THE INTERMEDIATE STATE

Dr. W. A. Criswell

Luke 23:39-43

2-12-84     10:50 a.m.

Welcome, the uncounted multitudes of you who share this hour with us on radio and on television.  This is the First Baptist Church of Dallas, the oldest church in Dallas; and this is the pastor bringing the message entitled The Intermediate State.  It is the first sermon in the doctrinal series on eschatology, the last things that consummate the age, the second coming of our Lord.  This concerns our death and what happens beyond the grave.

Let us turn to the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the Third Gospel, Luke 23, and I shall begin reading at verse 39 [Luke 23:39].  Our Lord is hanging on the cross, and on either side of Him was an insurrectionist, crucified with Him.

And one of them, a malefactor, which was hanged on the cross with Him, said, If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us.

But the other malefactor answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?

And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds:  but this Man hath done nothing amiss.

And turning to Jesus he said, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom.

And Jesus said unto him, Verily—

[Luke 23:49-43]

You know that’s a strange word.  In Hebrew it is “Amen.”  In Greek it is “Amen.”  And in English it’s a translation, “Truly, verily, absolutely, confidently, assuredly” [Luke 23:43].

Verily I say unto thee, sēmeron, This day, today thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.

[Luke 23: 43]

Where we go when we die; there is no one of us but that faces that inevitable fortune with intensest interest.  No one of us has ever stood by the side of an open grave, or has ever seen one whom we loved and lost for a while, but has wondered into what kind of a world do they enter when they leave us to go to be with God.  That is a mark of the image of the Lord Creator in us.  It is the man who remembers past history, who seeks meaning in the present, and who looks at death and scans the future for its meaning.  No animal writes history.  No other creation of God seeks meaning in the present.  And least of all is there any of God’s creatures who contemplate its death.  But the man does; we do.  We cannot hide our faces from it, nor can we deny our intensest interest in it.

This is the very keystone and heart of the Christian faith and the Christian message.  It has to do with resurrection.  It has to do with our Lord Christ.  In His triumph over death and the grave He brought an ultimate victory to all of us who face that inevitable judgment [1 Corinthians 15:55,57].  And our hope of a life beyond the day of death and our promise of a resurrection from among the dead is, I say, the very soul and center of the Christian message.  As Paul wrote in Ephesians, and as he wrote in the eighth of Romans, God purposes the entire redemption of the purchased possession, not only to save our souls, but also to resurrect and to redeem our bodies from the dust of the ground [Ephesians 1:14, 2:4-8; Romans 8:15-23].

When we look at death, there is manifestly a time period between the day that we die and the great resurrection day when we are raised from among the dead [1 Thessalonians 4:16-17].  For example, Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses have been dead thousands and thousands of years, but the resurrection of their bodies has not yet been consummated [Daniel 12:1-2].  Where are they in this interval, in this intermediate state?  Our answer can only be found in the revelation of the Word of God.  The mind of man cannot penetrate the darkness beyond death.

But the Holy Scriptures in the revelation of God brings to us a marvelous, a clear, and a lucid light.  For one thing, the Scriptures know nothing of the extinction or the annihilation of the soul.  All of those sentences that we read in the Old Testament that describe the waste and the chaotic nature of death refer to the appearance of the human body; they never refer to the soul.  In Holy Scripture the soul is presented to us always as being immortal.  When God creates the soul it is a gift forever.  He never takes it back, nor is it ever destroyed.  It is like matter: when God created substance, matter, He created it forever, eternally.  Matter cannot be destroyed; it is here forever.  It may change form: we may burn a log, but we don’t destroy it; it just changes into vapor or atmosphere or ash, but the substance of it is still there.  We cannot destroy matter.  Once God created it, it is eternal.  It is thus when God created the soul.  It is forever; it is immortal.

