The State of the Blessed Dead

by Henry Alford

We stand to-day at this point in our consideration of the state of the blessed dead. They depart, and are with Christ. “This day,” the day of the departure, they are consciously, blissfully, in His presence. Their faith is turned into sight: their misgivings are changed for certainty: their mourning for joy. Yet, we said, their state is necessarily imperfect. The complete condition of man is body, soul, and spirit. The former of these three, at all events, is wanting to the spirits and souls of the righteous. They are in a waiting, though in an inconceivably blissful state. Of the precise nature of that state,—of its employments, if employments it has, we know nothing. All would be speculation, if we were to speak of these matters.

Our concern to-day is with the termination of that their incomplete condition. When shall it come to an end? We have this very definitely answered for us by St. Paul, in a chapter of which we shall have much to say, and in a verse of that chapter which we will take for our text, 1 Cor. xv. 23. Notice, he is speaking of the resurrection of the dead: and he says, “But every one in his own order: Christ the first-fruits: afterward they that are Christ’s at His coming.”

Well then: from these words it is clear that the end of the expectant state of the blessed dead, and the reunion of their spirits with their risen bodies, will take place at the coming of Christ. Here at once we are met by a necessity to clear and explain that which these words import. In these days, it is by no means superfluous to say that we Christians do look forward to a real personal coming of our Lord Jesus Christ upon this our earth. I sometimes wonder whether ordinary Christian men and women ever figure to themselves what this means. I suppose we hardly do, because we fancy it is so far off from ourselves and our times, that we do not feel ourselves called upon to make it a subject of our practical thoughts. To this we might say, first, that we are by no means sure of this; and then, that even if it were true, the interest of that time of His coming for every one of us is hardly lessened by its not being near us, seeing that if we be His, it will be, whenever it comes, the day of our resurrection from the dead. It is evidently the duty of every Christian man to make it part of his ordinary thoughts and anticipations—that return of the Lord Jesus from heaven, even as He was seen to go up into heaven. Now, our object to-day is to ascertain how much we know from Scripture, without indulging in speculations of our own, about this coming, and this resurrection which shall accompany it. The latter of these two we made the subject of a sermon a very few Sundays ago; but it was not so much with our present view, as to lay down the hope of the resurrection as an element among the foundations of the Christian life.

Now one of the first and most important revelations respecting this matter is found in the fourth chapter of 1 Thess., ver. 13-18. These Thessalonians had been, as we learn from the two epistles to them, strangely excited about the coming of the Lord’s kingdom. Perhaps the Apostle’s preaching among them had taken especially this form; for he was accused before the magistrates of saying that there was besides or superior to Caesar another king, one Jesus. And in this excitement of the Thessalonians, fancying as they did that the Lord’s kingdom would come in their own time, they thought that their friends who through Jesus had died a happy death were losers by not having lived to witness the Lord’s coming. Indeed, they sorrowed for them as those that had no hope: by which expression it seems likely that they even supposed them to be altogether cut off from the benefits and blessedness of that coming by not having been able to see it in the flesh. Thereupon St. Paul puts them right by saying,—using the same argument as in that great resurrection chapter, 1 Cor. xv.,—that “if we believe that Jesus Himself died and rose again, even so also those who through Jesus have fallen asleep will God bring with Him,” that is, will God bring back to us when He brings back to us Jesus.

You may just observe, by the way, that the whole force of what the Apostle says is very commonly lost, by a wrong method of reading these words. We very commonly hear them read, “will God bring with him.” But thus we, as I said, lose the force of the argument, which is:—If Jesus, our first-fruits, our representative, died and rose again, so will all who die in union with Jesus rise again. And in order to that, the same power of God which brings Jesus back to us, will with Him, with Jesus, bring their spirits back, in order to that resurrection.

Well, what then? “This we say unto you by the word of the Lord”—thus the Apostle introduces, not an argument, not a command or saying of his own, but a special revelation—“that we, which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord” (for notice that at first, at the early time when these Thessalonian epistles were written, first of all St. Paul’s letters, the Apostle looked forward to that day of which neither man nor angel knoweth, as about to come on in his own time) shall have no advantage, no priority, over them which have fallen asleep. And why? For this reason—that “the Lord Himself shall come down from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first:” that is, shall rise before anything else happens—any changing, or summoning to the Lord, of us who are alive.

Now here let us pause in the sacred text, and consider what it is which we have before us. Mind, we are speaking to-day, as the Apostle is speaking in this passage, entirely of the blessed dead; of those of whom it may be said that through Jesus their death is but a holy sleep. We have clearly this before us:—at a certain time, fixed in the counsels of God, the Father, known to no created being,—mysteriously unknown also, for He Himself assures us of this in words which no ingenuity can explain away, to the Son Himself in His state of waiting for it,—at that fixed time the Lord, that is, Christ, shall appear in the sky, visible to men in His glorified body; and His coming shall be announced to men by a mighty call, a signal cry, and by the trumpet of God.

Now let me at once say that as to such expressions as this, when we are told that they cannot bear their literal meaning, but are only used in condescension to our human ways of speaking, and thus an attempt is made to deprive them in fact of all meaning, I do not recognise any such rule of interpretation. If the words are used to suit our human ways of thinking, I can see no reason why the things signified by those words may not also be used to affect our senses, which will be still human, when the great day comes. As to the sound being heard by all, or as to the Lord being seen by all, I can with safety leave that to Him who made the eye and the ear, and believe that if He says so, He will find the way for it to be so.

Now let us follow on with the description. With the Lord Jesus, accompanying Him, though unseen to those below on the earth, will be the myriads of spirits of the blessed dead, And notice,—for it is an important point, since Holy Scripture is consistent with itself in another place on this matter,—that at this coming none are with the Lord, no spirits of the departed, I mean, except those of the blessed dead. In other words, this is not the general coming to judgment, when the whole of the dead shall stand before God, but it is that first resurrection of which the Evangelist speaks in the Apocalypse, when he says, chap. xx. 5, “The rest of the dead lived not again until (a prescribed time which he mentions, whatever that may mean) the thousand years were finished This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ.”

Then, the Lord being still descending from heaven and on the way to this world, the dead in Christ shall rise first—the first thing: the graves shall be opened, and the bodies of the saints that sleep shall come forth, and, for so the words surely imply, their spirits, which have come with the Lord, shall be united to those bodies, each to his own.