THE boundary line of repentance. Life is the boundary line of repentance. What the Scriptures call “time,” contains the whole period during which man can turn to God. “To-day if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the bitter provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness.” If we are ever molded into the image of Christ, made conformable to his death, and prepared for the society of the blessed, it must be while we are in time. To show that we are inside of the clear revelations of God, we shall make two or three references to the New Testament. One man, more curious to know the fate of the masses, than his own duty to God and man, in our Lord’s lifetime asked him: “Lord are there few that be saved?” To this the Lord responded: “Strive to enter in at the straight gate; for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.” Luke xiii. 23, 24. He then proceeds to the time when this shall be, as follows: “When once the Master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and He shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence you are.” In reply, they make an appeal to the fact that the Lord had been accustomed to eat and drink in their streets. He replies, “I know you not whence you are; depart from me all ye workers of iniquity.” This must be after death, for He refers to the future, “When ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out,” or thrust away. It is after death, because the Master of the house has never risen up and shut to the door of the kingdom, in this life. As we sing sometimes, “The doors of gospel grace stand open night and day.” None, in this life, stand and knock at the door, crying, Lord, Lord, open to us, whom the Master refuses to receive. His language now is, “Whoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely.” “He who cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out.” “He who seeks shall find; to him who knocks, it shall be opened,” and “whoever calls upon the Lord shall be saved.” But the time will come, when the Lord shall have arisen and shut the door, and men shall stand without, knocking and crying, Lord, open to us; but He refuses them admittance and thrusts them away, declaring that He never approved them.—Nothing like this can be found in this life. It refers to the time when the fear of the wicked cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish shall overtake them; then shall they call upon the Lord, but He will not answer them. See Prov. i. 26, 27.
Another passage to which we refer, to show that death is the boundary line of repentance, is the case of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke xvi. 19, 31. This rich man died, “and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments.” Here we find a man in torments after death. Lazarus has also died, and been carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom. Dives, once the rich man, but now a beggar, looks up and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom, and cries to him, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.” Now, the question of repentance, or obtaining relief from punishment after death, is fairly before us. In a case stated by our Lord himself, an application is made for the mitigation of torment after death. But what is the response of Abraham, who speaks in the place of the Almighty, here? It is, “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime received thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.” Here are two men after death, one comforted and the other tormented. Can any change be made in their condition? Let us hear Abraham. He then proceeds: “Besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed; so that they who would pass from hence to you can not; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.” This is an end of all change of condition. In that world there is no turning to God nor falling from grace. The rich man, then despairing of any mitigation of his torments, or change of his condition, makes one more appeal to Abraham. “I pray thee, therefore,” said he, “that thou wouldst send him to my father’s house; for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” Having fallen into torments, on account of his unbelief, and having five brethren also unbelievers, he desired testimony presented to them from the dead, lest they also come to this place of torment. But Abraham answers, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.” The rich man persists: “If one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.” This is the only New Testament account of a request for a departed spirit to be sent to our world to lead sinners to repentance; but this request, coming from one already in the torments of a wicked man after death, was refused in the following words: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.” This shows that God will allow no means employed to save sinners save only those of his own appointment, and writes the seal of condemnation upon all visitations of the spirits of dead people to save sinners.
The next and only passage more to which we shall refer, to show the boundary line of repentance, is Rev. xxii. 11, “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he who is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” This is an end of all repentance, of all turning to God, and also an end to all departing from him. The holy shall remain holy, and the wicked remain wicked, from this time forward. Jesus made his personal efforts to save man in this world. When he left the world, he committed to the apostles the ministry and word of reconciliation, and they made their efforts in this world. All the means ever employed to save man, have been employed in this life. All the cases of acceptable repentance that we have ever known anything about, were in this life. If, therefore, men ever turn to God, it must be in time.
We proceed in the third place, to consider the state of man between death and resurrection. There were, in the days of our Lord’s pilgrimage, a class of materialists, who not only denied the resurrection of the dead, but that there was an angel or spirit. Many were the debates which they had with the Pharisees who differed with them upon these three points. Knowing that our Lord had sanctioned the doctrine of the Pharisees, that there were angels and spirits, and would be a resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees approached the Lord with the puzzle, touching the resurrection of the woman and seven husbands. As if they had said, “Now, Master, you agree with the Pharisees, and teach that there will be a resurrection of the dead; but this doctrine involves a difficulty; for a certain woman, in the course of her life, had seven husbands, and we should be pleased to know which one shall have her in the resurrection?” Our Lord soon explains this matter. He says, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God.” He proceeds, “Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto him.” While those departed from this life, are dead to us, they are alive to God—“for all live unto Him.” “The inner man,” as Paul calls him, or “the hidden man of the heart,” as Peter styles him which is eternal, “not corruptible,” but immortal, which Jesus says, man is not able to kill, though separated from us, or dead to us, is alive to God, “for all live unto Him.” See Luke xx. 27–38.