In that magnificent twelfth chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, the wisest man who ever lived said, “The dust shall return to the ground from whence it came; but the soul, the spirit shall return to God who gave it” [Ecclesiastes 12:7].  In the tenth chapter of the Book of Matthew our Lord said, “Do not fear him who can hurt the body, but not the soul:  fear Him who can cast both soul and body into Gehenna; fear Him” [Matthew 10:28].  In the sixth chapter of the Book of the Revelation, in the opening of the fifth seal, John says, “I saw at the base of the altar the souls of those who had been martyred for their testimony of Jesus Christ” [Revelation 6:9].  They were dead in this life, but they were alive to God.  John says, “I saw them.”  John says, “I heard them speak” [Revelation 6:10].  They were invisible to men, but they were not invisible to God, or to John in his exalted and supernatural state.  They were alive though they had been slain.

This is a truth that God forever brings to our minds in the revelation on these sacred pages.  And as I contemplate that revelation and consider that truth, I cannot but think to myself, “Could it be, is it possible that there is life apart from the body?  Do we still live when we are dead?  Could it be that there is spirit alive, cognizant, though there is no body and no substance and no matter to enclothe it?”  Then I remember:  God is Spirit [John 4:24].  He does not have body or form.  It was only in the incarnation that God became flesh and dwelt among us as a Man [Matthew 1:20-25; John 1:14].  Then I remember Hebrews 1:14; the angels are spirits.  They do not have bodies, and yet they minister, the Scriptures say, unto us.  Then as I consider it deeper I come to the conclusion the real world, the actual world, is the world of the invisible, of the unseen, of the intangible, of the spirit.  The transient, temporal world is the world of substance and matter, but the real world is the world of soul, of mind, of spirit!

Look:  Paul closes the most marvelous tribute in beauty, the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, he closes it with this word, “For there abideth faith, hope, love, these three.”  “There abideth faith, hope, love, these three” [1 Corinthians 13:13].  Suppose I ask one of you, “Come up here and lay on this podium a piece of faith, and let me look at it.”  And I ask one of you, “Come up here and lay a piece of hope on this lectern, and let me look at it.”  And I invite one of you, “Come up here and place a piece of charity, of love, on this desk, and let me look at it.  So this is faith?  Well.  And this is hope?  Unusual.  And this is love.”  It is ridiculous!  I approach the inane when I suggest a thing like that.  For faith abiding, hope abiding, love abiding, these are of the spirit.  They are invisible.  They belong to the real world.

  It’s an invisible process, but no less real.  So with our soul and with our spirit:  the real me is not what you see with your eye; the real me is on the inside.  The real me lives in this house, and I look at you through the two windows of my eyes.  The me is on the inside of this tabernacle, this wasting house.

So the Scriptures speak to us concerning that intermediate state when I die, against the day of my final resurrection.  And the Bible has a word for that intermediate state.  And they are exactly alike whether it is sheol in Hebrew, or whether it is hades in Greek; they are infinitely conversant.  They are exactly alike: Sheol in the Old Testament and Hades in the New Testament.  It is the place; it is the intermediate state into which we enter when we die.  For example, Israel, in the thirty-seventh chapter of the Book of Genesis, Israel is brought the coat, the many-colored coat of his son Joseph [Genesis 37:26-36].  His envious and jealous brothers have sold him to the Ishmaelites, who have taken him down to Egypt and sold him to Potiphar as a slave.  But they have to say something to his father, so they kill a goat, kill a kid, and they dip that many-colored coat of Joseph in the blood, and they take it to Israel, and they say to Israel, “Is this the coat of your boy?”  And Israel looks at it, and Israel bursts into indescribable grief, “This is the coat of my son!”  And he says, “An evil beast hath devoured him” [Genesis 37:33].  And in his indescribable grief, Israel says, “I shall go down to Sheol, unto my son, mourning for him” [Genesis 37:35].  My brother, an evil beast, Israel thought, had devoured him, eaten up the boy.  Yet he says, “In Sheol I shall meet him.  I go to my son.”  That’s the Bible [Genesis 37:35].

Or take again, in the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Job, Job cries, “O God, hide me in Sheol until Thy wrath be past, and then at a set time remember me!” [Job 14:13].  He did not cease to exist in Sheol, just that God would hide him there until the day of judgment had past, and then remember him [Job 14:13].

