ARE WE IN FELLOWSHIP WITH THE DEAD?

You have come to the spirits of just men made perfect. — Heb. 12:23

That exciting line in Hebrews indicates that we are or should be in fellowship with the righteous and illustrious dead. That has to mean first of all that the dead are not really dead but very much alive. It shows that life really begins at death and that death is not the end of life. It underscores what Jesus h.as taught us, that “God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live unto him” (Lk. 20:38). The passage in Hebrews shows that we are as much in communion with the Church of Christ in heaven as we are with the ecclesia on earth. One line says that in coming to Christ we have come “to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven,” which refers to the relation we have to the church throughout the world. That we are all “enrolled in heaven” means we are really citizens of heaven and but pilgrims on this earth. Even though most Christians around the world will never know each other personally, they are nonetheless in communion with each other. We can all take heart that God’s church is out there, all around the world, and we can suffer together and rejoice together. That is fellowship.

Another line in the same context shows that as believers we have come to (into a relationship with) “the spirits” who have gone on to heaven and have been made perfect or complete. They are the church in heaven and we are the church that is still on earth. It is not that they are there and we are here. There is an important sense in which we have come to them. That too is fellowship. There is a sense then in which we are to commune with the dead.

This in no way allows for necromancy, sorcery, or black magic, for the Scriptures clearly condemn communication with “familiar spirits.” I am not suggesting anything akin to the occult. I am only seeking to draw an important truth from Scripture: that fellowship with God reaches beyond his community upon earth to include “innumerable angels in festal gathering” and “the souls of good men made perfect” (Phillips). I am not talking about receiving messages from the dead or additional revelation from some departed spirit, and I hold no brief for seances where some departed loved one is “conjured up.” All such practices are Satanic. I don’t even believe in reading horoscopes, not even for “kicks.” I avoid even the appearance of the occult.

But if the dead do not talk to us it may be that we can talk to them. While I am certain that God hears such meditation as he would any prayer, I am of the opinion that the departed saints might also hear. But I do not expect nor even desire that the dead respond. I can thank my mother for being the good mother she was or I can talk with all the church in heaven in appreciation for the great victories already won for Luther, Tyndale, Wycliffe, for the martyrs. I accept by faith that I am as much in fellowship with the dead saints as the living saints, and so I can “be with them” in some way. Otherwise “you have drawn near” (Phillips) to the church in heaven has little meaning.

The following quotations from Alexander Campbell, in a letter to his wife in 1841, show that at least one worthy brother agrees with what I am saying.

I have been walking in the woods, casting my mind over past scenes and past times, conversing one while with the dead, and at another communing with the far-distant living. I have placed myself amidst my domestic group some 20 years ago and the years succeeding, and have revived my family circle with its occasional guests.

We ought often think of the dead — not only of our own dead, but of the dead saints of other times. Their history affords us instruction, example and motive.

Campbell mentions various ones by name: his first wife and her parents “good father and mother Brown,” his mother and two sisters, and “the excellent Dr. Holliday,” and then asks, “Where are they and how employed? Think they never of those they left behind? And shall we never think of them who have gone before? Must we mutually and perpetually forget each other?”

Around our house Ouida and I are much in communion with both living and dead saints. The living from many states come by to see us, and we thank God for everyone of them, princes and princesses of heaven. But we also visit with those who have gone on. We have read and talked so much of William Barclay and Alexander Campbell that they are permanent guests. And presently Ouida is enjoying the company of Elisa Davies, whose lengthy autobiography she consumes, reading it over and over. She is Ouida’s hero, a spunky, committed, beautiful Christian woman if ever there was one, and Ouida gets blurry-eyed as she recounts her sacrificial life, such as serving in Alexander Campbell’s horne, attending his sick and helping him bury his dead.

Now don’t you think we can now and again speak up and say, “Dear sister Elisa, we thank you for your visit and for writing that great book” and such as, “Willie, we thank God that he gave you so many gifts and that you were willing to share them”?

If you don’t agree with such as that, then you will agree, I assume, that we have indeed come to or drawn near to the saints in heaven, as Heb. 12:23 says. Now you tell me what it means. — the Editor