The Rich Man and Lazarus:
If the reader is not familiar with this passage (Luke 16:19-31), he is recommended at this point to study it carefully.

Lazarus, the beggar, dies and is "carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom". The rich man dies, but when he is "in hell, in torments", he can see "afar off" Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. He begs Abraham to send Lazarus, "that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue . But the request is rejected-the former rich man must suffer his punishment. Besides, says Abraham, "between us and you is a great gulf fixed", so that no passing over from one place to the other is possible. The rich man then asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers, lest they suffer the same fate as he has done. This request too is rejected, in terms we shall consider further in a moment.

Now there are certain features of this narrative which make it impossible to take it literally. Abraham's bosom as the place of the righteous after death; the conversation between Abraham in bliss and the rich man "in hell"; the idea that one might be sent with water from the one place to the other "to cool the tongue" of a sufferer. The conviction that this is not a literal account of the states of the dead, but a kind of parable, or symbolic narrative, becomes a certainty when it is realised that all these details were part of the tradition of the Pharisees at the time, as Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, shows in his Discourse Concerning Hades. So Jesus was employing some of his opponents' own ideas to confound them.

But it is in the last few verses of the passage that Jesus' real point emerges. When the rich man requests Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers, Abraham replies: "They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them." When the rich man says, "Nay, father Abraham, if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent", Abraham replies: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."

Within a short time this saying was strikingly fulfilled. Jesus raised Lazarus-the real Lazarus-the brother of Martha and Mary, from the dead. The miracle created a sensation among the people, but far from "being persuaded", the leaders of the Jews were only the more resolved to kill him. Very shortly after that, Jesus himself rose from the dead. Despite the powerful evidence of witnesses, the Jewish authorities were determined to deny his resurrection and to reject his claim to be the Son of God. They had not really accepted the teaching of their own Scriptures, "Moses and the prophets", and they would not accept the claims of Jesus to be the expected Messiah.

This was the whole point of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. It perfectly conveyed the point Jesus wanted to make. It has nothing to teach us about the state of the dead. For that we must go to the evidence of the Bible as a whole.

The Thief on the Cross: Luke 23:39-43 contains the account. Jesus hangs on the cross. One of the two thieves, crucified with him, confesses that he is being "justly condemned", but "this man (Jesus) has done nothing amiss". Then, turning to Jesus, he says, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom" (v.42).

This is an astonishing request. Look what it implies:

1. that to the thief Jesus was "Lord";
2. that the thief expected Jesus to survive the crucifixion;
3. that at some future time, Jesus would be "coming into his kingdom";
4. that at that time Jesus would be able to "remember him" and to restore him to life.

All these assumptions agree entirely with what the New Testament teaches. Now look at Jesus' reply:

"VERILYISAYUNTOTHEETODAYTHOUSHALTBEWITHMEINPARADISE."

Now that is just how the Greek letters appear in the oldest manuscripts: they are all capitals; the words are not separated; and there is no punctuation. So how do you understand Jesus' answer? Is it,

"Verily, I say unto thee, Today thou shalt be with me in paradise"?

Or is it,

"Verily, I say unto thee today Thou shalt be with me in paradise"?

It makes all the difference in the understanding of Jesus' promise. How are we to decide? Grammatically either sense is possible. Semeron (today) may be taken either with the first verb, or the second. But there are other considerations.

• Jesus was using a familiar Hebrew form of statement commonly found in the Old Testament. Here are three examples from one chapter (Deuteronomy 4:26,39,40):

• "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day . . . Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart . . . Thou shalt keep (God's) commandments, which I command thee this day . . ."
  
  To declare something "this day" (or today), was a form of solemn statement with full assurance of truth. Similar expressions occur 42 times in the book of Deuteronomy alone. So Jesus was using a well-known Hebrew form to underline the seriousness of his words, "I say unto thee today . . ". The thief could be assured that what Jesus promised would indeed come to pass.

• Where was Jesus "that day" anyway? Not in glory, in heaven. He was in the tomb. As he prophesied himself to the scribes and Pharisees: "The son of man shall be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. 12:40). "Heart" is a Hebrew idiom for "midst"; he meant he would be in the grave.
  
• What are we to understand by "paradise"? Once again we must be careful to get our understanding from the Bible itself, not from human traditions. The word was originally Persian and in the Old Testament is translated forest, orchards, and gardens. Isaiah declares that when the time comes for the Lord to "comfort Zion", He will "make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord (51:3).

The small number of other passages which are sometimes brought forward to support the idea of survival of the soul after death will also be found, on careful examination, to be quite consistent with the rest of Scripture.

Why so Widespread?
The question may well be asked, If the survival of some soul or spirit after death is not taught in the Bible, how has it become so widely believed among religious people?

The explanation is simple. Some such idea of survival was common in all the pagan religions of antiquity, in all nations. It represented a common longing of the human mind. It was a distinctive mark of early Christianity that it rejected this false belief. The first Christians understood the perishing nature of mankind. They looked for the new life, promised through the Gospel, not at death but at the return of Christ when the faithful dead would rise from their graves. As time went on, however, "mass conversions" of formerly pagan nations occurred in the Roman world.

Inevitably many converts brought their pagan notions with them. Further, the leaders of the Christian Church tried to make its teaching harmonise with the ideas of the philosophers, derived from Greek sources. The immortality of the soul was common among them.

But wherever there has been a serious attempt to discover what the Bible is really saying, there has been also a return to the beliefs of the early Christians. Such a return occurred during the Reformation in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The truth has been acknowledged openly in more recent times by distinguished theologians. Look at these quotations:

In 1897, B. F. Westcott, Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, commenting on 2 Timothy 1:10, wrote:

"The central fact of our creed . . . is not the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body. Our Saviour brought life and incorruption (not immortality) to light. . . Bearing this truth in mind, we can see the force of Paul's words: 'The Lord Jesus shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation' (Phil. 3:21, R.V)" - Some Lessons of the Revised Version of the New Testament, p.192.

In 1924, Bishop Gore (of London) wrote:

"I think . . . that, in the doctrine of human nature, the proposition that the soul of man is in its essence incorruptible, and so necessarily immortal . . . is derived from Greek -philosophy and not from Scripture." - The Holy Spirit and the Church, p.288, footnote.

Appalled at the spread of irreligion in the war years, the Church of England set up a Commission under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Rochester. Members of many religious communities took part. The report, Towards the Conversion of England, published in 1945, contains this paragraph:

"The idea of the inherent indestructibility of the human soul (or consciousness) owes its origin to Greek, and not to Bible sources. The central theme of the New Testament is eternal life, not for anybody and everybody, but for believers in Christ as risen from the dead." - p. 23.

(The italics in these quotations are the present writer's.)

These are remarkable declarations indeed. All that we have been finding in Scripture is here confirmed. Men and women do not automatically survive death. By nature they perish in the grave. Those who are to attain to eternal life will do so as a result of resurrection from the grave at the coming of Christ.

The Vital Message
From our brief review of the teaching of the Bible on this important subject one thing becomes clear: the message it contains is vital to us all, for if we take no notice of it, we shall perish. That is why its message is called "the Gospel", that is "the good news". Just how essential it is Paul showed in reminding his readers in Corinth of "the gospel which I preached unto you . . . by which ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you . . . (1 Cor. 15:1-2).

To the Romans he wrote:

"I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth (Rom. 1:16).

How much our perishing race needs this "good news"! What a marvellous thing it is that this message of life still exists among us, for here it is, in the pages of the Bible, in the very words of Jesus and his apostles. Let us make it our aim to get to know this "word of life" while we still have the opportunity, for our very future is at stake.