Thus it is that God speaks of our life beyond death, beyond the grave.  And the Scriptures say that Sheol and Hades are divided into two parts: Sheol, into Abraham’s bosom [Luke 16:22-23]; and Tophet, which is a word Isaiah uses in the thirtieth chapter of his prophecy [Isaiah 30:33], to describe a place in the Valley of Hinnom where sacrifice, where children had been offered to Molech, and it was cursed of God [Isaiah 30:30-32].  Abraham’s bosom, into which God’s people are translated [Luke 16:22-26]; and Tophet, where the unbelieving and the lost are condemned [Isaiah 30:33].  Now in the Bible Hades, in the Greek New Testament, is divided into two parts: one is called Paradise, and the other is called Tartarus.  Paradise and tartaros, or “torment,” and in the Scriptures they are presented as temporary [Luke 16:23].

If I had time I’d like to expound the fifth chapter of the second Corinthian letter of the apostle Paul [2 Corinthians 5].  There he speaks of the fact that Christianity, the Christian faith abhors disembodiment, as nature abhors a vacuum [2 Corinthians 5:2-4].  The very heart and soul of the Christian faith is this:  that we shall not be disembodied spirits, or as Paul calls them “naked, unclothed” spirits, but that we shall be clothed upon, we shall be resurrected, we shall live in a body, we shall be somebody [2 Corinthians 5:1].  You will be you, and I shall be I, and we shall be we, raised like our Lord was raised [Romans 6:4, 1 John 3:2].  And the Scriptures say that this intermediate state is temporary [Daniel 12:2].  In the twentieth chapter of the Book of the Apocalypse, Hades and Sheol are cast into the lake of fire to be destroyed forever and forever [Revelation 20:14].  They are temporary states.

Now last: when we are translated into that other world just beyond the grave, the intermediate state, what is our status as we enter the dark beyond, the day of our death?  To the one who is lost, to the unconverted, to the unbelieving, it is a dark and dreary and dismal creation.  In the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Luke that you just read, it’s called “torment,” torment [Luke 16:23].  In the third chapter of 1 Peter, it is described as a prison [1 Peter 3:19].  In the second chapter of 2 Peter it is named tartaros [2 Peter 2:4]. It is a place where the lost and the damned are kept until the day of judgment, when their works come before God and their evil deeds find an ultimate retribution [Revelation 20:13].  Finally, at the great white throne judgment they are raised from the dead; there they are judged and then forever cast into Gehenna [Revelation 20:11-15].

It is too horrible for me to think about the estate of the lost when they die.  But how beautiful and how precious if I can speak of the Paradise, the other part, the other half of Hades, into which we enter when we die. 

  And where is Paradise?  In the twelfth chapter of the second Corinthian letter, Paul says that he was raised up to Paradise [2 Corinthians 12:4].  Then he says, “I was raised up to the third heaven” [2 Corinthians 12:2].  The first heaven is where the clouds go by and the birds fly through, and the second heaven is where the stars shine, and the third heaven is where God is, where Jesus is.

Another thing about Paradise, where it is:  the Lord Jesus, in the second chapter of the Apocalypse, said to the church at Ephesus, “He that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God” [Revelation 2:7].  So the tree of life is in the Paradise of God.  Where is the tree of life?  In the twenty-second chapter of the Book of the Revelation it reads, “And I saw a pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.  In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life…and the leaves were for the healing of the people” [Revelation 22:1-2].  So the tree of life is in Paradise, and Paradise is the city of God, the New Jerusalem, that the apostle saw come down out of heaven [Revelation 21:1-2].  When I die, therefore, I go to Paradise.  I go to the beautiful city of God.  I go to the New Jerusalem [John 14:2-3; Revelation 21:2-3].

“Sēmeron, this day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise” [Luke 23:43].  Do you notice, “with Me…thou shalt be with Me.”  When our Lord went back to glory, raised from the dead and ascended into heaven [Acts 1:9-10], He took with Him this converted, saved criminal.  Can you believe that, a criminal in heaven?  He took with Him this malefactor.  “Thou shalt be with Me” [Luke 23:43].  Paul says, in the first chapter of Philippians, to be with Christ is far better [Philippians 1:23].  In the eighth chapter of the Book of Romans he says, “Nothing, nor death, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love and grace of Jesus our Lord” [Romans 8:38-39].  To die is to be with our Lord, “today thou shalt be with Me in Paradise” [Luke 23:43].