There is a very well-known story told of a man who had served his king and country in many a distant land, and in many a strange experience, coming back home, and talking to his friends of the wonderful sights which he had seen, and the wonderful experiences which he had gone through.
And when they remarked to him on the sort of wonders he had experienced and known, he checked them with saying, “There is something more wonderful than anything I have yet known, which I still have to experience,” and when they asked him what it was, he said, “It is the first five minutes after death.” The first five minutes after death! It was upon what happens in the first five minutes after death that the prophet was exercising himself here in this particular prophecy. (Davey Biggs, D. D.)
Life beyond the grave
1. The prophet believed that for those who pass through the gate of death there would be recognition in the strange life beyond the grave. He believed that those who were inhabiting that world before other individuals entered into it would know them, would be there ready to greet them, greet them as in this ease with horror, with dismay, with, as it were, congratulations that what had been tyrannical in the world of life before death had now, as it were, found its level, the opportunity of tyranny gone.
The prophet pictures the expectation that there was in the hearts of those who had known what it was to be cruelly oppressed in this world when their oppressor came to join them. He shows that the attitude of those who were within the grave in the unseen world was one of expectation.
2. There is memory there, memory not only of our past selves, but about other people; memory, too, of those living on the earth. (Davey Biggs, D. D.)
Recognition beyond the grave
We know that what was only conjecture in the mind of the prophet when he painted hell stirring up the dead to meet Belshazzar, King of Babylon, has become certainty through the revelation given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ. I do not know how anybody can read through the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and not feel that, whatever the intention was with which the parable was spoken, incidentally our Lord does teach us that in the life beyond the grave the personality which we have known here in this life continues. As personality shows itself in self-consciousness, so our Lord shows that the rich man and Lazarus are conscious of their own existence. There is mutual recognition too. The rich man has not any doubt whatever who it is in whose bosom Lazarus was reposing; and I suppose at the very least fifteen centuries parted them. In the same mysterious way Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration knew that it was Moses and Elijah who were talking with the Messiah. There is a wonderful power of recognition of even those whom we have never met. We shall know, and our Lord Jesus Christ wishes us to know that we shall know, the great people in the past to whom we owe such great debts. (Davey Biggs, D. D.)
