SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, thank you for bringing us here together safely on this beautiful morning.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, thank you for all of your promises to us and how they all find their yes and amen in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lord, for the benefits we enjoy in this life, and thank you for the benefits we enjoy at death in Him and through Him.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, help us to reflect well on these things today as we consider what happens when we die.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, thank you that this doesn't have to be a scary thing for us to talk about, but it's a hopeful thing.
SPEAKER_01: It's a helpful thing.
SPEAKER_01: It's a thing that gives us encouragement, gives us hope, so that we don't have to grieve as those who grieve without that hope.
SPEAKER_01: So, Lord, as always, we're dependent upon your Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Help us to understand and apply better your word.
SPEAKER_01: We pray in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so these past several weeks we have been talking about the benefits of redemption that we enjoy in this life.
SPEAKER_01: We've talked about justification, adoption, sanctification.
SPEAKER_01: Last week we talked about assurance of God's love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Spirit, increase of grace, and perseverance to the end.
SPEAKER_01: Today, we're talking about the benefits that we enjoy in union with Christ that are applied to us specifically at death.
SPEAKER_01: So, before we get into the catechism answer and so on, uh how would you answer that question?
SPEAKER_01: What are the benefits of dying in Christ?
SPEAKER_01: Or what happens to believers when we die?
SPEAKER_01: I'll ask it more simply.
SPEAKER_06: What happens?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: We move from this corrupted place to a place that God has made just for us.
SPEAKER_06: And it may be an intermediate place that are, you know, I'm not gonna get all dogmatic about exactly what it is or anything.
unknown: I'll get dogmatic about it.
unknown: It's all about evidence.
unknown: And what does the evidence support?
SPEAKER_06: The evidence supports that God is going to be with me in my death and never leave me nor forsake me, and he's going to be with me and with whatever my experiences after death, it will be made under his good, loving, sovereign power.
SPEAKER_06: How's that?
SPEAKER_00: You're looking at me?
SPEAKER_00: James approved.
SPEAKER_06: Is this gonna be on the test?
unknown: Teresa?
unknown: We can rejoice that we will have one more stand.
unknown: Yeah.
unknown: We can.
SPEAKER_01: Uh guy in the back row playing on your phone.
SPEAKER_01: You had your hand up.
SPEAKER_04: I'm just confirming I'm playing with my phone.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01: Appreciate that.
SPEAKER_01: You're looking up scripture references because you're that holy.
SPEAKER_03: Those candies aren't going to crush themselves, man.
SPEAKER_01: Every time you crush a candy, a Bible verse pops out, right?
SPEAKER_01: So it's righteous.
SPEAKER_01: So what we're talking about today is the intermediate state.
SPEAKER_01: What happens to believers when we die?
SPEAKER_01: Where do we go?
SPEAKER_01: When we say the intermediate state, we mean intermediate.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of Christians think, a lot of Christians think that when you die, you go to heaven, and that's the end of the story.
SPEAKER_01: It's actually not the end of the story.
SPEAKER_01: The story of Christianity isn't life after death, it's life after life after death.
SPEAKER_01: It's consummate life, it's glorified life, it's resurrection life in the new heavens and new earth.
SPEAKER_01: So we're going to talk about that new heavens and new earth.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about the final state next week, but this week, again, we're looking at the intermediate state.
SPEAKER_01: And there are two popular alternatives to what we will discuss as the intermediate state that have been prevalent throughout church history, that to some extent are prevalent today, depending whether you talk to certain Protestants or certain Roman Catholics.
SPEAKER_01: And the first is soul sleep.
SPEAKER_01: And soul sleep is the idea that when we die, we go into a state of unconscious repose.
SPEAKER_01: Martin Luther held a position like that one, the Anabaptists, Socinians, which were kind of like 16th, 17th century rationalists.
SPEAKER_01: Today, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, holds something similar to that.
SPEAKER_01: And advocates of the view of soul sleep base their position on the common use of sleep as a metaphor for death.
SPEAKER_01: Like several places.
SPEAKER_01: Acts 7, Acts 13, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4 talk about death as a kind of sleep.
SPEAKER_01: And that biblical metaphor is married to a kind of anthropological commitment to the tight unity of mind and body, or body and soul.
SPEAKER_01: So the idea is that as the body goes in death, the soul goes in death.
SPEAKER_01: And so the mind or the consciousness, in a sense, goes out of existence until the resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: What do you make of that idea in light of scripture?
SPEAKER_01: Anything come to mind?
SPEAKER_04: So I would assume that means immediately.
SPEAKER_03: And that's where those arguments would come from, is that those terms meaning are changeable in certain pastors.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the tricky part with that is when Paul says, you know, when he's talking about when I die, depart with me to be with Christ, and he says that's better.
