OUR Saviour says that we should live by “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Matt. 4:4. This is because His “word is truth.” John 17:17. Now God’s Word says that “the dead know not anything;” also that “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.” Eccl. 9:5, 6.
Yet men presume to be wiser than God’s Word. They say that dead men do know many things; that they can love and hate those who are living; that they can talk to the living, and tell things that can not be learned in any other way; and that they can even appear in bodies and show themselves.
Whom shall we believe? Shall we believe man, who can see only a little distance, and must sleep a third of the time, and eat every day, in order to exist even a few years? or shall we believe the Creator of all things? Does not the all-wise, all-powerful Creator, who made man of the dust of the ground, know more about the nature of His creation than does the creature? The unerring Word gives the logical answer: “Let God be true, but every man a liar.” Rom. 3:4. He is the “faithful and true Witness.” Rev. 3:14. His “Word is true from the beginning.” Ps. 119:160.
In the beginning God told the man that to disobey His word meant death; and when the man did disobey, death was defined to mean returning to the dust, of which he was made. It was also in the beginning that the adversary, Satan, told the man that he should “not surely die.” See Gen. 3:1-5. The man believed Satan, and the consequence has been sin and death.
Then to believe that people are conscious after death is to believe Satan’s word in preference to God’s; and Christ says that Satan is “a liar, and the father of it.” John 8:44. He was “a murderer from the beginning,” because he persuaded the man that he had life in himself, and thereby caused his death.
So when any one tells us that we are immortal, and that our dead friends are conscious of all that we are doing, we know whose word is their authority. For God’s Word says that He “only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto.” 1 Tim. 6:14-16. The Gospel tells us that “the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Rom. 6:23.
And the eternal life that we get through Christ must come through a resurrection from the dead. He is “the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25); and “if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” 1 Cor. 15:13, 14. All the chance man has for life after death, is by a resurrection from the dead; “for this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (see verses 52, 53). But this immortality is not “put on” at death, but at the resurrection, when Christ comes again. G.