DIVES AND LAZARUS by John Nevins Andrews

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 22, 1868

DIVES AND LAZARUS.

By John Nevins Andrews

It is probable that no one portion of Scripture has stood more in the way of people in general when the doctrine of the sleep of the dead is first brought to their notice than the account of Dives and Lazarus. Luke xvi, 19–31. This is deemed a clear, minutely circumstantial, and decisive proof of man's conscious existence in death: The righteous during the state of death being happy in the bliss of Heaven; the wicked tormented in the flames of hell. Yet even to the common theory of conscious existence in death, this text presents very serious difficulties.

1. If Lazarus was in Heaven, and Dives in hades, how could they converse together? Is hades in the third Heaven somewhere in the sight of the New Jerusalem? Oh! no; hades is in the depth of the earth.

2. Is hades a place of knowledge and instruction? By no means. It is a place where there is no work, nor knowledge, nor wisdom. It is a place of darkness, silence, secrecy, corruption, and worms.

3. Those in hades are represented as DEAD. Their thoughts have perished; they sleep the sleep of death.

This account is on all hands acknowledged to be a parable. It is, however, very different from any other of our Lord's parables. The others relate to things in this life, but the scene of this is laid in hades, the

place of the dead, and those who converse together are dead men. Is there no key given in this parable that will enable us to unlock its meaning? Indeed there is. When Abraham denies the request that Lazarus should be sent to warn the living that they come not to Hades, the place of the dead, unprepared, he adds as a sufficient reason, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”

Then we are divinely authorized to search Moses and the prophets on this subject with the assurance that we shall receive correct instruction. These writers all place hades in the interior of the earth, and make it a place of utter darkness and silence, where there is no knowledge; yet they present several cases of the dead in this very place conversing, lamenting, or being comforted.

But, probably, no one thinks there are literally dead kings sitting on thrones deep in the earth, and holding discourse. The dead are not alive. Hades is not a place of thought, but one of utter forgetfulness and deep sleep.

When persons or things which have no life and no consciousness are represented in the Scriptures as talking, how do we understand such declarations? Not that they do really have feelings, and thoughts, and powers of utterance, but that they are personified, and made to speak and act just as they would under the existing circumstances were they indeed alive and capable of thought and utterance. Things which in the purpose of God are to be, he can speak of as existing, simply because they shall exist. So to God the dead are alive, simply because they are, according to his purpose to live again. Compare Luke xx, 38; Rom. iv, 17. There is, therefore, the utmost propriety in thus presenting before the living the dead in hades, and giving them opportunity to speak just as they would, had they the powers of thought and utterance. This kind of speaking is often found in the Bible. It is that kind of intense personification called in rhetoric, Prosopopœia, “by which things are represented as persons, or by which things inanimate are spoken of as animated beings, or by which an absent person is introduced as speaking, or a DECEASED PERSON IS REPRESENTED AS ALIVE and present.” See Webster.

Thus when Job sets forth the nature of that wisdom which is from above, he introduces four things destitute of life, two of them being the very opposite of life, to speak concerning the place of wisdom: “The depth saith, It is not in me; and the sea saith, It is not with me.” “DESTRUCTION and DEATH say, We have heard the fame thereof with OUR EARS.” Job xxviii, 14, 22.

The reader will find a brief treatise on this subject in the tract entitled, “The Wicked Dead,” in which the texts relating to hades and the condition of those therein are very fully given. The account of Dives and Lazarus does not contradict those Scriptures that represent the Judgment as coming before the reward of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked.

J. N. ANDREWS.