SPEAKER_01: He compares the this worldly existence to a worldly, an extra-worldly existence with Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And it's not, you know, the sense you get there is not a sort of impersonal kind of departure, but like a personal existence in the presence of Christ for a time.
SPEAKER_06: Today thou shalt be with me in Ariana.
SPEAKER_07: That's what I was going to say.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so you will be with me.
SPEAKER_01: Again, it's a personal, relational kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01: John Calvin, his very first published work was a work by the name of Psychopanicia.
SPEAKER_01: And this is what he wrote about.
SPEAKER_01: Soul sleep.
SPEAKER_01: That was his first published work.
SPEAKER_01: It was him refuting the idea of soul sleep.
SPEAKER_01: And he drew on several of these texts that we're talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Also, Luke 16, the rich man and Lazarus, where Lazarus is clearly portrayed as conscious in this sort of intermediate state of life after death.
SPEAKER_01: Today you will be with me in paradise.
SPEAKER_01: When Jesus dies, he commits his spirit not to non-being but to his father's hands.
SPEAKER_01: Stephen, the same kind of thing in Acts 7 when he's stone.
SPEAKER_01: And so we have these different pictures of a conscious, personal, relational existence in the state or in the period between life and death.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we can speculate about the relationship of time and eternity and what that's like, and will we experience it as just the blink of an eye, and then it will be the resurrection?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: What we know is what Scripture presents to us as the state, however, we experience the flow of time in it, where we go to be in the presence of the Lord and we await the coming of the resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: Randy?
SPEAKER_04: What about in Revelation, the souls that are under the altar crying out?
SPEAKER_01: Crying out, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Where is it?
SPEAKER_04: What's that?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're in the intermediate state.
SPEAKER_01: To me, that's just one more evidence for a conscious kind of existence before the in between death and the consummation.
SPEAKER_06: So what does it mean when Jesus says to the various people about the people that he brings back from the dead that they're just sleeping?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he says they're asleep.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we don't.
SPEAKER_01: That biblical metaphor is um yeah, it's it's it's a legit metaphor for sleep.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible uses that metaphor for sleep.
SPEAKER_01: But it's always the question with the metaphor, like how tightly does it align with the reality?
SPEAKER_01: Is that what Jesus is saying?
SPEAKER_01: That everybody who's dead is only sleeping?
SPEAKER_01: I think when you bring all these other things into the picture, but yeah, when Jesus brings people back from the dead, I mean he uses that metaphor.
SPEAKER_01: And in those contexts, especially, I think he's emphasizing the fact that, you know, as far as him and the giving of life is concerned, bringing someone back to life is as easy as waking someone up from sleep.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a lot of what's going on there.
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't say that they are, their soul is with God, like a dead person with me.
SPEAKER_02: He says they're asleep.
SPEAKER_02: He's not snatching them back from God or heaven or whatever.
SPEAKER_01: I don't maybe he is.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he doesn't explain it, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like this question that we have about the precise mechanics of the intermediate state, like in those circumstances, he's not at all interested in answering it.
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's kind of like we have to weigh everything on balance again.
SPEAKER_03: Uh maybe it becomes formulated as well.
SPEAKER_03: That's one of the constructs of the social argument is in Genesis is not reading the dust of the earth redirect the life of the soul.
SPEAKER_03: So it's a combination of life and the body to construct the soul.
SPEAKER_03: That's part of the things we're gonna hear in the argument is that it doesn't form to it.
SPEAKER_03: It's part of like the light law has electricity applied to it.
SPEAKER_03: If you remove one of the components, then the light seems to exist, and the law has electricity to apply it.
SPEAKER_03: So you have a lot of formula and components to it in the army.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: What about poor Lazarus?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was in paradise.
SPEAKER_00: And then hey, he's in paradise, and then Jesus said, come out.
SPEAKER_00: Lazarus, you gotta call, man.
SPEAKER_06: You gotta says he's he had a raw idea.
SPEAKER_00: He was like, I gotta go back.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, man.
SPEAKER_01: You know, Paul in a vision got swept up to the third heaven and he didn't, you know, complain about coming back.
SPEAKER_01: He, you know, I think he he saw that as a kind of I mean, if if God were get to give you a glimpse of his glory now, it's like, yeah, you're gonna want to just stay there.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be like Peter on the mountaintop.
SPEAKER_01: Can we just, you know, pitch some tents here and hang out?
SPEAKER_01: Because this is great.
SPEAKER_01: This is great.
SPEAKER_01: But I I think Lazarus would probably have had the same experience where it's like you've been given this glimpse of glory, this glimpse of paradise, this taste of heaven for a reason.
SPEAKER_01: And I think in the final analysis, Lazarus probably would have been cool with that.
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna tell your story forever.
