
as He started on His mission, “Father, into
Thy hands do I commend My spirit” (in the journey
on which it is going). May we not read it in
that “au revoir,” not “good-bye,”
to the thief beside Him, “To-day you shall be
with Me in Paradise”? May we not dwell
on the wonder and joy and gratitude and love which
must have shaken that world within the veil, as the
loving conqueror came in amongst them? And may
we not reverently follow Him still in thought when
He returned to earth and, as we conjecture, somewhere
in the Forty Days after the Resurrection, told His
disciples of His marvellous experience? I am
not laying down this as a statement of Scripture,
but I think it is a fair conjecture, for how else could
they have learned it? And if we are right; think
how the knowledge of it would swell the glad confidence
of St. Paul. “For I am persuaded that
neither DEATH, nor LIFE, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,
is able to separate us from the love of God which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I think we must see that this teaching
of the Apostles and apostolic men of the whole early
Church is true. People sometimes ask, “Why,
then, is it new in our day?” The answer is easy.
At the Reformation time there were terrible abuses
connected with the Church’s doctrine of the
Intermediate life. The practice of purchased
Masses, and Pardons, and Indulgences, and all the
absurdities connected with the Roman purgatory, so
exemplified in Tetzel’s cry, “When money
clinks at the bottom of my box a soul is released
from purgatory.” With such provocation
one does not wonder though one may greatly
regret that the indignant reformers, in
sweeping away the falsehood, sometimes swept away
also the underlying truth. The teaching about
the Intermediate Life, and the old practice of the
Church in remembering her faithful departed in prayer,
were all put in the background as leading to dangerous
abuse; and so the people, getting no real teaching
about it, got the sad habit of trying to forget about
the state of their dear ones departed. In their
ignorance, they could only guess blindly what the
Creed here means. So for centuries this has been
the “lost article of the Creed.”
But this teaching of the Creed is none the less true,
because it has been neglected in later days.
And if it be true, it is well worth our attention,
for it confirms what we have already learned from
the previous teaching of the Lord, that the life of
the departed is a clear, vivid, conscious life, since
Christ could teach them and they could learn.
And it suggests that the departed
souls of the old world who had no chance of knowing
Him have not by death lost all capacity for repenting
and receiving Christ. Those men that St. Peter
thinks of had perished in God’s great judgment,
but it would seem in their terrible fate they had
not hardened themselves irrevocably against God.
Those who do that on earth seem to close the door
for ever. That is the sin against the Holy Ghost the
only sin which our Lord says hath never forgiveness
either in this world or in the world to come.
These evidently had still their capacity for repentance.
And this gives one stirrings of hope in the perplexities
of God’s awful judgments. Don’t be
afraid to think this. There is not one word
in Scripture to forbid our thinking it. It merely
means that in the terrible fate which they had brought
on themselves they had not utterly hardened their hearts and
Christ had not forgotten them in their misery.
Section 6
Estimate fairly the value of this
evidence for our Lord’s visit to the Unseen
Life. Do not overestimate it. It is not
all Scripture. But all that is not Scripture
is the wide-spread belief of the primitive Church
which was afterwards crystallized into an article of
the Creed. Surely it is enough to deepen our
sense of the reality of that Unseen Life. It
strongly confirms what we have learned already that
that life is a vivid, conscious life into which “I”
go my “self,” with my full memory of the
past. And do not misread it. It is not
offering any hope to wicked men who, with full knowledge
of Christ, wilfully reject Him. It tells of
men who had never known Him, and has hope only of
those “who were capable of receiving Him.”
There is nothing here to make light of the responsibility
of this life.
But this message comes to us to comfort
the hearts and strengthen the faith of thinking men
and women who are puzzled and perplexed and estranged
from Christ by the terrible perplexities of life and
of God’s judgments as they understand or misunderstand
them. You have often thought of the difficulty
of reconciling the righteous justice of God with His
Fatherly love. You have often thought, in wondering
doubt, “Why did Christ come so late in the world’s
history? What of all the old-world souls who
could not have known Him here on earth? For you
know that there is no salvation save by Jesus Christ.
You have read in the Old Testament of whole nations,
men, women and little children, swept away in one
dread destruction. What of them? You have
wondered about the vast heathen world passing in thousands
every day into the Unseen, with no knowledge of Him.
You have sometimes read the Registrar-General’s
return of deaths in your city, and thought of all
the little dead children, brought up in evil homes;
of sullen prisoners hardened in the jails; of grown
men and women in the city’s slums who, through
the hardening influence of circumstances, had little
real chance of ever being touched by that tenderness
of God’s love which leads men to love Him in
return. You know they have not died in Christ.
What of them?” If you had to stand at some
death-beds at which some of us have to stand you would
feel as we do the insistent pressure of that question
for all in the ancient or modern world the
vast countless world of the dead who had
no real chance of knowing Christ or being touched
by His love here on earth.
Oh, the generations old
Over whom no church bell tolled
Christless lifting up blind eyes
To the silence of the skies.
For the innumerable dead
Is my soul disquieted!
Trust them with God, says this teaching
of the Creed. Christ will do right by them.
Christ does not forget them.
Trust Him, though thy sight be dim,
Doubt for them is doubt of Him.
Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen
Yearns to reach those souls in prison,
Through all depths of sin and loss
Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross.
Never yet abyss was found
Deeper than that Cross could sound.
In these two chapters we have touched
on the chief statements in the New Testament and in
the beliefs of the primitive Church as to the near
Hereafter. There are others of less importance
to be referred to as we go on. It seemed well
to lay down some basis to proceed on.