States of the Living and the Dead

Copyright 1998:
William A. Simpson

There are really four areas that we need to examine in a consideration of the states of the living and the dead.  For the living, we need to examine the states of the saved and the unsaved.  In the case of the dead, we need to examine, likewise, both the saved and the unsaved.  We will find that ours is a glorious and wise God, who orders heaven and earth according to His purposes;  a mighty God, One who is not afraid to pit His great power and wisdom against His adversaries.  First we shall consider the state of the person who is alive, but who is unsaved.

The  Living   Lost:

It has been the state of most who have ever lived, and it remains the state of the vast majority of men and women today.   Like Adam & Eve, alone in an evil and dark world, a world that has largely rejected God and is sinking ever more rapidly into the swirling morass of immorality, selfishness, pride and hatred, unsaved people inhabit a dark and forbidding world.   These are the waters of the unsaved.  To be sure, many of the "living lost" are kind, decent people.  Or they at least seem to be.  To understand what these people are, one must understand a bit about their world.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve communed with God.  They saw His immeasurable glory daily, and understood his great wisdom.   That makes the tragedy of  the forbidden tree all the more terrible.  Eve truly believed that she could achieve the level of understanding that this great God possessed.  Oh, she wanted to be as smart as God, for He was very smart indeed, and she could see that clearly.  When the devil told her that she could be like God, she was deceived.  Like Lucifer's own heart, hers had been lifted in pride.  She was already a grand and glorious creature of God, but her heart desired more, for she was tempted. 

When Eve partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she did indeed double her own understanding of life.   Before, she had only known good.  She knew that there was evil, but she did not know what it was.  She knew that it existed, for there was a tree whose name was the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  But she had had no personal experience with evil, and could not discern its dangers, though God had clearly warned Adam not to partake of the fruit of that tree.  Knowing that her God is fearfully wise and sovereign in His realm, she should have understood that the serpent, who was also confined to the Garden of Eden as she was, could not possibly be right in the things he said.   Else, why was he not also as smart as God.

The instant that the fruit passed her lips must have been stunning.  She not only now understood evil; she became evil herself.  What a passage there was; what a translation.  From immortal to dying.  From the presence of God to the dark terrors of condemnation.  By a lack of faith in the Word of God, she failed; by faith in that same Word are we saved.  As Eve was translated to mortality in an instant, so shall the saved also be translated to immortality in as brief an instant.  This, at the rapture of the church.

God loved Adam and Eve.  He did not kill them immediately, as He had said that He would.  He was merciful.  Without the shedding of blood, there can be no remission of sin.  So, God took an innocent animal, killed it, and tore the hide from its lifeless body and fashioned coats for Adam and Eve.  Blood was shed, but it was not Adam's or Eve's.  It was substitutionary.  It was the blood of an innocent animal, killed in their place.   Nevertheless, a day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.  The oldest person ever to live, Methuselah, lived 969 years, so that every man reaps the wages of sin on the same day on which he is born.  God had told Adam that on the day he ate of the tree, he would surely die.

Adam and Eve almost certainly did not understand the significance of the coats of skin as a covering for their sin.  They had never seen blood before that moment.  Nothing had ever died.  It must have been horrifying for them to see their friend the lamb slain in such a cruel fashion.  To have its sticky skin pressed against their bare flesh must have given them at least an inkling of the tragedy of their sin.  And when they saw the lifeless, skinned carcasses on the ground in front of them, they must have stood with great fear in their hearts, knowing that one day they would share that silent and dark estate.  

They could be saved through the continuance of animal sacrifices for their future sins, but they knew that they must now first pass through that emerald gate called death.  They would eventually come back to God, but it would only be through the grave.

Unprepared for life in a cursed world, Adam and Eve had no clue as to how long God would allow them to live.  If God had been merciful toward them in a practical sense, He might have taken them earlier rather than later.  But His mercy was toward us, that we might be saved through the generations of their descendants leading to Christ.  Adam and Eve lived long lives. 

From them issued both Cain and Abel.  We shall use these two as our first examples of the living, lost and saved.

Poor Cain.  He just didn't get it.  He was rocking along, doing Ok.  He was a row-crop farmer.  He grew vegetables, which he would swap with Abel for the occasional dinner lamb.  He was basically happy.  Certainly, he had many children and lived to a ripe old age.