SPEAKER_01: Not really, they're gonna tell Jesus' story forever, and you're you know, the key instrument in it.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so soul sleep, that's that's that's a common view, that a somewhat common view in the in the history of the church.
SPEAKER_01: Uh another, maybe more top-of-mind view is the Roman Catholic view of purgatory.
SPEAKER_01: According to Roman Catholic, you know, reading Hebrews 9 27, right after death comes judgment.
SPEAKER_01: So there's a kind of intermediate judgment before the final judgment.
SPEAKER_01: And if you die in a state of mortal sin, then you go straight to hell and you suffer eternal conscious torment.
SPEAKER_01: If you die in a perfect state of grace, lacking mortal or venial sin, then you go straight into heaven and you enjoy the beatific vision.
SPEAKER_01: Uh does anyone get to do that?
SPEAKER_01: Roman Catholicism?
SPEAKER_01: Has anyone ever died in such a state?
SPEAKER_01: Do you know?
SPEAKER_01: Well, Mary former Catholics.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Mary didn't die, she was assumed because she was perfect, so that death would not impact her.
SPEAKER_00: But as far as if you're not talking about Mary, no, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, unless you had your confession and walked out and got hit by a bus within like eight seconds.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Then I think you were clean enough to make it.
SPEAKER_01: That was always my anxiety being a Roman Catholic.
SPEAKER_01: Like, how long has it been since I went to confession?
SPEAKER_01: Because those sins really rack up.
SPEAKER_01: So if you if you die in a state of imperfect grace, according to Roman Catholicism, so that means you know maybe you have venial sin uh but no mortal sin, then you go to purgatory.
SPEAKER_01: And purgatory is a state of temporary punishment for those who have not yet fully paid for their transgressions.
SPEAKER_01: So Hebrews 12, 14 says that we ought to strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord, right?
SPEAKER_01: So purgatory is the place where the imperfect process of sanctification and holiness can be completed.
SPEAKER_01: Where do you find that in the Bible?
SPEAKER_01: Well, not quite the Bible, but almost the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: 2 Maccabees 12, 39 through 46 speaks of Judas Maccabees making propitiation for those who had died in order that they might be released from their sin.
SPEAKER_01: So there's this idea that there are people who have died but are still held fast by their sin in some way, and Judas Maccabees made some kind of offering in order to propitiate and release that sin.
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, fast forward a couple thousand years, and when the coin into the coffer clings, a soul from purgatory springs.
SPEAKER_01: Which is what really tipped Martin Luther over the edge and got the Protestant Reformation going.
SPEAKER_01: Clement of Alexandria, early church father, important church father, developed the idea of purgatory out of the liturgical practice for praying for the dead and a desire to explain how maybe somebody who had come to faith in Jesus, but they were clearly not very sanctified or completely sanctified, and then they died.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, how does that work?
SPEAKER_01: Because they seem like a really imperfect saint.
SPEAKER_01: How do they come into the presence of Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: This is what Gregory the Great, who is the first Pope Pope, what he said in Matthew about Matthew 12, 32.
SPEAKER_01: He said, as for certain lesser faults, we must believe that before final judgment there is a purifying fire.
SPEAKER_01: For he who is the truth declares that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be pardoned, either in this age or in the age which is to come.
SPEAKER_01: So before final judgment, a purifying fire.
SPEAKER_01: Which, you know, in the final analysis, uh, it's better than eternal fire.
SPEAKER_01: So if there's something you can do to get ready for the final judgment so that you don't go into hell forever, it sounds like a good deal, even if it takes 10,000.
SPEAKER_01: Moneymaker.
SPEAKER_00: Purgatory is a moneymaker, too.
SPEAKER_01: So, how, you know, thinking again in an evaluative kind of mode, how do we respond to something like purgatory?
SPEAKER_01: What sort of biblical and theological ideas pop up in your mind to say, eh, I don't think that's right.
SPEAKER_00: Purgatory suggests, and maybe outright states, that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ was not enough.
SPEAKER_00: So that in and of itself is striking to the conscience.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_03: It makes a transactional.
SPEAKER_03: It does make it transactional.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the so on the biblical score, we want to be able to say that purgatory has no direct biblical support.
SPEAKER_01: There's this one obscure line uttered in a deutero-canonical book that we don't recognize as authoritative that maybe would point towards something kind of sort of like purgatory.
SPEAKER_01: But the Bible, the canon of scripture, has no support for this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01: And an even stronger counter-argument, I think, is by pointing to all that the Bible says about the sufficiency of Christ and our doctrine of justification.
SPEAKER_01: These are core differences with Roman Catholics.
SPEAKER_01: But what do we believe about justification?
SPEAKER_01: It's the act of God's free grace whereby he forgives all our sins and receives it as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone.