The Transfiguration of Christ presents us the three states, the fleshly, the intermediate, and the resurrection, or eternal state, all at once. The Lord is changed into the glorified state, is seated upon the throne, as we would see him to-day, if we were before him in heaven. Hence Peter says, “We were eye witnesses of His majesty, for he received from God the Father, honor, and glory, when there came such a voice from the excellent glory. ‘This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” On this august occasion, Peter, James and John represented the fleshly state. They were present in the flesh. Moses was here, not in the flesh, for he had died some fifteen centuries before this. He was not in the resurrection state, for Christ was the first-born from the dead of every creature, that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. But he was in the intermediate state, or the man Moses was there separate from the body; alive, conscious, and held a conversation with the Lord, in regard to his great sufferings to be accomplished at Jerusalem. Though Moses had been dead to the world fifteen hundred years, and his body mingled and lost in the dust, he was alive to God all this time, and so are all the dead. He had not lost his identity, nor his name, but is known and mentioned as the man Moses, in a conscious state, seeing, hearing and talking. Our friend, so much loved, lamented, but now dead to us, is alive to God, and as conscious, and maintaining his identity as much as when here in the body. Another dignitary present at the transfiguration, was Elijah, who was taken to heaven without seeing death. He was in the glorified state, in the body, glorified, spiritual, as all the bodies of the blessed are. Probably the Lord took him to heaven without seeing death, in view of this very occasion. What a grand scene is now before us. The Lord of the universe is before us upon the throne; the old prophet Elijah, stands before him who was the great prophet of all the authority, before the witnesses of Christ. Here stands Moses, the Law-giver of ancient Israel, and recognizes the Lord Jesus Christ, and surrenders up all authority to him. Just at this wonderful and interesting moment, the Almighty from the upper world, called out, “This is my Son, the beloved in whom I am well pleased: hear him.”
Let us hear Paul once, on this subject. “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.” In a few words, he says, “Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of Him.” 2 Cor. v. 9. How could we be “present with the Lord,” and “accepted of Him,” when absent from the body, if there be not an inner spiritual man, who will exist separate, or absent from the body? No man living can ever reconcile this passage with the preposterous theory, that when a man dies, he has no conscious existence. To this we add only one more scripture. When John, in the Island of Patmos, was in awful and sublime vision, and saw the whole panorama of the future ages passing in review, he says, “I saw under the altar, the souls of them who were beheaded for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ, and they cried and said, how long, O Lord God Almighty, holy, just and true, dost thou not avenge us of our blood on them who dwell on the earth.” Here were souls, alive, looking back to what had been done on earth, and looking forward to what would be done in future. They had not lost their identity nor memory, forgotten the past nor distrusted the future, but were alive. The intermediate state is, therefore, a conscious state, the righteous are comforted, and at rest with the Lord, in Abraham’s bosom, or Paradise; the wicked are in Tartareous, in prison, tormented, reserved unto the judgment of the great day, with the angels that sinned.
In the fourth, and last place, let us take one look forward to the eternal, or resurrection state. Looking to the close of the intermediate state, John says, “I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no more place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of these things which were written in the books, according to their works.” Rev. xx. 10–12. After thus presenting the dead in judgment, he proceeds to tell us where they came from, as follows: “And the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them and they were judged every man according to their works.” The Greek hades, here translated hell, simply means the invisible, or unseen state. In this invisible state, the book of God reveals two distinct, or separate apartments. One is Paradise, the other is Tartareous. In this same book of Revelations, John, speaking in the person of Christ, says, “I am he who was dead and am alive forevermore; I have the keys of hell and of death; I can open and no man can shut, and shut and no man can open.” The amount of this is, that I have the keys or power, to open the grave, and raise the bodies both from land and sea, and I have the power to open the invisible state, both Paradise and Tartareous, and bring forth the spirits of the dead, both righteous and wicked, re-uniting soul and body, to stand in judgment. When the last righteous sentence is passed upon man, in the last judgment, the final separation follows. Whoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. Here is the last account of the wicked, the incorrigible, and we must leave them where God leaves them without any attempt to dwell upon their deplorable and irremediable condition.
Let us now turn our attention to the righteous—the good and virtuous of all ages—those who feared God and worked righteousness in every nation. John says, “I saw them coming from every nation, kindred, tongue, tribe and people, who had washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, and they shouted, blessing and glory, and honor, and might, and dominion unto him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb, for ever and ever!” And again they shouted, Hallelujah to the Lamb! The Lord God Omnipotent reigns! John looks again, and says, “I John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them and be their God. And God shall wipe all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, for the former things are passed away.” Shall we who are bathed in tears, here to-day, reach the holy city, where we shall be called to pass through the deep waters of affliction no more; where we shall hear the groans of the sick and dying no more; where there will be no visiting of the sick, nor funeral occasions; where we shall no more be called to give up fathers and mothers in death, husbands or wives, or precious children; but where the wounded heart shall be made whole, the weary spirit shall be at rest, and the mourner comforted. How ineffable the bliss! How unutterable the joys! of a state where we shall not only be free from all the afflictions that encompass us here, but see the Lord and dwell with him forevermore! How invaluable the rich boon proposed to man, through the Lord Jesus Christ! What everlasting obligations we are under to love God and serve him! Let us put our everlasting trust in the Lord, our strength and our Redeemer.