WHAT WE BELIEVE OF MAN by W. H. Ebert

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, April 15, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 16

WHAT WE BELIEVE OF MAN.

By W. H. Ebert

BY W. H. EBERT.

Having contemplated man in the light of philosophy and reason, tracing him through his existence here, and seeing that his career, whatever it may be, ends at last in death, we turn from his grave, and ask, Is it possible for him to live again? If so, how? Upon what may we base a hope? Nature fails us; reason fails us; and hope fails us. However much we may love life and desire to live again beyond the grave, we cannot hope so to live, without having some proper foundation upon which to base that hope. Nature furnishes no such foundation. Nothing less than a miracle repeated in each individual case, can bring the dead to life again. This ever has been, and ever will be, a miraculous act. Can it be done? Will it be done? There is nothing seen or known in man’s nature that denies the possibility of a resurrection; but many considerations unite in declaring that man may live again.

Man never could have originated himself; he is the result of some superior, efficient cause, and that power, or cause, is to him a miraculous one. The origin of his present life is a mystery of which he knows but little. He is born; he lives; but he does not understand how he lives. The phenomena of life are all above his actual comprehension. How life is the result of organized matter, he cannot fully know; but he sees that such is the case. He believes it; he knows it. And he sees, believes, and knows that these bodies die, dissolve into their original elements, and that life is ended. Yes, indeed!

He has been once begotten and once born, has once lived and once died. And now unless he can be born again to life, he cannot live again. The power that first gave body and life could most certainly restore them again. But will this be done? What authority have we for believing it will be accomplished? Philosophy furnishes no proof that such a miracle will be wrought. We turn to the Bible—a book divine. In it we find a revelation from Heaven to man. God, the Creator of man, has made known to him his origin, his history, his duties, and his destiny. In the absence of this information, all that he knows on these subjects is the uncertainties of philosophical speculation. The Bible is man’s intellectual telescope, through which he sees the distant future. By it he may explore the beauties and grandeur of a refined and purified world. In the distance, and beyond the shores of mortality, he sees it restored to its Eden state. He learns that he is offered a citizenship in the earth made new, not in its present degenerate condition, not in a state of rebellion against God and his laws. Immortality is offered to him, and to all mankind, upon the same conditions. He is made to see that the present life and the present world were forfeited by the rebellion of the first parents of our race; that death was threatened them, on conditions. Gen. 2:17. And because of disobedience they, and all their posterity became doomed to die, and return to dust again. Gen. 3:19.

Being no longer permitted to partake of the fruits of the “tree of life” (Gen. 3:24), corruption commenced upon man, and the seal of death was put upon him. It remains upon him. All was wrapped in death and gloom. The sentence was written, and stood unrepealed and unrepeatable: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Friends consigned their loved ones to graves from which they could have seen no way of escape, had not God revealed unto the world that the dead should be made to live again. Luke 20:37; 24:27, 44, 46. God made the revelation through the prophets that the dead should be raised up; that man, though he had forfeited his first life, and could not be saved from death, would be redeemed from that death to a second existence.

Raised again from the dead! A miraculous proposition! This would require as much, and the same, power as it first took to create man. The proposition that God would re-organize and bring to life again man’s dead and decomposed body, required proof adequate to its wonderful nature. Man could not have this hope without believing the proposition. He could not believe it without sufficient testimony. God did not ask him to do so. Sufficient proof was given him. The Father sent his Son Jesus Christ, who both declared, explained, and demonstrated to men that they should be raised from the dead; and that they should, in their second state of existence, or life, be held accountable only for their own actions in this life; that such second life should be an everlasting one, or eternal, if the uses which had been made of life here should have been such as to warrant it. And that then those who should have refused to conform to what is lawful and right should die a second time, and remain eternally destroyed.

Christ raised the dead. John 5:25. Many did hear his voice and come forth from the dead. The world wondered at the miraculous demonstration of his power. But it was yet more wonderful to be told that all mankind should, in some future time, hear that same voice, and come forth, and that, too, to a Judgment, wherein each was to receive his doom,—either eternal life or eternal death. John 5:29. Rom. 2:6, 7; 2 Thess. 1:7–10. It was thus that Christ taught; and, to confirm all that he had said, and all that the prophets had foretold of him, he submitted to death; not only that he might thus become a sacrifice for the sins of the world, but that his resurrection by the Spirit of his Father, might furnish, to the utmost, all the proof that could be needed, that the proposition of a resurrection of the dead was true; and that all men might have an assurance that they, too, would be, at some time, by the same power, raised from the dead.

Yes; Christ died; Luke 24:5–7, 27–44, 46; and the facts, that he died, was buried, and raised again from the dead on the third day, became the great cardinal points of the gospel of Christ. 1 Cor. 15:3, 4. This makes the testimony as full as it could be made to man, with his limited faculties, that there will be a resurrection of the dead.

The same “all” of mankind that died in Adam, shall be made alive in Christ. 1 Cor. 15:22. Christ so taught when he was here. John 5:28, 29. This will take place in the resurrection, when all shall be quickened into life again. A miracle will be wrought in each individual case. All will be raised to life; some, to die again; and some, to receive an eternal existence, in a world of glory and beauty.

We believe that man will live again. The foundation upon which to rest such a hope is a good one. It is not laid in man’s wisdom, but in the word and power of God. Man never even originated such a thought. That man could and would live again, was never taught by any philosopher in any age, until he had borrowed the idea from God’s revelation of it to man. While the true foundation upon which it was promised was soon lost sight of by an idolatrous and heathenish set of philosophers, the idea of life became incorporated into all their important traditions and superstitions. And they now are made to teach that man has an immortality of his own nature, dwelling in him; that it cannot die, and that he does not really die, and does not, therefore, need a resurrection to live again. And this was the teaching of the devil through the serpent, by the influence of which, sin entered into the world. Gen. 3:5. And so it remains to-day, one of the greatest deceiving falsehoods, preventing mankind from accepting salvation upon the terms of the gospel, by which life and immortality are brought to light by the resurrection of the dead. 2 Tim. 1:10. We believe that man will live again, by the same power that first created him,—the power of God,—manifested in the resurrection of the dead.