SPEAKER_01: So, one and done.
SPEAKER_01: If we are in Christ, we are justified.
SPEAKER_01: We are declared innocent before the throne of God.
SPEAKER_01: So if that's the case, then what room do we have for a doctrine of purgatory?
SPEAKER_01: Jesus paid it all.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to go into some kind of holding tank after death to pay something more if Jesus already paid it all.
SPEAKER_08: Well, in saying, you know, if you believe in purgatory, you're believing that you don't have all of the righteousness of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So it cuts right right at the heart of our assurance of pardon.
SPEAKER_01: Our assurance of salvation.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_04: Same thing with the fact that you say today is the day for salvation.
SPEAKER_04: You won't get those second chances that in the future.
SPEAKER_04: That's not a thought.
SPEAKER_04: Today is the day for salvation while you're still here and are right.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so those are two wrong, from my, from our perspective, views on the intermediate state.
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about the right one.
SPEAKER_01: This is shorter catechism question 37.
SPEAKER_01: What benefits do believers receive from Christ at death?
SPEAKER_01: The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into glory, and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do remain in their graves till the resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: So, let's talk about the parts.
SPEAKER_01: And we'll start by talking about death itself.
SPEAKER_01: Is death a part of life?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, descriptively it is.
SPEAKER_01: Should it be?
SPEAKER_01: Where does death come from?
SPEAKER_01: What's that?
SPEAKER_01: It's not supposed to be, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's not supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01: What's that?
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_01: Death is the wage of sin.
SPEAKER_01: Death is a consequence of sin.
SPEAKER_01: Specifically speaking about human death.
SPEAKER_01: People can argument about plants and animals in the garden.
SPEAKER_01: That's that's not, we don't need to talk about that today.
SPEAKER_01: But in scripture, when it comes to human beings, we think we see three types of death.
SPEAKER_01: The first is the most obvious, physical death.
SPEAKER_01: Genesis 42, 38.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, this is Jacob speaking.
SPEAKER_01: My son shall not go down with you, for his brother is dead, and he is the only one left dead.
SPEAKER_01: You know, he's it's just everyday, quotidian kind of dead, not alive anymore.
SPEAKER_01: The breath has left his body.
SPEAKER_01: That's one type of death.
SPEAKER_01: Another type of death is spiritual death.
SPEAKER_01: And spiritual death is the separation of a person from God.
SPEAKER_01: Ephesians 2, 1 through 2.
SPEAKER_01: Paul talking to people who are physically alive.
SPEAKER_01: You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.
SPEAKER_01: So, we got physical death, we got spiritual death.
SPEAKER_01: You know, when God told Adam, You shall not eat of the tree, he held the consequence before him and said, In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.
SPEAKER_01: And surely Adam heard that as kind of physical death, right?
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe comprehensive death, whatever that would have meant to him.
SPEAKER_01: But he didn't die.
SPEAKER_01: Does that mean God broke his promise?
SPEAKER_01: Does that mean that God was bluffing?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: He did die.
SPEAKER_01: He just did not die physically, not yet.
SPEAKER_01: He died spiritually, in that he was alienated from God.
SPEAKER_01: And the third type of death that we see in Scripture is eternal death, which is the finalization of that alienation between a person and God.
SPEAKER_01: Revelation 20, verse 6 Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: Over such the second death has no power.
SPEAKER_01: But they will be priests of God and Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.
SPEAKER_01: Or Revelation 21:8.
SPEAKER_01: As for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
SPEAKER_01: So believers are saved from the second death, the alienation between the person and God that's reconciled through Christ, and we are kept from that third form of death, which is eternal death, or what Revelation calls the second death.
SPEAKER_01: But in this age, on this side of glory, we are not all kept from that first form of death, that physical death.
SPEAKER_01: We still experience it.
SPEAKER_01: And it was a lot, it was an issue, right?
SPEAKER_01: In the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Thessalonians 4.
SPEAKER_01: Paul writes to them to encourage them.
SPEAKER_01: Because there's a problem.
SPEAKER_01: We've put our faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: We believe in him.
SPEAKER_01: We have eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: Bob put his faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He has eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: But Bob just died.
SPEAKER_01: How do I make sense of that?
SPEAKER_01: And Paul says to him, I don't want you to grieve as those who have no hope.
SPEAKER_01: Because the trumpet will sound and Christ will descend.
SPEAKER_01: And those of us who are still alive will meet him in the air.
SPEAKER_01: Or the dead will rise first to meet him in the air, and those of us who are still alive will meet him too.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so we're saved from our spiritual death, we're kept from eternal death, and yet we still experience unless Jesus comes back first physical death.
SPEAKER_01: So this catechism question helps us to think about alright, when that happens, what happens?
SPEAKER_01: First it talks about the souls of believers.
