[Outline of a sermon by Dr. H. F. Carpenter, reported in San Jose (Cal.) Mercury.]
“Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.” 2 Kings 20:1.
HEZEKIAH was a holy king, but was fatally sick. He was advised to arrange his temporal affairs accordingly. The prophet of God did not believe death to be a passport to heaven, a new birth, a beginning of increased activities, nor a “passing on” to any life whatsoever, but the cessation of all life—“Thou shalt die, and not live.” In this he was in harmony with nature, for we never call anything dead as long as it has life in it. If we were to adopt the sentiment of Isaiah, we should save ourselves from opposition to the prophet of God.
Secondly, we would save ourselves from applying many texts to death which have no reference to death. “Absent from the body” refers not to death, for Lazarus had been dead four days and was found in his body in the tomb. “To depart and to be with Christ” refers not to death, for Paul did not expect thus to depart till the resurrection at Christ’s coming. See 1 Thess. 4:16, 17. 2 Cor. 5:1 refers not to death, but to the time when mortality shall be swallowed up of life: read verse 4.
Thirdly, we would save ourselves from many inconsistencies of Biblical exposition. If everybody passes to judgment and reward at death, what need of a future day of judgment, as the Bible plainly teaches in multiplied texts? Why tell us that the “cloud of witnesses” with which Paul in Heb. 12:1 says we are compassed, are the spirits of our dead friends watching sympathetically over us, and then when we read in Eccl. 9:5 that “the dead know not anything,” tell us that that means they know nothing about the things of this world? Such inconsistent expositions will be avoided by believing God’s prophet.
Fourth, we would avoid mortifying our good sense. If death sets the gates of heaven not only “ajar,” but “wide open,” then Epaphroditus when sick unto death was well nigh heaven. But God, Paul said, “had mercy on him” and healed him. Phil. 2:27. Was it a mercy to keep him from heaven?
Fifth, we should avoid overtaxing lexicographers. They search in vain to find a meaning for “death,” destruction, perdition, to suit our theology in the root and etymology of these words, if we teach that life continues in death. They are compelled to add a sense which they call a “theological sense.” Why beggar language by contradicting God’s prophet?
Sixth, we would save the honor of the Gospel as the only revealer of future life and immortality. If future life is through the immortality of the soul, then the Gospel did not reveal it. The Bible speaks of the soul 857 times, but calls it immortal never. It also speaks of the human spirit nearly 800 times, and never calls that immortal or deathless, but it is written, “The spirit shall fail before Me, and the souls which I have made.” Isa. 57:16. Matt. 10:28 denies the soul’s immortality, and we read more than once of “killed” souls. The Egyptians first taught the soul’s immortality, but the Gospel teaches future life and immortality through a resurrection from the death state. Is it not better to honor the Gospel rather than Egyptian philosophy?
Seventh, we should save ourselves from strengthening the hand of the wicked. God chides some teachers, saying, “Ye have . . . strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life.” Eze. 13:22. Persuade a man that death don’t kill, but his life will flow on, ever progressing, and what cares he for Christ as a life-giver? He will fix things all right in the endless life before him. So he risks it. If he believed God’s prophet that to die is to cease living for a time, he would feel the need of Christ to give future life immortality. The words of Christ would mean something when He says, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” John 10:10.4
Eighth, we should find ourselves in harmony with science truly. Not a scientific fact can be brought to show that life continues in death. Buehner says that “unprejudiced philosophy is compelled to reject the idea of an individual immortality and of a personal continuance after death.” Vogt testifies to the same. Maurice Maeterlinck, in speaking of memory, the strongest point of our intelligence upon which philosophy can base a hope of continued life, says, “Memory is the most precarious of all our faculties, . . . one of those which disappear the most promptly.”
Ninth, we should save ourselves from belittling what the Bible magnifies. It magnifies the resurrection, day of judgment, the second coming of our Lord, the inheritance of saints, the new heavens and the new earth, the end of all sin upon earth, and the will of God done here as in heaven, and the earth filled with God’s glory,—Edenic beauties all restored. But of what account are all or any of these to a disembodied existence? Let us take our stand with Isaiah, the evangelistic prophet, and say to dying men, “Thou shalt die and not live.” Then point them to Jesus who alone can redeem from death and ransom from the power of the grave.