The Condition of Man in Death and the Judgment-Day
By Editor
A THEORY that is taught by a large part of the Christian church and that is believed by the most of the world, is that when a man dies he has an immortal soul that leaves the body, to go away to some other realm, and be, if anything, more conscious in death than it was during life. This soul is thought to be the real man. The same Christian church which teaches this theory in regard to man's condition in death also teaches, and rigidly so, for that matter, that there is a Judgment-day. Indeed, the apostle has said, in the word of God, that "He hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world." There is no doctrine of the Bible that is any more clearly taught than the future Judgment, and the church as a whole, regardless of creed or sect, quite generally recognizes that teaching. Now if the soul of the righteous man at death goes immediately to heaven, and the soul of the wicked man at death goes immediately to hell, as the orthodox church has so generally taught, what is the occasion of this future Judgment-day? Will God, at the end of time, call a general Judgment to decide whether or not He has made a mistake in sending some poor man to hell maybe five or six thousand years ago, with the possibility of divine justice and divine accuracy being called in question, and having to apologize to this poor person for burning him so many thousand years, when he ought to have been in heaven? And then, is the same Judgment-day to consider whether or not the awful fact will have to be disclosed to some one who has been singing and rejoicing in heaven for two or three thousand years, that after all, he is in the wrong place? We would like to have those who really believe in their theories concerning the conscious state of the dead and the future Judgment-day, explain this thing to us. It is a conundrum that we can not harmonize with the justice, mercy, and infallibility of the divine Father. Able writers in recent issues of this paper have presented scriptures which show that in death the man is absolutely unconscious, that he is dependent upon the future resurrection for his existence again. During this unconscious state in death he is absolutely oblivious to everything that is passing, and so the time that he spends in the grave will be to him only a moment, the twinkling of an eye. If he is a righteous man, it will be as if he had closed his eyes on his death-bed, only immediately to open them to the glorious spectacle of the second coming of Christ and to the experience of being made immortal. Some of these same writers have shown, in our recent issues, that the Judgment upon the righteous will be in the past when Christ comes the second time. The books in heaven will have been opened, and their cases will have been decided for eternal life. Then during the thousand years between the first and the second resurrection, the righteous sit in judgment with God. They go over the entire history of the world. Every case that is sentenced to eternal death is examined, and the righteous are permitted to know why God has decided in the way that He has. And then they all heartily join in saying that God is righteous because He has judged thus. We are not reviewing, in these paragraphs, the evidences that our writers have presented, but are simply calling attention to the conclusions reached from the Scripture evidence. What a clear, consistent plan this is, and how good it is to know that it rests upon a plain "Thus saith the Lord," and not upon mere human speculations!