The Certainty of Death
Death is the one absolute certainty of human existence. All men know they shall die — they cannot escape it. As Job declared, God will bring every man to death and to the house appointed for all living, which is the grave. The bodies of every human being take up residence in that house at their appointed time. Neither godliness nor wickedness alters this. Every holy man of old knew that his faith did not exempt him from death. Enoch and Elijah were the exceptions; to the rest of mankind, the word of God declares: it is appointed unto men once to die.
And yet the fact of death’s universality does not strip it of its solemnity. There is a time to be born and a time to die, as Ecclesiastes 3 declares, and the Scripture is full of its stark record — and he died, and he died, and he died. The relentless repetition is deliberate. It is designed to bring every man face to face with the one certainty he is most tempted to ignore.
Death and the Gospel Warning
It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment. This is not merely a theological datum. It is a warning with an edge. Willcock presses it with pastoral urgency: how you and I had better be prepared for that moment. The man who knows he must surely die ought to be making his calling and election sure, and seeking to die in the Lord. Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, says Revelation 14:13. But to pass from this state of existence into the next as a stranger to God and his grace is a horror that no words can adequately describe.
Jesus warned in Matthew 10:28 that God has power to destroy both soul and body in hell, and commanded his hearers to fear him who has such power. The wrath to come, as John the Baptist and Paul both describe it, is not simply wrath that arrives and then ends. A million years into hell, Willcock observes, it will still be the wrath to come — to come, and to come, and still to come, for all eternity.
The Intermediate State: The Purpose of This Series
Every Christian knows he will go to heaven and that there is coming a resurrection of the body. But many believers have a very unclear picture of the intermediate state — the period between death and the resurrection, when the soul is not with the body. Where is it? What is happening to it? What can be expected when death comes? The knowledge of these things brings immense comfort to the true believer, but only when the child of God properly understands what the Scriptures teach.
The series begins therefore not with death but with life — for before we can understand death, we must understand what life is. The Scriptures show that man is comprised of three parts: spirit, soul, and body. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 lists all three explicitly: your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless. Hebrews 4:12 distinguishes between soul and spirit as the two-edged sword of the word of God pierces to the dividing of both.
Spirit, Soul, and Body: The Nature of Man
The soul or spirit is the immaterial part of man, while the body is the material. In many passages of Scripture, soul and spirit are used interchangeably: Stephen at his martyrdom prayed Lord Jesus, receive my spirit (Acts 7:59), while 1 Peter 4:19 speaks of committing the keeping of our souls to God — the same reality, expressed differently. Willcock notes that the distinction between soul and spirit, while real — as Hebrews 4:12 makes clear — is not one about which Scripture gives us sufficient detail to be dogmatic. God knows the distinction; he has not seen fit to reveal its precise nature to man.
The foundational text for understanding the origin of life is Genesis 2:7: the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. The body was formed first, from dust. It was not alive. Only when God breathed into Adam the spirit or soul of life did he become a living man. Life is therefore not merely a biological phenomenon but a gift directly imparted by God. And the soul thus given is the immortal part of man — the part that does not and cannot cease to exist when the body returns to dust.