The Bible tells us that a great civilization descended from Cain, forming large cities with many industries.  Cain must have been quite a manager, a real executive.  We tend to think of him as rather doltish; Caveman Cain, who wasn't even smart enough not to murder his brother.  Vicious and cruel, we see Cain as the arch villain.  Beyond that, we don't think much of him.

But he wasn't the arch villain that we think of him as.  Not in his world.  Not really.  He was a thinker, a rich man who grew to great prominence in his world.  Today, he would wear pinstripes, and might even be rich enough to wear a fresh flower in his lapel daily.  He would certainly ride in limosines and be invited to all the most important functions.  He was, in reality, and truly, a greater villain than even we consider him, but he did not appear so to men of his day.   He surely had an earthy understanding of his many descendants.  He was surely a proud patriarch who lay on his deathbed at the last, secure in the knowledge that he had made his mark on the world. 

Not even close.  Cain was a lost man.  He was not saved.  Every last one of his descendants perished in the great Flood, so that there are none of his line in the world at all today.  Cain did not have the peace of God in his heart.  The harder he worked to immortalize what his heart told him was mortal, the angrier he must have become.  The older he became, the more bitter his soul must have recoiled at the thought of his mortality.  All his labors to be squandered by his heirs.  He hoped that men would remember him for his great deeds and many civic responsibilities.  He is remembered for something else altogether. 

Cain probably had some outward semblance of wisdom.   He showed a different face to the world than the one that lived in his heart of hearts.  Outwardly he was probably a gregarious sort, as men of great success often are.  Polished to the very heights of society, glib and always politically correct.   Inwardly, he knew that he would die, and he had no real hope for any relationship with God that would extend beyond the grave.  Where there is no hope, there is never true happiness, and Cain could not have been a happy man.  All his hopes were earthy hopes, and ended at a hole in the ground.

We know that Cain was a religious man.  He offered sacrifices for his sins.  But he did not offer those sacrifices as instructed.  He was willing to worship God after a fashion, but he was not about to be dictated to as to the manner or frequency of that worship.  God would have to be satisified that Cain even acknowledged Him at all, let alone according to some prescribed method.  Oh no, not Cain.   He'd give God His due, but he'd do it his way and in his own time.  If that wasn't good enough, well, then God would just have to go unsatisfied.  In his realm, he was like God, sovereign over all he possessed.   Cain probably felt more or less like God was his only peer.

These might have been some of Cain's reasonings.   But his precious mama had worshiped God, and he surely felt that she was a crinoline saint who could do no wrong and deserved to be emulated.  So Cain had his religion too.  What did it matter that it wasn't exactly like his mama's?  Oh, not too much.  It only made the difference between life and death.  Between eternal bliss or everlasting torment.  The Bible calls this way of thinking "the Way of Cain," (Jude 11).  The way of Cain is to worship God without reference to the instructions given in the Word of God, according to one's own preferences.

The world is filled with religious people today who have no more clue than Cain did as to how to properly worship God.  Indeed, Cain knew precisely how to worship God and atone for his sins.  He had heard the truth from his parents, just like his brother Abel had.  Most people today have never heard the gospel.  Oh, they hear a multitude of preachers talking about the Bible, and talking about God, but precious few who will tell them the truth about the grace of God or the love of God or the mercy of God.  They're happy to talk about God's omniscience or His omnipresence, usually in some manner connected with His judgment and severity.   Afraid of God themselves, they want to draw you into that same trap so that you will not draw close to Him, even as they tell you that you must draw close to Him.  The devil must laugh uproariously at the silly millions who blindly follow his many contradictions.

Or perhaps Cain attempted to reason God out of existence altogether.  That is a favorite trick of the unsaved.  Or maybe he considered himself a god, and felt that he didn't need to be concerned with any other God when he had himself to please.  The New Age movement is not new at all, but is a very old religion that has never worked for anyone.  If God does not exist outside the human being, then we have no fear of having to answer to anyone for anything, and that is very liberating.  The problem is that every man knows that there is a God (Romans 1: 19), and they harden their hearts to what they truly do know.  There is no such thing as an atheist -- there are only rebellious souls who deny what they know in their hearts to be true.

