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From Here to Forever
the commendation, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, ...
enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” when they have been dwelling
in His presence for long ages? Are the wicked summoned from
torment to receive sentence from the Judge, “Depart from me, ye
cursed, into everlasting fire”?
Matthew 25:21, 41
.
The theory of the immortality of the soul was one of those false
doctrines that Rome borrowed from paganism. Luther classed it
with the “monstrous fables that form part of the Roman dunghill of
decretals.
The Bible teaches that the dead sleep until the resurrec-
tion.
Blessed rest for the weary righteous! Time, be it long or short, is
but a moment to them. They sleep; they are awakened by the trump
of God to a glorious immortality. “For the trumpet shall sound, and
the dead shall be raised incorruptible. ... So when this corruptible
shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on
immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written,
Death is swallowed up in victory.”
1 Corinthians 15:52-54
.
Called forth from their slumber, they begin to think just where
they ceased. The last sensation was the pang of death; the last
thought, that they were falling beneath the power of the grave. When
they arise from the tomb, their first glad thought will be echoed in
the triumphal shout: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is
thy victory?”
1 Corinthians 15:55
.
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1
E. Petavel, The Problem of Immortality, p. 255.