Introduction

The verse everybody quotes

Stand at enough gravesides and you will hear it. A minister, a friend, a card on the flowers: absent from the body, present with the Lord. It is one of the most quoted phrases in the Bible, and it is quoted most often at exactly the moment when people most need something solid to hold. The words come from Paul:

We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.

Most people take the sentence to mean something quite specific. They take it to mean that at the moment of death a conscious part of us, usually called the soul, leaves the body and goes immediately to be with Christ, and that the funeral is therefore a farewell to a body while the real person is already somewhere else. It is a comforting picture. It is also, for many, the only picture they have ever been offered.

This book asks a simple question of that picture: is it what the Bible actually teaches? Not what tradition has taught, not what a hymn says, not what we would prefer to be true, but what Scripture says when we let it speak from Genesis to Revelation and let the plain passages explain the difficult ones.

I want to say at the outset that nothing in these pages takes anything away from the hope of the Christian. If anything, I believe the Bible’s own teaching about death is more comforting than the version most of us inherited, not less. It leaves no room for a loved one looking down and grieving over our troubles, no room for a purgatory, no room for fear of what the dead may be experiencing right now, and no room for the deceptions that have always gathered around the claim that the dead can speak to us. What it offers instead is rest, a Saviour who holds the keys of the grave, and a morning.

Why the subject matters

Death is the one appointment none of us will miss. “It is appointed for men to die once,” says the writer to the Hebrews, “but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Every family will stand at a grave. Every believer will be asked, by a grieving child or a dying parent, “Where are they now?” If our answer is built on tradition rather than Scripture, it will not bear the weight that will one day be placed on it.

There is a second reason. What we believe about death shapes what we believe about God. If the dead are conscious, then the unsaved dead are conscious too, and the doctrine of an eternally burning hell follows almost automatically. If instead the dead sleep until the resurrection, then judgment belongs to a day God has appointed, death itself will be destroyed, and the character of God is seen to be exactly what Jesus revealed: a Father who is not willing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9).

There is a third reason, and it is a practical one. Jesus warned that the last days would be marked by deception, including signs and wonders designed to mislead (Matthew 24:24). A great deal of that deception, from ancient Babylon to the modern séance, rests on one claim: that the dead are alive somewhere and can be reached. If the Bible says otherwise, then knowing what the Bible says is a protection, not merely an academic exercise.

How this book works

The book moves in four parts. Part One asks what a human being is, because you cannot understand what happens at death until you know what dies. Part Two looks at how the Bible describes death itself, consistently and in both Testaments. Part Three takes the hard texts one at a time: Paul’s “absent from the body”, the thief on the cross, the rich man and Lazarus, the medium of En Dor, and the souls under the altar. I have not hidden any of them. Part Four turns to the morning: the resurrection, the end of death, and how a person who believes all this actually lives and grieves.

Each chapter opens with a reading line so that you can read the passages in full before you read what I say about them. Each ends with a short summary, questions for reflection or group discussion, and one thing to practise. Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version. Where I summarise a passage rather than quoting it, I give the reference so that you can check me. I hope you will.

One rule governs everything that follows. Where Scripture speaks plainly and often, that plain and repeated teaching must govern the one or two passages that are harder. We do not build a doctrine on a parable, a comma, or a single verse pulled from its paragraph. We build it on the whole witness of God’s Word.