The Last Things Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell

The Last Things Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell Paul Helm the banner of truth trust THE BANNER OF TRUTH TRUST 3 Murrayﬁeld Road, Edinburgh EH12 6EL, UK P.O. Box 621, Carlisle, PA 17013, USA * © Paul Helm 1989 Reprinted (retypeset) 2016 isbn: 978 1 84871 701 5 * Typeset in 11/13 pt Adobe Garamond Pro at the Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh Printed in the USA by Versa Press, Inc., East Peoria, IL Introduction Contents Introduction ix 1. Responsibility to God 1 Limits 4 Scripture and Responsibility 6 Alarm and Comfort 10 God’s Gift of Time 14 Regaining the Balance 18 2. Death and Dying 21 The Inevitability of Death 23 The Day of One’s Death 26 The Finality of Death 30 Dying and the Test of Faith 33 Death and Bodily Resurrection 38 Should a Believer Want to Die? 42 Summing Up 43 3. Judgment 45 The Fact of Judgment 47 The Just God 50 Judgment According to Truth 56 vii THE LAST THINGS The Standard of Judgment 60 Salvation by Works? 68 4. Heaven 73 Continuity and Change 74 Heaven as Redemptive, Fixed and Final 78 Heaven as Rest, but also as Activity 83 Critiques of Heaven 86 Heaven as Vision and Reward 94 5. Hell 99 Opposing Hell 101 Hell and Annihilation 108 Differences in Hell? 111 The Preaching of Hell 117 6. Glory Begun Below 121 1 Corinthians 15 123 Romans 8 127 2 Corinthians 4–5 131 Some Conclusions 133 General Index 139 Scripture Index 143 viii Introduction Introduction T has sometimes been necessary for the Christian Church I to defend particular teachings of the faith, often in the face of great opposition. Athanasius defended the true di- vinity of Christ, Augustine upheld divine grace against Pe- lagius’ religion of self-effort, and Luther’s rediscovery of the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone was in the face of the determined opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. At other times it is not neglect of the true teachings of the faith that nullifies the Christian gospel so much as ‘the spirit of the age’. There may rise up an almost indefinable moral and spiritual atmosphere which suffocates the gospel, inhibiting both its intelligible and forceful presentation and its faithful acceptance. This study is written out of the belief that at present the Church is up against such a ‘spirit’. Even in those sections of the Church which have striven most manfully to keep to biblical themes there has been a change in sensibility during the present century. This change in outlook, in the ix THE LAST THINGS framework of thinking and feeling, has resulted in a shift in the centre of gravity in the Church’s message and in those concerns to which people are prepared to give time, effort and money. What has happened? Concern for the present life has over-powered that for the life to come. In a previous study, The Callings (1987), an attempt was made to show in what ways the present life is important for the Christian. The Christian is not called to ‘full-time Christian service’, nor to a monastic attitude, a life of literal separation from the world. Divine providence has given to each Christian a calling. Through it divine grace is appropriately shaped for the needs and opportunities of each individual, and a person’s character is developed. Thus, a Christian’s calling, not simply his effectual call by grace but the network of personal circumstances and gifts which constitute his calling in the wider sense, is purposive. The goal and end of a person’s calling does not terminate in this life, but it makes sense only in the light of the life to come. His calling in this life is part of God’s heavenly calling, the call that leads to heaven. While the Christian, in being called by grace, already has eternal life, such life will fully be realised, blossom and bear fruit, only in the life to come. And the Christian’s daily work, intrinsically satisfying and worthwhile as it may be, will also find its fulfilment through the formation of character, and perhaps even in some of the products of human culture, in the city of the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and new earth wherein dwells righteousness. There are, then, two basic extremes to be avoided. One is to think of this life as a shadow, as not real; to belittle and devalue it to the point where it is not worth living. The other mistake is to think that the present life is everything. x Introduction The basic fact about the present life is that it is important and valuable in all its aspects because it leads to the world to come. So this book looks onward, beyond the details of the Christian’s daily calling, to the end, that end which gives these present responsibilities their point. And in order to see this end clearly we need to attempt to counter the spirit of the age, which tends to see everything in exclusively ‘this worldly’ terms. We can focus this more closely by putting it in terms of a dilemma: is heaven for the believer the completion and climax of this present life, or is it in complete contrast to it? Is life here on earth merely idling in anticipation of heaven, a waiting room, a twiddling of the thumbs? Or is it continuous with the life to come? In The Callings we argued that it was continuous, and this present study aims to trace this continuity through to its climax. To do this we must face up to the stark reality of the ‘last things’: death, judgment, heaven and hell. In order to do this we need to neutralise certain currently powerful ways of thinking. One of these is a diminished sense of human responsibility, a mood which easily sloughs responsibility onto society, or upbringing, or science, or fate. But personal responsibility is central to the gospel, for if there is no responsibility, if there is nothing that I or anyone else ought to do, then there can be no sin, and if there is no sin then there is no Saviour from sin. So there is need to reaffirm each person’s responsibility before God, a responsibility which extends as far as the eye of God can see. Responsibility is not merely a matter of what other people load on to me, nor is it limited to what I am prepared to take responsibility for. It extends to those responsibilities xi THE LAST THINGS which are sometimes thrust upon me by circumstances, and those I grow up with and assume imperceptibly. Responsi- bility extends to those matters, inner desires, motives and thoughts, which are known only to the person who has them and to the Searcher of hearts. Like the Psalmist we each have secret faults from which we need to be delivered (Psa. 19:12). Something else which needs counteracting and neutral- ising is the refusal to recognise the speed with which time passes, and the connection between the death that we each face, and the judgment to come. Modern people live as if they are on earth for ever, and death, when it is faced up to, is sentimentalised. But the Bible is emphatic that after death judgment fol- lows, the judgment of God. For we live in a moral order of things; we live in God’s sight and are accountable to him. These facts raise important questions about justice, about which there is much misconception, and this also requires discussion. For the justice of God is not the malevolent anger of a despot with a grudge, it is judgment according to truth; awesome, but also liberating and comforting. According to Scripture the judgment of God, the last judgment, will bring a great division. Mankind will then be separated into the saved and the lost. And this claim also runs counter to the spirit of the age, not merely the fact of judgment, but the fact of division; it runs counter to one of the strongest assumptions of modern Christian theology, that the world is one world. For the ‘one world’ theologian believes that the dominant idea is the unity of the human race. For him, the human race resides in one world, and always will. And it is the work of the theologian and of the church to foster and support this unity, to break down xii Introduction barriers, and to see that this unity is realised in practical ways. On this view, even if there is to be a divine judgment then, whatever happens, the unity of the race will be preserved. Divine judgment can only be, for the ‘one world’ theologian, restorative in its purpose and effect. There is to be no final separation between members of the human race, no sheep and goats, no lost and saved, no right-hand and left-hand, despite the repeated teaching of Scripture to the contrary. It is unthinkable, for the ‘one-world’ theologian, that any person could remain unrestored, for then the race would be divided, and divine love would have been vanquished. By contrast the ‘two-world’ theologian recognises the undoubted biblical testimony, and the teaching of the Chris- tian church in all ages, that divine judgment will bring division. The basic theological fact is not the unity of the human race, a unity to be preserved at all costs, but the purpose and glory of God. That purpose is not threatened by the pros- pect of the lost, and of two worlds between which there is a great, impassable gulf fixed.

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