LIFE AND IMMORTALITY ONLY THROUGH CHRIST.
By W. N. Glenn
REV. DR. KUMMER, pastor of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of this city, has been delivering a series of discourses on the subject of immortality. He takes the ground that man possesses naturally an inherent, never-ending life. Whether righteous or wicked, he must live on eternally, and he cannot help it. A peculiar phase of his argument is that the Old Testament does not teach the doctrine directly, but indirectly; that it is not directly stated, but is everywhere implied, everywhere taken for granted. Now any man who imagines a doctrine taught, by implication where it is not directly stated, must have previously imbibed the idea from some other source. And this reading a preconceived doctrine into the word of God, which is confessedly not squarely stated there, is doing violence to the word. That the doctrine of man's natural immortality is not taught in the Bible, either directly or indirectly, is evident from various emphatic statements to the contrary. These statements are so directly against the idea of natural immortality in man that to assume that such a doctrine is taught there, even by the remotest inference, is to force a self-contradiction upon the Scriptures. Man was made in the image of God; it is agreed that the image was spiritual, as Dr. Kummer declares, and the question as to whether it were also a physical image will not here be discussed. That man was created in the spiritual image of his Creator is shown by the statement that "God hath made man upright." Eccl. 7:29. So long as he retained his upright character, he was in the spiritual image of God, for God is upright. But when he sinned against God by disobedience, and transferred his allegiance to Satan, he ceased to be upright and lost his godlike image. To say that a sinner is in the spiritual image of God is to charge God with sin. Had Adam continued faithful, he would have continued to live. But the source of his continued existence was not in himself, as is shown by the fact that he had access to the tree of life as a means of prolonging his life. And when he proved disobedient by eating the forbidden fruit, he was driven out of the garden and cut off from the tree of life, lest he should eat of its fruit and live forever. The way to the tree of life was guarded by cherubim and a flaming sword, to keep the sinner from living forever in his sinful condition; yet Dr. Kummer tells the people that the sinner must live forever, whether he wants to or not. It requires but a few quotations from the Scriptures to show what they directly teach in regard to the nature of man. And when we know the direct teaching, we need not have any trouble about understanding that which is indirect. When a teacher interprets any Scripture language into a contradiction of that which is plain and positive, he becomes, to say the least, an unsafe guide. "If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." Isa. 8:20. As to positive statements, we have, first, the warning of God to Adam against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Of course Adam died a spiritual death when he disobeyed God. No one who claims to believe the Bible will dispute that in that very day he became "dead in trespasses and sins." Eph. 2:1. That the penalty was physical death or cessation of existence is evident by this further declaration of God, after the disobedience of Adam: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." The thirty-seventh psalm, verse 10, gives this positive testimony: "For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be; yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be." And verse 20 says: "The wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs; they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away." And all the burnt offerings of the Mosaic ministration signified this very thing. David says, in the seventy-third psalm, "I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, . . . until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end." In Eccl. 9:5, 6 we have this testimony: "The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun." To this may be added the testimony of Job concerning the dead, that "his sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them." Chap. 14:21. Malachi tells us that "the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch." Could there be any expression more direct, more emphatic, more explicit than these. Is it dealing honestly with the word of God to assume that it indirectly teaches that which is diametrically opposed to these positive, unqualified assertions? No reader would for a moment think of so treating any other book. Dr. Kummer laid great stress on the expression so often used in the Old Testament that men when dying were "gathered to their fathers." He insisted that this was a spiritual gathering, and instanced the case of Abraham in proof. He said it was impossible that Abraham was gathered to his fathers in a physical sense, for he was buried in the land of Canaan, while his ancestors lived and died in the distant land of the Chaldees. This argument is fatal to some other dogmas of the immortal-soul theory. The expressions "was gathered to his fathers," "slept with his fathers," etc., are used of the good and the wicked indiscriminately; so that, if reference is had to a separate spiritual existence, we have all classes sojourning together in the "spirit land." When Abraham was alive, God called him out from his heathen fathers, but, according to Dr. Kummer's theory, as soon as he died his spirit was remanded to association with their heathen spirits. If the spirits of all the dead, good and bad, are gathered together in the "spirit land," the question arises, What is their condition? are they enjoying the bliss of heaven, or suffering the torments of hell, or enduring the uncertain issues of purgatory? This is but a sample of the confusion in which they are placed who persist in believing the serpent's deceptive assurance to Eve, "Thou shalt not surely die."312 It is claimed, however, that in the New Testament the doctrine of inherent immortality is asserted more and more directly. The preaching of life and immortality by Christ and Paul is specially cited by Dr. Kummer as proof of his immortal-soul assumption. He seems to overlook the fact that Christ and Paul did not proclaim eternal life as something that man already has, "and cannot help himself," but that they proclaimed it as a boon to be obtained only through Christ. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." John 3:16. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." Verse 36. What is the wrath of God?—It is the penalty of sin. "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Rom. 6:23. Does the unrepentant sinner have anything in Christ?—Nothing whatever. Said Christ to the Jewish leaders, "Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life." John 5:40. "The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy; I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." Chap. 10:10. "This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." 1 John 5:11, 12. Thus we see that the New Testament is just as direct, as positive, as explicit, as the Old in its declaration that man has neither life nor immortality in himself. It assures us that the King of kings and Lord of lords "only hath immortality" (1 Tim. 6:15, 16); and that eternal life is the reward of those who "by patient continuance in welldoing seek for glory and honor and immortality." Man is a lost sinner, a creature of the dust, condemned to death, and his only hope of redemption from that low estate is in accepting pardon and life through Jesus Christ. The invitation is general, is universal. "The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." Rev. 22:17.