    The unsaved man today is little different from Cain.  All his hopes are earthly hopes.  All his fears are earthly fears.  When he thinks of God at all, it is normally with a bitter resentment or a nameless fear.  He does not like to retain God in his knowledge (Rom 1: 28), preferring to think about things that he hopes will make him happy or secure.  The man who has not been born again has no light in him at all, and all his life is lived in darkness and denied despair.  Even among the religious, those who call themselves Christians but who have not been reborn, there is anger and bitterness.  Indeed, the more religious one becomes while also not being saved, the greater is his bitterness, despite an outward mask of calm and dignity, peace and benevolence .

The unsaved person looks to his own goodness to get him to heaven (if indeed, he thinks, there is a heaven).  Most unsaved people have heard of both heaven and hell, at least in our Western culture.  The unsaved who believe in heaven and hell hope that somehow things will just "work out."  They hope that God grades on the curve, and that they will somehow just make it into heaven because they consider themselves to be average people, neither truly bad, nor zealots for what is good.   With this reasoning, they are able to dismiss any further thought or discussion of the things of God, and they go through their lives with that tiny web of fear that lies at the pit of the stomach and that never goes away.  It gnaws at their subconscious minds all their lives until, at the end of their lives, they are forced to look on themselves with some sort of an evaluating eye.

Unsaved people do not die happily.  They neither look forward to going to heaven nor hope to stand before God.  For some, death is an escape from the fears and inconsistencies that have plagued their hopeless lives.  For many of those who commit suicide, the most elemental cause is that they have no hope in this life of ever seeing anything improve, and just want the pain and fear to go away.  Death is not a beginning for them, but an end.  Being lost, separated from God, is a heavy burden to carry.  It is rarely noticed in the mind of the unbeliever, but it weighs on the heart, unseen, but dampening every one of life's pleasures.

There are many, many unsaved in every denomination of Christianity.  Indeed, when you walk into a church, perhaps one in ten will actually be saved.  The rest are there in order to please God by their works.   They dress up in their fanciest clothes, arising on what is traditionally a day off from work, and they visit their local churches, but they aren't proving anything except to themselves.  They do not understand the doctrine of grace, or how a person is to be saved.  Many give large sums of money to the local church in their lifetimes for no other reason than that it makes them feel good about themselves.  They feel like they are being generous with God.   Or perhaps they think that God will then be obliged to let them into heaven.   When the unsaved give large amounts of money, it does no more good in getting them to heaven than any other good deed.  We are not saved by our good deeds, but by the grace of God.  The good deeds of the lost are always wrongly motivated, not being accompanied by faith, or any understanding of the doctrine of salvation.

Many is the pastor who hasn't a clue about God's grace, and how could any saved person sit there week after week and listen to the musings of the lost?  Those who do are surely fruitless.   Each denomination has grown its fat bureaucracy, shifting its emphasis from the spreading of the gospel to the collection of money, from saving souls to adding bodies, from the things of the Spirit to the filling of pews.  Yet, in almost every denomination, there are  Christians to be found -- people who have been born again, who pray and study and commune with God every day, and whose faith is sincere, based upon the Word of God and incorporating a full relationship with Him.  The need for Christian fellowship drives them to the apostate churches in droves, the hope of finding like-minded souls with whom to commune in the Spirit of God.

There are many churches in the world that have held fast to sound doctrine, teaching and preaching the Word of God without the irrelevance of denominational doublespeak, even while being affiliated with a particular denomination.   Though they are many in the world, these churches are rare in any given city.   Some of them are quite large.  Many cities will host one or two local churches that are godly in both their doctrine and their walk.  Unless the city is very large, there will not be many more than that, though there may be many groups of individuals who meet for study and prayer in private homes sprinkled all through the city. 

Before we proceed to look at the living who are saved, let us summarize the estates of the living lost by saying that they walk in darkness, fearing a God whom they do not know, inexorably approaching a day of judgment that they would avoid if they could, waxing more bitter with every passing second as they watch their end approach.  It is dreadful existence, though they tell themselves they are happy.  Their hearts deceive them, the devil deceives them, the world deceives them, their lost friends deceive them, but at the end of it all, they must face a horrifying truth.  In times of crisis, they turn to a God whom they do not know, without any faith at all that He will help them.  Their occasional joy is always muted by an unspoken dread.  Though they may appear so outwardly, no unsaved person is truly happy deep inside, where an unsettling truth dissipates the glory of their hopes and dreams.  It is the truth of a God whom they either serve incorrectly, as Cain did, or whom they refuse to serve at all.

The Living Saints

What a contrast may be drawn between the lost and the saved.

To Be Continued...