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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 15. Now Turn to the Book
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Now Turn to the Book
And now we want to turn to the Book directly for the detailed study out of which this simple picture is drawn.
It will be noted that these old Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, are flooded with the Kingdom conception. The continual thought absorbing these writers is not death and heaven and the life beyond. They are absorbed with a new condition of things coming on the earth.
There's a King coming, and through Him a kingdom. And the kingdom they are thinking of will be on the earth. The triumph of right on the earth is their overmastering thought. This prevailing outlook of things is based distinctly on promises to Abraham, and David, and the other fathers of their people.
It is really the same as with the writers of the Newer Testament, where the dominant thought is of some One coming back to the earth, to lighten all wrongs and Edenize the earth again. This kingdom conception and outlook in the older pages color all the sky continually.
This makes the references to the future life stand out in sharper relief. Indeed the broad view seems to make it clear that these old writers didn't discuss the future life much. They took it for granted. This is the setting of the particular passages we want to look at.
It will be noticed that there are other things taken for granted. God is taken for granted. He is above any such thing as death. We are His creatures, breath of his own breath. We have the same quality of life as He. We have been badly hurt by sin. As a result there is death for the body. But the principle of life within us is of the same essential sort as God's. We are kin in the quality of life, through His gracious creative touch. All this is the common background here.
The other world is taken for granted. There is another world, another bigger part of this world we are in. It's another sort of world, that part we don't see. God's home or fireside is there. There's no death there, with God, for He talks to successive generations. Men come and go on the earth, but this One is continuous. In very homely simile, it is like the harvests coming and going, but the farmer continues season after season. This, be it keenly marked, is the common point of view of this old Book.
And God is directly concerned about things here. It seems quite natural to them to write down, "and God said," as they do countless times. Jacob is awed by God speaking to him at Jabbok, but it never occurs to him to question it. Abraham's heart is stilled when God appears in a dream or vision, but he accepts it as a thing to shape his plans by.
And death is taken for granted, as a dreaded passage through to something beyond. It is something unnatural, a break. It is a thing to be dreaded in itself, like passing through a dark gloomy valley on your way to the mountain top. This is revealed incidentally in the language used.
For instance death is commonly spoken of as sleep. Sleep is a temporary thing. It is followed by waking. There is no direct analogy to death in nature. Winter is not death, but sleep. The spring is the waking time with all the powers renewed and refreshed. The grain of wheat is said to "die". But the process it goes through is a natural stage in the getting of the harvest. The death stage that man knows is an unnatural thing, a sharp rupture in nature's order (Gen_2:17).
Now, here in the Book, death is as sleep.
The kings are commonly spoken of as sleeping with their fathers. Jacob says "when I sleep with my fathers." David cries out joyously "I shall be satisfied when I awake, with thy likeness" (Psa_17:15). This is as common in the Old, as in the clearer resurrection light of the New Testament.
And it should be noted that this usage of sleep for death is distinctive to this old Bible. That is, it seems to have originated there. Its use elsewhere is a copy of this old Biblical usage.