SPEAKER_01: In the ancient Greek world, there was uh there was a kind of dualism between body and soul.
SPEAKER_01: Uh for Plata, the soul was immortal.
SPEAKER_01: It uh it dwelled in the world of the forms apart from and before the creation of the world.
SPEAKER_01: And in Neoplatonic thought, this sort of idea entered that the way you get creation of human individuals is the soul falls out of heaven in some way and inhabits a body for a time.
SPEAKER_01: And bodies are inherently corrupt.
SPEAKER_01: Bodies are bound by appetites and desires and all these sort of base kind of things that continue to pull the soul downward.
SPEAKER_01: And so what does salvation look like?
SPEAKER_01: Salvation looks like in a sense, back up the ladder of being, back to the one, back to the good, back to the beautiful, back to God, back to that disembodied state where we can just be souls again and we can get rid of the body.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Christianity, for the most part, rejected that.
SPEAKER_01: Because we are a mind-body duality.
SPEAKER_01: We are a soul-body duality.
SPEAKER_01: We are embodied souls and we are in soul bodies.
SPEAKER_01: God created us, body and soul.
SPEAKER_01: In the end of the story, like I said before, it's not a disembodied existence in heaven, it's a thoroughly embodied, glorified body existence in the new heavens and new earth.
SPEAKER_01: So, when we think about the souls of believers, it's really important that we don't forget that intimate connection between the soul and the body.
SPEAKER_01: The first half of this question will talk about what happens with the soul, and the second half will talk about what happens with the body.
SPEAKER_01: But we never want to think in an abstracted kind of way where, like, the real me is my soul, and my body is just the skin suit that my soul wears for a while.
SPEAKER_01: Completely unbiblical, right?
SPEAKER_01: You are your soul, you are your body both.
SPEAKER_01: And what you do with your body actually impacts what happens with your soul.
SPEAKER_01: And what you do with your soul too impacts what happens with your body.
SPEAKER_06: The incarnation really uh challenged any any belief that that uh diminishes God's love for the body and an appearanor, and his care for it.
SPEAKER_06: He entered his own creation and took on a spirit of the body.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: And he was resurrected in a material body.
SPEAKER_06: My you know, moment of doubt, I go right back to touch me and see the spirit, not flesh and bones that you see that I have.
SPEAKER_06: He's so kind to give them back to evidence.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm still I'm still deep in it.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrews 2, quote 14.
SPEAKER_00: Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: That through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery.
SPEAKER_00: So just turn on that this weekend.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus became flesh so that he could die.
SPEAKER_00: Um and just thing with that.
SPEAKER_00: It's just, and then at Usted Kenny, we've all discussed that Jesus will always have that body, will always be flesh.
SPEAKER_00: Um Paul talks about we will have a perishable body that becomes imperishable for eternity.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's beautiful, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna sneak that in, man.
SPEAKER_00: I was.
SPEAKER_00: And then Ruby keep it up for me.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, I didn't know.
SPEAKER_01: So the souls of believers after death are made perfect in holiness.
SPEAKER_01: Uh you'll remember from when we talked about sanctification.
SPEAKER_01: Uh sanctification is just a big word for making holy.
SPEAKER_01: Like they really are in Greek, it's the same, it's the same group word.
SPEAKER_01: So holiness is being set apart, holiness is being cleansed, holiness is being consecrated for service.
SPEAKER_01: And so we were made to worship God, and when we come to faith in Christ, it's the duplex gratia, the twofold gift.
SPEAKER_01: We have justification and sanctification at the same time through our union with Christ.
SPEAKER_01: So that's the promise that we are being conformed to the image of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: But the question that purgatory raises is what happens if that process is incomplete when you die, if you're not yet fully conformed to the image of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: But even that question, if you think about it, um when it kind of presumes that conformity to the image of Christ is an option that's available to us on this side of glory.
SPEAKER_01: Whereas a Protestant doctrine of sanctification and glorification would say that God will conform us to the image of Christ, but that is an unfinished project before we die or before Jesus comes back.
SPEAKER_01: What finishes the project?
SPEAKER_01: Us being ushered into the presence of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: That's when we are perfected.
SPEAKER_01: That's when we are fully and entirely sanctified and no longer capable of sin.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews 12, 14 again, strive to strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you think about it, Paul says in Philippians 2, we've talked about it a couple times now, that he dies, he goes into the presence of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews 12 also talks about the saints and angels, uh, the spirits of the righteous made perfect, right, in this great festival assembly and gathering in the presence of God.
SPEAKER_01: It's like a heavenly worship service that you see in Hebrews 12.
SPEAKER_01: Well, how does a saint go into the presence of God?
SPEAKER_01: How can a saint go into the presence of God if they've not already been fully sanctified?
