Through Gates of Death

"His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." (Psa.146:4)

As a concise definition of death that brief statement of the Psalmist is probably unequalled. Throughout the Bible the cessation of breathing, absence of movement, and apparent unconsciousness has been the accepted evidence of death; whatever the fate of the one thus affected he is no longer of this world. Thus, the expression so frequently met with "giving up the spirit," the antithesis of the original bestowing of the spirit of life when the individual began to live. The breath has always been presented as synonymous with the spirit of life; when the one ceases the other has gone, as the Wise Man said, "to God who gave it." (Eccl.12:7)

Modern progress in the medical world has presented an apparent challenge to this position. With the advent of cardiac machines and ventilators, electrical pacemakers which take the place of the heart, external heart massage, and so on, cases arise every so often when a person who has ceased to breathe and whose heart has stopped, and is therefore dead by conventional standards, is "brought to life" again after a short period. It is inevitable that the question is then posed to orthodox Christian theology; where was the "dead" person in the meantime? Did the soul leave the body and come back? Was there a resurrection? Can it be said that, even to this limited degree, man can "raise the dead"?

To some extent an answer is being discerned in the progress that is being made in knowledge of the brain and its working. It is known, now, that all consciousness, all thought and perception and action, is dependent upon the continued activity of the cells of the brain—tens of thousand millions of them. These cells depend for their continued operation on supplies of oxygen, which come from the lungs, and of raw materials carried by the blood from the food we eat. This generates electrical energy in the brain cells and it is this electrical energy, transmitted throughout the nervous system and into the muscles, which enables us to see and hear and act as we do.

The electrical activity of the brain, brainwaves, can now be detected and recorded on a chart, appearing as undulating lines which vary in characteristics according to the nature of thought or activity subsisting at the time. When the line becomes flat and straight, death is not far off unless the electrical activity can be restored. If the condition is due to cessation of heart and breathing, within a few minutes the brain cells will have suffered irreparable damage. If within this time heart and breathing can be restored by means of mechanical devices there is a chance that after a time, brain activity will recommence, and the patient "comes to life." These are the cases that are reported.

From these and other related factors it is being concluded by the medical profession that the true definition of death must lie, not in the cessation of breathing and heart beat, but in that of the activity of the brain which under normal conditions ceases within a few minutes thereafter. It is noteworthy that this is exactly what the Psalmist says in the Scripture above quoted. But be it noted that all this has to do with the physical body. No one has yet solved the mystery of the mind and the life, those two imponderable factors which use the brain cells as a means of relating the individual to his environment. All that science with its knowledge of the physical world can do; all that doctors with their mechanical and electrical devices can do, is to certify that there is no mind and no life operating in the body. It has become the body of a dead man or woman and its constituent atoms will speedily separate and return to the earth from which they came. As the Lord said to Adam in the story of Eden: "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." (Gen.3:19) That which lies beyond that point requires not knowledge of physics, nor yet of electronics, but knowledge of God. The ability to discern material things is of no avail in this sphere, but the ability to discern spiritual things is essential. The evidence of "things not seen" is of a different order from that required in the study of the physical sciences, but it is evidence just as conclusive, nevertheless. Therefore, the testimony of men through the ages who were capable of understanding the unseen things is of supreme value. The patriarch Job, an Arabian philosopher of nearly four thousand years ago, for example, was in no doubt as to the sequel to death. "I know that my Redeemer liveth" he said "and that he shall stand in the latter day upon the earth. And after I shall awake, though this body be destroyed, yet in my flesh shall I see God." (Job 19:25‑26 Margin) That so clear a view of the doctrine of the resurrection should be possible at so early a date has been denied by some of the "advanced" critics, but there are the words and they cannot he ignored. Job knew that his body must turn again to the dust, but he also knew that in a day yet to come he would realise life and consciousness in a new flesh, and in that flesh he would behold God as he had never beheld him before. The body—dust; the mind and the life—safe in the keeping of God; until in the resurrection that mind and that life is "clothed upon" with an organism suited to the environment in which they must henceforth exist.

The Apostle Paul at the other end of the time scale says exactly the same thing, but whereas Job seems to imply that he expected to experience life again, in a terrestrial body suited to this earth, the Apostle is talking to Christian believers about a resurrection life in a celestial body suited to another order of being the celestial. "There are…celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial" he says, "The glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another...so also is the resurrection of the dead...It is sown a natural (physical, terrestrial) body; it is raised a spiritual (celestial) body...If our earthly house…were dissolved, we have a building of God…eternal in the heavens." (1 Cor.15:40‑44; 2 Cor.5:1‑4) We earnestly desire, he goes on, to be "clothed upon with our house which is from heaven." In no clearer terms could he have expressed the basic truth that the body of any living being is the means whereby the mind and the life can make contact with its environment, the world in which it lives, knows itself and expresses itself. The body is an essential part of a living being, which is why Genesis says of the first creation "Man became a living soul" (Gen.2:7) but because mind and life is of God and in a manner we as humans cannot comprehend, is always held, so to speak, in the mind of God, the dissolution of the terrestrial body is not the end of all things to the individual. Though the cessation of terrestrial life for the time being, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection declares that in God’s own time life and thought and action will be resumed in another body whether it is terrestrial on this earth or celestial in a different sphere of being does not affect the principle and the fact.

