What the dead know

The question nobody likes to ask

What is the dead person experiencing right now? Most people answer from feeling rather than from Scripture, and the feelings are understandable. We want our loved ones to be happy. We want to think they can see us. The Bible, with great tenderness, says something different, and it says it in several places with no ambiguity at all.

For the living know that they will die; But the dead know nothing, And they have no more reward, For the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished; Nevermore will they have a share In anything done under the sun.

“The dead know nothing.” The sentence could hardly be plainer. Their love, their hatred and their envy, the whole emotional life of a person, “have now perished”. They have no further part in anything that happens on the earth. The dead are not watching us, cheering us on, or grieving over our mistakes. Solomon then draws the practical conclusion:

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.

No work, no planning, no knowledge, no wisdom in the grave. If the dead were conscious in heaven, they would know more, not less. If they were conscious in torment, they would at least have knowledge. Solomon rules out both.

The psalms agree

Some readers try to set Ecclesiastes aside as the musings of a disillusioned man. But the Psalms, the prayer book of Israel and of Jesus Himself, say exactly the same things.

Do not put your trust in princes, Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; In that very day his plans perish.

Here is Ecclesiastes 12:7 again from the other direction. The spirit, the breath, departs; the man returns to his earth; and in that very day his thoughts and plans perish. There is no gap in which he goes on thinking somewhere else.

The dead do not praise the Lord, Nor any who go down into silence.

For in death there is no remembrance of You; In the grave who will give You thanks?

David loved God. He wanted to praise Him. His argument to God for sparing his life is that the dead cannot praise; the grave is a place of silence. If David had believed that death would usher him into the presence of God, where praise would be richer than ever, this prayer would make no sense. King Hezekiah, pleading for his life, used the same argument: the grave cannot thank God and death cannot praise Him; it is “the living, the living man” who praises Him (Isaiah 38:18-19). God did not correct either of them. He answered their prayers.

Job and the grave

Job, in the depth of his suffering, thought long and hard about death, and his conclusions match the rest of the Old Testament.

But man dies and is laid away; Indeed he breathes his last And where is he? As water disappears from the sea, And a river becomes parched and dries up, So man lies down and does not rise. Till the heavens are no more, They will not awake Nor be roused from their sleep.

Man lies down and does not rise till the heavens are no more. Job does not say “until the moment of death is over” or “until his soul reaches heaven”. He says the dead sleep until the end of the age. Then he says something that sounds, at first, like despair but is actually a description of the dead person’s unawareness: “His sons come to honor, and he does not know it; They are brought low, and he does not perceive it” (Job 14:21). The father in the grave does not know what becomes of his children. He is not watching.

But Job does not stop there, and neither must we. In the middle of the same chapter he asks the question that this whole book is about, and answers it:

If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait, Till my change comes. You shall call, and I will answer You; You shall desire the work of Your hands.

“You shall call, and I will answer You.” Job’s hope is not that he will escape the grave by nature; it is that God will call him out of it. That is the hope of the resurrection, and it runs like a golden thread through every passage we have read. The dead know nothing, and the dead will hear His voice.

Does this mean the dead are nothing to God?

Not at all. “Precious in the sight of the Lord Is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116:15). Jesus said that God “is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him” (Luke 20:38). To God, who sees the end from the beginning and has already fixed the resurrection morning, His sleeping saints are as good as alive; their life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Nothing about them is lost. Their identity, their character, their relationship with Him, all is held in His memory and in His promise. What they do not have is consciousness in the interval, and the interval, from their point of view, has no length at all. The last thing the believer knows is closing their eyes in death; the next thing they know is the voice of Christ. For the sleeper, the morning comes immediately.

Taking the texts seriously

It is worth pausing to ask what it would take to believe that the dead are conscious, given the passages in this chapter. We would have to say that “the dead know nothing” means that they know a great deal; that “in that very day his plans perish” means his plans continue; that “there is no remembrance of You” in death means that the dead remember God perfectly; and that “no knowledge or wisdom in the grave” means knowledge and wisdom in abundance. That is not interpretation. It is contradiction. The honest course is to let the texts mean what they say and then to see how the harder passages fit with them, which is the work of Part Three.