SPEAKER_01: And so that's that perfection in holiness is what grants us entry into the presence of God, consummated entry.
SPEAKER_01: Because Isaiah 6, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
SPEAKER_01: The whole earth is filled with his glory.
SPEAKER_01: Uh Isaiah can't be in his presence unless he's atoned for and cleansed.
SPEAKER_01: And so we need to be cleansed before we can go into God's presence at death.
SPEAKER_01: So perfection grants us entry, perfection and holiness.
SPEAKER_01: It also keeps us in God's presence.
SPEAKER_01: If we're perfected, we've reached the end of sanctification.
SPEAKER_01: He is faithful to bring to completion that good work that he started in us.
SPEAKER_06: And when we see him, we shall be like him.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: In 1 John, because we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
SPEAKER_06: And all distractions and the will just make away like the corridor when curve through the ring.
SPEAKER_06: And we will see as he is.
SPEAKER_06: And that moment, I just imagine poof.
SPEAKER_06: All the stuff that still needs to get water for me will just poop right away.
SPEAKER_06: That's how I imagine it.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So this next quad, souls of believers are after death made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into glory.
SPEAKER_01: That's, you know, that's swiping a little bit at that idea of both those ideas of soul sleep and purgatory.
SPEAKER_01: It's to say that there's no.
SPEAKER_01: The intermediate state is intermediate.
SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to entering into the glorious presence of God after death, there's no waiting room.
SPEAKER_01: Like that's when you close your eyes for the last time, you can close them in confidence, knowing that the next time you open them, whatever that means for a disembodied existence, you will open them to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: I remember I uh we had a woman, she was wonderful.
SPEAKER_01: She was an older lady member of our church in Illinois, and she had to have aorta transplant.
SPEAKER_01: Like she needed a new aorta.
SPEAKER_01: And she's telling me about it.
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, is that even possible?
SPEAKER_01: How do they do that?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that it's possible.
SPEAKER_01: They put you on a bypass machine, they remove your heart from your chest, take the aorta off, and they replace it with a new one.
SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
SPEAKER_01: But I was at, yeah, I'm talking to her and I'm asking her, like, you know, how are you dealing with that?
SPEAKER_01: Are you scared?
SPEAKER_01: Are you confident?
SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
SPEAKER_01: And she's like, I mean, I've got Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a win-win.
SPEAKER_01: I'm either gonna wake up in a hospital room surrounded by my loved ones, or I'm gonna wake up in the arms of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And she wasn't just trying to give the like Christian answer for the pastor.
SPEAKER_01: She really meant that.
SPEAKER_01: She really believed that.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's true.
SPEAKER_01: And we can take comfort and confidence from that.
SPEAKER_01: Knowing that we don't have to die in a state of anxiety or worry or wonder about am I gonna go into the presence of Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: Or am I gonna go into a fiery holding tank?
SPEAKER_01: Or am I gonna go downstairs because I haven't quite cleared the bar.
SPEAKER_01: There's some mortal sins somewhere in me that I forgot to confess.
SPEAKER_01: Just speaking for myself, that's like a state of existential dread that I lived in for a long time.
SPEAKER_01: And where that drove me was to say, well, screw it.
SPEAKER_01: I'm constantly failing, so I'm not even gonna try to do the right thing.
SPEAKER_01: There's great hope, there's great comfort in this biblical doctrine of the intermediate state.
SPEAKER_06: Well, even the Catholics do have a little bit.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I I love uh Dante's divine comedy.
SPEAKER_06: I do.
SPEAKER_06: And even in his, I mean, he has Purgatorio and all the stuff that they, and you can just sort of bracket that out.
SPEAKER_06: But in Russian, when the saints see a new one coming in, here comes one to augment our love.
SPEAKER_06: And it's just like, oh, we're getting another person to make this even more, the more the merrier.
SPEAKER_06: Come on.
SPEAKER_06: Uh it to me is so beautiful thinking of saints welcoming another saint into that paradise of God.
SPEAKER_06: Here comes one to make our praise even more beautiful.
SPEAKER_06: So that's how I think.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I okay, I I give Dante, you just don't see I think it would be.
SPEAKER_01: Are they well entering into paradise after the fires of purgatory?
SPEAKER_06: No.
SPEAKER_06: So I think we're really good to say.
SPEAKER_01: Ah, really good.
SPEAKER_01: Well, well, the good news are Catholic brothers and sisters.
SPEAKER_01: When I say Catholic brothers and sisters, I mean that people believe in Catholics and put their faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Uh they're not going to go to purgatory.
SPEAKER_01: They might believe that well, their church might teach that they will, but they're gonna go straight into the presentation.
SPEAKER_01: That's something we can hear about trying to bring their Christianity into line with what they're doing.
