redemption to all the redeemed in sheol, and on the day of His resurrection He led them triumphantly into heaven. Since then, all who have died in the faith do not go into sheol, but pass directly into the presence of God so that only after the Cross could it be said, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” The wicked dead remained in sheol and are there today, as well as all the wicked who died since Calvary. There is no one in hell today, which is reserved for the devil, the antichrist, and the unsaved at the end of time. David the Psalmist speaks of the future, and his hope beyond the grave: “ I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Psalm 16:8-10). But he also is thinking about his soul, and the desti ny of his soul after death, and therefore, adds that while his body (his flesh) is resting in the sleep of death, “ thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.” Now the word which we wish to emphasize and notice in this verse is the word, hell. It is so translated in our King James Version. Now this is unfortunate, for the word in the original language is not hell but sheol. The place of the souls of the dead in the Bible in the Old Testament is called sheol. I wish that you would remember that word very carefully, wrongly translated so many times in the Bible by the word, hell. The word, hell, is never found in the Old Testament at all in the original manuscript, but wherever you find the word so translated it is always without exception a mistranslation of the word sheol. The English word, hell, in the English Bible occurs just thirty-one times in the Old Testament, and in every case it should have been sheol, and not hell. According to the Bible, the soul of man at death in the Old Testament, before the resurrection of Christ, went into a place called sheol, located in the center of the earth. His body went into the grave and was uncon scious and was said to sleep, while the soul went into hades in a conscious state, the lost in conscious torment, and the saved in conscious happiness. The soul of man at death is said in the Old Testa ment to go to the place called sheol; the same place in the New Testament is called hades and it is minutely described in Luke 16 by Jesus in the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The word used to designate the place where the body goes in kheber in the Old Testament, and mneneion in the New Testament. It is translated “ grave” and is the. place where the body goes at death in unconscious sleep. To confuse sheol and kheber, sheol and the grave, can only lead to increased confusion. Jesus definitely teaches a life after death. After the body is dead, God has power to cast both this body and soul into hell (Matthew 10:28). The Bible is the only Book which speaks with au thority about the future of those who die. It is the only source of reliable information which we have. Reject the Bible, and we are left in a fog of agnosticism, but accept the Bible teaching, and we have the only answer to the question, “After death—what then?” The clearest and most detailed teaching is found in Luke 16, where we have the words of our blessed Lord Himself, speaking with all authority concerning the abode of the souls of the dead. “ There was a certain
my flesh [body] also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt- shew me the path of life : in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand are pleasures for evermore” (Psalm 16:9-11). The Lord Jesus clinches it all in John 5:28. Hei;e are His words in answer to the question of Job, “ If a man die, shall he live again?” “ Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damna tion” (John 5:28-29). This moment of our death is already appointed by God, and when the moment comes we must keep our appointment with death. There is a time to be born, and a time to die, and when the time, already known by God and fixed by Him, comes, all the skill of the physi cian and the surgeon, all the wealth and the power and influence of man, cannot stay the hand of death. Wheth er it be king or peasant, rich or poor, great or small, young or old, it makes no difference, for “ it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” Do you realize, my friend, what that means? You may ignore the fact but it remains a fact just the same. I once knew a lady who would never permit anyone to mention death or eternity in her presence at all, but in spite of all her “head in the sand” philosophy, she has now been dead many years, and is already in eternity. w hen a man dies, he goes to only one of two places. I think we have made it plain that death does not end everything, but after death, what then? To answer this question by saying that some go to heaven and some go to hell, does not fully state the matter. For every man who dies goes to two places. The body returns to the dust, but his soul goes somewhere else. It is most essen tial and important that we remember this, for failing to carefully distinguish the destiny of the body and the soul at death leads to all sorts of confusion. At death the body goes back to the earth from whence it was taken according to the Word of God. Whenever the Bible speaks of the departed as sleeping, it always, invariably, refers to the body, never to the soul. There is no such thing as soul-sleeping taught anywhere in Scripture. This error has arisen from con fusing the grave for the body with the abode of the soul after death. Unfortunately this confusion has resulted from a faulty translation of our Authorized [King James] ver sion. In the original languages, the place where the soul goes at death is called sheol in the Old Testament and in the New Testament it is called hades. In our 1901 Re vised Version this error has been corrected, but in our King James Version the word, sheol, in the Old Testa ment is translated by various other words, all of them incorrect. In some places it is translated death, and in still others it is called grave, pit and hell. From this it is easy to understand how the place of the body, the grave, and of the soul, sheol, have been confused. The body always goes into the grave, and sleeps between death and resurrection, while the soul in the Old Testa ment times went to sheol: not asleep, but conscious, in the place of the departed dead, with memory, with thought and the ability to converse and speak. When Jesus died on the Cross to put away sin, He descended into hades and proclaimed the good news of
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THE KING 'S BUSINESS
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