GROWTH AND PURIFICATION
What is the main purpose of the Intermediate Life? Is there something to be done there which cannot be fully done at any other time?
Let us still try to keep to the firm ground of Scripture, and to avoid confusion let us confine ourselves still to the case of those who have died, in some degree at least, in penitence and faith.
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We have already seen that Scripture intimates that that life is not one of sleep or unconsciousness. It is a clear conscious life. It is therefore natural to ask what happens in it? What is the use of it? Science and experience teach that growth is the law of all the life which we know anything about. Even if we had no further light of revelation we should find it difficult to believe that imperfect beings dying in the grace of God pass into that life and live in it for years or for ages without any growth or development.
Scripture also teaches that God's aim for us is not merely that we should escape hell or just creep into heaven. Our goal is to grow into the likeness of God, to "rise to the stature of the perfect man, even to the stature of the fullness of Christ." How many of us are ever even in sight of that goal when we die?
But Scripture goes further still. It points us forward to the final stage of being, to the Beatific Vision of God in the far future and tells us with awe that that God "is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," that "even the heavens are not clean in His sight;" that into that final abode of bliss "nothing that defileth shall enter in." Which of us, the greatest soul of us all, can look forward to such a prospect without bowing himself in dread like Isaiah of old, "Woe is me for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, that mine eyes should see the King of the Lord of Hosts!" If there be no growth or purification in the Waiting Life what hope is there ever for any one of us of fitness for the presence of the all holy God?
Think that the great majority of those who die, even though penitent and striving after right, have much of evil clinging to them; that many after a whole life of ingraining their characters with evil have brought sorrowfully to Christ at last their poor defiled souls; that even the best is not without many faults and stains. If nothing that defileth shall enter Heaven, if growth is a law of all life as far as we know it, are we not practically compelled to believe that much of the growth and purification needed to fit us for God's presence shall take place in the great Waiting Life?
And this belief and hope for all these poor faulty souls in whom the good work of God has begun on earth, St. Paul confirms. "Being confident of this very thing, that He who hath begun a good work in you will perfect it UNTIL THE DAY OF JESUS CHRIST"—i. e., right through the earth life, right through the Intermediate Life, until the last great scene in the drama of our history opens at the Judgment Day.
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