SPEAKER_01: Souls of believers rather than perfectly holiness, and they immediately have the Lord and their bodies still united to Christ, you rather resurrect.
SPEAKER_01: When you when you think about your union with Christ, is that reflecting your meditation on your union?
SPEAKER_06: Is that your body sometimes we just don't think about it here?
SPEAKER_01: But this is the problem that they had before arguing with the greatest.
SPEAKER_01: So my soul is good.
SPEAKER_01: My soul is good.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter what I do.
SPEAKER_01: My body is whatever.
SPEAKER_01: When you go into that brothel, you can use this with your unit.
SPEAKER_01: So we we practice this every Sunday when we go to the word table.
SPEAKER_01: So we don't want to be able to remind that word.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to be so spiritual in our thinking about our connection with Jesus that we miss the actual material benefits and implications of being the idea of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: That's just another way of saying what we do with before.
SPEAKER_01: What we do with our bodies matter.
SPEAKER_01: But it's also that's also another way of receiving comfort from Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: We suffer sickness, when we're hurt, when we're disabled, when we're getting on ears and things on the world the way we use the word.
SPEAKER_06: None of that is all of that, all of that will ultimately be all the way to the Paul says the second.
SPEAKER_01: We know that the head that is our earthly home is destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: We have a building for God.
SPEAKER_01: A house not in hand eternal heavens.
SPEAKER_01: We grow, belonging to put on our heavenly life.
SPEAKER_01: If indeed by putting it on, we may not be found today.
SPEAKER_01: But while we are still in this head, we grow being burdened.
SPEAKER_01: Not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further bloated, so that what is mortal maybe followed up by life.
SPEAKER_01: So he's offering the body.
SPEAKER_01: We're actually not longing for not longing for the dissolution of the body like the reason of the world.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to go to the blood, we want to further.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want a moral body, we want a spiritual body, a heavenly body, and be resurrected and glorified.
SPEAKER_01: And so the mechanism question or answer gathers these ideas together to say that when we die, yeah, our bodies go into the ground.
SPEAKER_01: But our bodies are still united to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And so when they're in the ground, they're waiting for it.
SPEAKER_01: That's not that's the intervening state of our bodies.
SPEAKER_01: There's this temporary distribution between the body and the soul and go into the presence of God.
SPEAKER_01: But that is not the end of the story.
SPEAKER_01: The end of the story is the consolation that the end of the goal is that the soul body.
SPEAKER_06: He intends for me to be fully as an age as I'm in the process of becoming his an Asian.
SPEAKER_06: And that would be ecstatic joy.
SPEAKER_06: So I'm trying to age for the glory of God.
SPEAKER_06: I'm trying to endure my sipping by my brother calls it early onset river mortis.
SPEAKER_06: I'm enjoying my early onset river mortis.
SPEAKER_06: I'm trying to do it for the glory of God.
SPEAKER_05: It won't have the last word either.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: What else?
SPEAKER_03: The promise is real there's nothing else is no other hoop I need to jump through.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
SPEAKER_01: No other hoop to jump through to receptor.
SPEAKER_05: As it says in the first three dead smaller.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we often think uh we spend a lot of time and energy on trying to figure out how to live well, which isn't bad.
SPEAKER_01: We should do that.
SPEAKER_01: But um the in the Middle Ages they were really good about this.
SPEAKER_01: Uh the phrase was memento mori.
SPEAKER_01: Remember your death.
SPEAKER_01: And they really, and when you're living in the Middle Ages, and you know, everybody's got gotta have 12 kids because only three or four of them are gonna survive.
SPEAKER_01: Or not if that, right?
SPEAKER_01: If life expectancy is low, plague is everywhere, you might die of a paper cut.
SPEAKER_01: It's hard times in in the Middle Ages.
SPEAKER_01: Memento more.
SPEAKER_01: People lived in the shadow of death, but not in a weirdly morbid kind of way, but in a sort of, I live in the light of eternity.
SPEAKER_01: And having these convictions about what happens to us when we die helps us to live well in light of eternity.
SPEAKER_01: Randy Dice here.
SPEAKER_04: I've been to some funerals, eulogies, we're given with such a low view of heaven.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, they're gonna get to play golf in heaven eternally, and it'll be so much fun and go fishing and all this.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, just give you a break.
SPEAKER_04: To think about heaven that way is to diminish what heaven is all about.
SPEAKER_04: It's about worshiping perfectly holy, holy holy god.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Perfectly.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I've shared this before.
SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a show called The Good Place that Suzanne and I like.
SPEAKER_01: Super clever, super funny, horribly wrong about everything having to do with the afterlife.
SPEAKER_01: But that when they finally get to heaven in the like the last couple episodes of the show, they get there and everyone is just dumb.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone is an idiot, like literally.