The time element is involved here, for the teaching of the Old and the New Testaments, echoed by Christian theology through the centuries, is that the resurrection takes place at the "Last Day" i.e. the day that the Messianic Kingdom takes control of affairs on earth for the elimination of evil and the conversion of humanity to God and his ways. Martha put that understanding very succinctly at the tomb of Lazarus when our Lord said to her "Thy brother shall rise again" and she responded "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." (John 11:23‑24) Many an endeavour has been made to postulate the position of the life or the spirit during that intervening time—as people know time—between death and resurrection, but none of the so‑called "intermediate states" provide satisfactory definitions. The ancients, viewing the "Last Day" as almost inconceivably remote from their own times, likened the pre‑resurrection state of the dead to a time of sleep in which the dead, quietly waiting their call, were oblivious to the passage of time. Thus, the many expressions of this nature describing the place of the dead. "In death" says the Psalmist "there is no remembrance of thee." (Psa.6:5) Again, he describes them as being "in the dark" and "in the land of forgetfulness." (Psa.88:12) "The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence." (Psa.115:17) "The dead know not any thing" declares the Wise Man emphatically, "for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave." (Eccl.9:5,10) In uttering these sentiments, the writers were not denying the resurrection: they all held tenaciously to belief in a future life, but they did assert just as dogmatically as the experts of today assert, that when the heart is still and the breathing has stopped and the brain no longer responds, the being is dead and there is nothing left but that which resides in the incomprehensible power of God. One day at some unknown future time that power is to be exerted and that being will live again.

Canon R. H. Charles, one of the most knowledgeable theologians of the early 20th Century, put this position very logically in his book "Eschatology" (A. & C. Black.1913). Commenting on the account of man’s creation as given in the second chapter of Genesis, he says that according to that account "the material form when animated by the spirit became a living soul. The soul is the result of the indwelling of the spirit in the material body and has no independent existence of its own. It is really a function of the material when quickened in the spirit. So long as the spirit is present, so long is the soul a living soul, but when the spirit is withdrawn the vitality of the soul is destroyed and it becomes the soul of a dead man, i.e. a corpse."

The space between death and resurrection may seem long as one measures time—in the case of the ancients it can be truthfully said to be thousands of earth years—but from the Divine standpoint it might be nothing more than an instant of time. It is difficult for us with our human limitations, to realise that many of our everyday conceptions and standards are valid only in the world we know and may appear very different when viewed from the standpoint of eternity. The analogy of sleep so often used by Biblical writers may be more fitting than we realise; to the one who sleeps, his period of sleep is as a moment and he is unaware of the passage of time; the observers around him experience the lapse of maybe several hours, occupied by all the activities applicable to the affairs of this world. Many present day mathematicians and physicists believe that time as we know it only applies to our physical universe, and even within this sphere is capable of what seem to be some strange anomalies. Thus, one consequence of Einstein’s theory of Relativity is what is known as the "clock paradox" by which it is claimed that if astronauts in a spaceship found it possible to travel through space at nearly the speed of light they might be away from the earth for say two years according to their clocks and calendars, and reach home to find that two hundred years had elapsed on earth and all their friends were dead. The arguments upon which this astounding conclusion is based are quite incomprehensible to the ordinary person and it is only fair to say that an equal volume of equally expert opinion declares that the whole idea is a mathematical abstraction which would not happen in the real world. But that such an apparently fantastic conclusion can be reached by responsible physicists does at least suggest the possibility that the passage of time may not mean just the same thing to those who have passed beyond the gates of death as it does to we who still remain. We do not know; all we can say, and say it on the authority of all that the Scripture has to tell us concerning the death state, is that the next event after death, in individual experience, is resurrection. From then life goes on, into what further revelations of the wonders of Divine creation we do not know. All we do know is that life is unending, leading into eternally widening spheres of experience and activity to those who use their resurrection life to overcome the failures and errors of the past and come fully into harmony with the Divine laws, and take their rightful place in Divine creation. It is for that purpose the Kingdom of Christ upon earth is ordained, that those who so choose may "inherit the Kingdom prepared [for them] from the foundation of the world." (Matt.25:34)

Therefore death, as the term must of necessity be defined and understood amongst men and women, is the cessation not only of bodily functions but also of the activity of the brain, and the consequent commencement of the return of the physical body to its dust. The fact that the body may be mummified and preserved from decomposition, as in the case of the ancient Egyptians, makes no difference; the preserved body is just as much a part of the "dust of the earth" despite the fact that decomposition has not taken place, for the spirit has gone, and when the spirit has gone the man is dead. Death is a phenomenon that, so far as man is concerned, is confined entirely to the physical body and to this planet. Even when the Apostle Paul in 1 Cor.15 speaks of some in the end of the Age who do not "sleep" like those who died in earlier times but are "changed, in a moment" (vv.51,52) to their heavenly destiny, he does not invalidate this fact. Those who are thus "changed in a moment" die just as truly as the antediluvians who were swept away by the Flood, for the moment of their "change" is the moment the material brain ceases to function and the human body is discarded for ever. That is death—even though it be followed instantaneously by resurrection.

"What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?" asked the Psalmist (89:48). "Shall he deliver his soul from the hand of the grave?" No; humans cannot. But God can—and God will.

Bible Study Monthly 1989