The dead know nothing?
The “Preacher” said (Ecclesiastes 9:5): “The dead know nothing at all.” That looks plain enough. It would be easy to say: “The Bible teaches that the dead either no longer exist or that after death while they might continue to exist they must be unconscious.”
Both those views are widely held. Atheists and “Conditionalists” (for very different reasons) share a similar view. The atheist believes that when a human dies he/she is obliterated; never to return. The Conditionalist believes that when a human dies the human ceases to be but that God will bring back into deathless life all those of all the ages who are embraced in his work in Jesus Christ. In the meantime however, on the Conditionalist view, humans cease to exist at death and that’s why “the dead know nothing at all.”
Then there’s the doctrine that’s often called the doctrine of “soul sleep”. Those who hold that view think that though humans experience biological death they continue to exist in a disembodied form. “The soul” survives biological death but it is unconscious until the resurrection when God re-embodies humans.
There are other ways to view the Preacher’s remark.
If he meant that at death the human simply ceased to exist, it’s possible that he was mistaken. We’re all aware that we mustn’t simply quote a text and say: “See? There’s what the Bible teaches as truth.”
In his confusion and agony Job said many things about God that were false to the core and in 7:9-21 he not only denies life after death he denies any possibility of restoration (see especially 7:9 and 21). It’s true he wrestles with the problem but in the end he gives more hope for a cut-down tree than for a cut-down human (14: 7-22). Without going into details God said Job’s friends had not spoken the truth about him (God)—42:7-8.
Good men and women can be mistaken in their beliefs and the Bible is perfectly willing to include their errors as well as truths. If this makes the Bible a more difficult book to work with and if it suits God for it to be that way then so be it. We’ll just have to become better students and listeners.
Then again, the Preacher might not have meant that death ended everything, only that death cut a person off from all knowledge of what is going on in life under the sun as well as cutting him off from the activities of this life as we now experience it. See Ecclesiastes 9:4-6. His language may only be the language of appearance in this life.
A psalmist in Psalm 89 responds to the praise God is given in 89:1-37 which concludes with God’s promise never to forsake David’s house or go back on his covenant with him (89:33-37). This psalmist protests that God hasdone what he said he wouldn’t do! He says (89:38-39, NRSV): “But now you have spurned and rejected him…You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust.” But this is the language of appearance resulting from actual experience during a particular period of trial. The psalm doesn’t end with an accusation that God is faithless so we need to be careful how we understand his earlier words.
A deeply troubled psalmist in 6:4-5 asks for deliverance from death because, he says, “No one remembers you when he is dead. Who praises you from the grave?” Psalm 88 is one long plea for rescue from a very ill man who has been forsaken even by his closest friends. He wants to know how his death can profit God and how God can show him wonderful things while he is lying in the grave (88:10-12). He wants to know if people in the graveyards sit up and sing God’s praises (88:10). None of this has anything to do with his views about life after death or a coming resurrection. He sees death as the disruption of life and all the things he regards as precious in this life. If we had said to him, “Do you think there is life after death?” he would probably have said, “I’m not in the least interested in that issue at the present time. I want life before death!”
I’m one of those who believe that something identifiable as us survives biological death. [Call it “soul” or “spirit”.]
I’m one of those who believe that Christians in some ways enter a deeper level of intimacy with Christ when they die (see Philippians 1:21-23 and click here for a little on that text).
I believe that mere “life after death” is profoundly less than the whole marvellous human story which comes to completion in a glorious resurrection when Jesus returns to obliterate death by resurrecting his redeemed to embodied immortality.
There are a number of profound truths that are not made known or fully developed in the OT scriptures; truths that have been made known and/or developed with the coming of Jesus. (See, for example, Ephesians 3:1-5, Acts 17:30-31 and 2 Timothy 1:7.) This means we should be careful how we use OT texts.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.