SPEAKER_01: They're all affected by this deep spiritual malaise because for hundreds and thousands of years they've been playing golf or they've been exploring the world.
SPEAKER_01: They've been doing all of the things that you might think of wanting to do in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: And at the end, they're just like, ah, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's all empty at the end.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't fill them, it doesn't satisfy them.
SPEAKER_01: You know, their solution to that is they put this door in heaven, and you can walk through the door, and then you cease to exist, and you're reabsorbed into the universe.
SPEAKER_01: And what that does is it adds an element of finitude that makes life after death meaningful again.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm just watching it and thinking like, your heaven sucks because Jesus isn't there.
SPEAKER_01: If heaven for you is just like an endless retirement on earth where you get to go to all the beaches and play all the golf and do all the things, it's gonna get old.
SPEAKER_01: It's like Dave Ramsey says like you have enough lobster, it's gonna taste like rubber all the time.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: But if you were if your conception of the afterlife is living and loving in the presence of an infinite God forever, there's no there's no bottom to that well.
SPEAKER_01: When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun.
SPEAKER_07: We've no less time.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no less time to sing God's praise than when we've just begun than when we've just begun.
SPEAKER_01: So that that's that's the reality of heaven.
SPEAKER_06: Here's the thing you can you can be in that that attitude of praise and gratitude and bless the Lord, oh my soul, let me not forget all your benefits, and from that position, you love everything that he made.
SPEAKER_06: So you still get to enjoy it's not that he takes anything away from you unless he has to.
SPEAKER_06: Right all the normal enjoyments of human life, you know, a good meal and or a game of thought can rise because they they are in that exactifies them, of course.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh Augustine he made a distinction between use and enjoyment.
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, we were made to enjoy God, was the chief end of man to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
SPEAKER_01: Uh all all the other things of creation are supposed to be means to that end.
SPEAKER_01: We use, in Augustine's sense, we use the things of creation in order to enjoy God.
SPEAKER_01: It's when we get that backwards that everything falls apart.
SPEAKER_01: We place our ultimate enjoyment in the things of this world.
SPEAKER_01: We do what Paul said in Romans 1, we worship the creature rather than the creator who's blessed forever.
SPEAKER_01: It's idolatry.
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes, you know, if your view of heaven is the endless round of golf, well, then golf is your idol.
unknown: Exactly.
SPEAKER_01: And you're enjoying that worldly thing.
SPEAKER_01: And it's depending on how you view your Christianity, you're using God as a means to that end.
SPEAKER_01: But again, heaven is the reality.
SPEAKER_01: Dying and going into the presence of Jesus is the reality that we will enjoy Him for His own sake.
SPEAKER_01: And then when we get to the new heavens and new earth, we get creation back.
SPEAKER_01: We get creation back the way we're supposed to get creation, where we can fully use all the things of this world that God has blessed us with in the right way, in the right measure.
SPEAKER_01: Use them as a means to the end of enjoying God.
SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
SPEAKER_01: That means we'll enjoy the things better than we ever could on this side of glory.
SPEAKER_01: If, you know, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_01: The lobster, the golf, the football, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_01: If that's our thing, and we're all about that, we'll get to the bottom of it and we'll be like Tom Brady after he's won his 17th Super Bowl.
SPEAKER_01: There's gotta be something more.
SPEAKER_01: But if we want God, if we aim for earth, I think C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis said this.
SPEAKER_01: Aim for earth, you won't get it.
SPEAKER_01: Aim for heaven, you'll get the earth thrown in.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So that's that's what this is saying to you.
SPEAKER_01: And that's this view of our dying and going to be with Christ helps us to maintain that kind of perspective.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, the the lobby is filling.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna pray for us, and we're gonna call it quits for today.
SPEAKER_01: Father, thank you for these great and precious promises.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lord, that we can live in light of eternity without fear, but with full assurance that we are yours in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, for those who lack that assurance, for those who are living in unnecessary fear, I pray that you would bring peace, that you would bring comfort, that you would bring a knowledge that Jesus did indeed pay it all.
SPEAKER_01: That there are no more hoops to jump through, and that when we die, we will go to be in your presence.
SPEAKER_01: And that will be better.
SPEAKER_01: Even if it's not as good as the new heavens and new earth.
SPEAKER_01: We can't even wrap our minds around that.
SPEAKER_01: But Lord, we thank you that you give it to us as an anchor for our hope.
SPEAKER_01: And I pray that you'd help us to walk in hope.
SPEAKER_01: This morning, as we come to worship you together, please, Lord, stoke the flames of that hope.
SPEAKER_01: Remind us of the life that we have in Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Help us to deny ourselves, to take up our cross, and to follow him all the way to the very end.
SPEAKER_01: We pray in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, man.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.