p. 4 | Our Imperishable Inheritance by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 6, 1909

Our Imperishable Inheritance

By C. M. S.

What Say the Prophets?

WE have seen that man, placed on probation to determine for himself which he would have, life or death, made the choice that entailed mortality upon himself and his posterity; that Satan’s promise of eternal life and godlike attributes on condition of disloyalty to God, was a false promise, and man’s attempt to grasp the reward held out by Satan brought in sin, whose wages is death.

The thought of a cessation of existence has never been pleasing to man since its first announcement was made in Eden, and there is no doubt that the great deceiver has fostered that feeling in man, and through it he has framed a system of belief as deceptive as was his first proposal to the mother of the race. Man in all ages has clung to the thought that the human body is a chrysalis out of which emerges the immortal soul when the visible body has ceased to live. Every heathen people has held that doctrine; and the farther away from God they have wandered, the more deeply has that belief been burned into their being, and the more elaborately have they fashioned the rituals that proclaim their faith in that idea. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome were

not the only nations that fostered faith in the immortality of the soul. Among the most primitive peoples, beyond the far fringes of civilization, that doctrine was inculcated with weird and mystic rites. The fact that so many different peoples in all parts of the world have held a belief in the immortality of the soul is used by many as a conclusive argument that man does in very truth possess such an imperishable entity.

Perhaps among no people of ancient times was the belief in the immortality of the soul more strongly rooted than among the Egyptians. The pains taken to preserve the bodies of their dead is proof of this. But it is doubtful if any people ever went farther from God than they when they made gods of birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things, and “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” It is one of the anomalies of sacred history that out from among such a nation God could bring forth a people who would be known as his people, among whom he would deign to dwell, and who would preserve his worship and his name through the long night of heathendom’s domination. It is an illustration of the power and resourcefulness of the Almighty, and shows out of what unpromising material God can produce jewels worthy of his crown of rejoicing.

Heathenism was in the heyday of its glory when Egypt was in its prime; and the doctrine of the soul’s immortality had an unlimited opportunity to demonstrate what it could do for man in that epoch. It turned men so far from God that the Pharaoh of the oppression pretended never to have heard of him, and the Apis, the Ibis, and the beetle were given more homage than the God who made the heavens and the earth.

When God called out his people from among the Egyptians, he gave them, as well as the Egyptians, an object-lesson of the utter nothingness of that whole system of worship and the powerlessness of all the objects to which that people rendered homage. Every tenet of their faith was smitten by the hand of the Almighty, whom they had forgotten. Their gods became festering carcasses, and the river Nile, to which they looked as the great source of their temporal blessings, was turned into a breeding-place for the pestilence and the plague. In those visitations Israel and Egypt had a sufficient lesson that “the Lord, he is the God,” and the only legitimate object of worship.

But Israel, whose land was a highway of the nations, was to bear witness to another truth. The idolatry of the nations sprang largely, if not wholly, from a wrong conception of the nature of man. Satan’s declaration to Eve has been reiterated to every generation— “Ye shall not surely die: . . . ye shall be as God.” If man be immortal, why not the beasts also? If man be as God, and God is worshiped, why may not man be worshiped? If the beasts, like man, be immortal, and man, like God, is worthy of worship, why are not the beasts, which are immortal like man, also worthy of worship? Through such reasonings did the ancients turn their backs upon the God of the heavens, and bow down to the gods of the air, the field, and the stream. The acceptance of Satan’s flattering deception opened the door and paved the way for all the idolatry that has cursed the world.

The Creator did not leave man to his own imaginings as to this great truth. He testified against the error by his power and by his leadings; but through the prophets he has multiplied testimony concerning the nature of man that leaves his children without excuse for falling into the error of believing man immortal. Through Job he speaks thus: “Man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? . . . Man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. . . . If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.” Job 14:10-15. Remaining in the grave “till the heavens be no more,” does not signify remaining in the grave through all eternity; for there will come a time when “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” 2 Peter 3:10. That time is “the day of God” (verse 12), and the “call” for which Job would wait was the call of his Redeemer: “The Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first.” 1 Thess. 4:16. Job expected to be among the number wakened from the sleep of death by the voice of the Son of God.

When the Lord was giving his final instruction to the Israelites before permitting them to go over into the promised land, he set before them precisely the same choice that he set before Adam and Eve in Eden. It was, obedience and life, or disobedience and death. He said: “I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; in that I command thee this day to love Jehovah thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, that thou mayest live and multiply, and that Jehovah thy God may bless thee in the land whither thou goest in to possess it. But if thy heart turn away, and thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish. . . . I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed; to love Jehovah thy God, to obey his voice, and to cleave unto him; for he is thy life, and the length of thy days.” Deut. 30:15-20.

Mark the plainness of speech, the simple alternative, the antithesis of choice. It was not a continuation of existence in two different environments—happiness and misery; but on the one hand life, and on the other its opposite, death. There is no intimation of a deathless entity, an immortal soul; no suggestion of eternal torment as a punishment for disobedience. They have the same warning as that given to Adam. They could have eternal life only through obedience. Life is life without respect to whether it is possessed in misery or in joy. If obedient and loyal, they were promised life; but they could not have life, even in misery, through disobedience. No life of any kind is promised as the wages of such service. “Ye shall surely perish;” “the wages of sin is death.”

That was God’s warning to his people on the borders of the promised land,—a people who were to stand as God’s light to enlighten the world. The message he gave them they were to repeat to the world, testifying for him against idolatry of every kind, and necessarily against the root of idolatry—the deification of the creature and the immortality of the soul. We shall see in another article how God multiplied testimony to the ancients upon this subject, and left them, as he has left us, without excuse for holding to such belief. C. M. S.