Of course some sceptics automatically presume that an absence of something must mean that the books aren’t to be trusted and that the concept of Heaven was introduced later to dangle a carrot in the faces of peasants and the concept of Hell was the stick attached to the carrot - but I don’t think that is correct – there must be a perfectly good reason why God would refrain from mentioning the afterlife in the Old Testament. Perhaps the wisest assumption, as we will consider in a moment, is that He was waiting until He knew people were ready for knowledge of such a concept. We see a synonymous example with Jesus’ refusal to be very direct in stating who He really was – He only becomes less furtive in the final days when He knows that His presence in Palestine was far enough in to avoid His name becoming just another cult name among those who were on the fringes of His ministry. And I think the same is true with regard to Heaven and Hell in the Old Testament – many great scholars have told us that surrounding tribes, cultures and nations were, in fact, very preoccupied with a religion or superstition of the afterlife, and I presume God saw how fruitless such beliefs were for them. 

 

I suppose the wisdom behind avoiding this type of lifestyle would be roughly similar to the way we try to avoid those fully ensconcing habits out of which people make gods of their own fancies, hobbies or interests. The man who likes watching the occasional game of football may well be missing out on the exciting passion that comes from supporting one’s local team; but the man who makes a god out of his allegiance to football and his team and lets the results affect every aspect of his life and every area of his emotions is not distilling from the sport the very best of what it can offer. Reading books is a wonderful pastime and very edifying too; but the lady who makes her books the only god in her life, to the point that she would quite willingly sacrifice friendships and most of the external world, is not getting the best out of literature or absorbing the real delights that make literature so wonderful. Now similarly any religion that is almost entirely focused on securing the post-life prosperity of its adherents and treating dead people as though they are still alive is in effect making a god of the afterlife. 

 

I ought, perhaps, to point out here that I am not in any way trivialising the afterlife, for in fact, even the Christian faith places a premium on our eternal destination over our earthly lives, but with one key difference - the Christians’ anticipations of being in Heaven with God are not anticipations at the expense of earthly diligence or commitment or dedication; we are promised an eternal blissfulness, but we do not let that deter us from our earthly duties. Through God’s stupendous grace, we get the best of both worlds.  

 

Having a relationship with my Creator means so much more to me than simply anticipating a paradisiacal afterlife – in fact, if ever I were to place too high a premium on the life I will have next (God’s promise ensures that I don’t have to) I should be taking away from my worship something very important and precious – God would be at the core of my living but with something else in mind beyond the intrinsic nature of making my relationship with Him central to my living. Much better that He is my focus for who He is, not for something that is to come. In fact, this must be one of the reasons why a Heaven already promised as a free gift of salvation is as it is – so that we are freed up to focus on Him without worrying about what we have done to work our way towards Heaven or how we have acted to improve our chances of making it there. This, I think, is vitally important in our staying clearly focused on God and not on extraneous things.

 

Given the foregoing assumption, it seems that what God is doing with us through the grace of Christ - averting our gaze away from the afterlife - He was doing to the people of the Old Testament too. He was revealing Himself to them progressively, knowing that such revelation would lead the world to His Son – but also to show them that desire for Him should be their true goal and that God Himself was a more than sufficient Person onto which their attentions should be solely focused. Perhaps to the people that predated the cross of Christ, belief in the afterlife would have been a premature interference on their growth, and in fact an unadulterated relationship with our Heavenly Father was the right point to start their growth. 

 

Let me put it this way, their efforts in understanding the whole picture of salvation and eternal bliss may not be much less sophisticated than those who were witness to, or subsequently able to take on board, Christ’s dying on the cross and His defeating death, but we do not say that their efforts in crystallising the whole truth of which they could be aware were raw and wholly unrefined, for I am sure that they would have known things about our Heavenly Father that we could scarcely imagine. But when it comes to the eternal significance, their efforts were, I presume, similar to a young son’s representation of a house that he sees his architect father designing in real life on a much more sophisticated scale. Of course he is only a boy and is not ready to absorb the full details of house construction. With his plastecine he can attempt a representation of what he sees his father doing; he can mould the square for the walls and main living quarters, he can shape a triangle for the roof, a matchstick for the chimney, and little indentations for the doors and windows. But no father, when he comes home from his own building projects claims that his son’s play model is insufficient because he has made an unsound structure with no blueprint for pipes and cable wiring – we would think him a fool if he did. His son’s effort may well be unsophisticated compared with his dad’s work, but they are the first steps of progression.  When it comes to the differing abilities in architecture they are the milk next to his dad’s solid food.  If his dad were a sensible man he would see that his son’s first steps towards a sophisticated attempt at architecture must begin by being crude and messy, and may even be a slight indicator that he will grow into his father’s successor and heir to the business.

 

Now in one sense, when it comes to the full picture of salvation and the afterlife, that must be what the Old Testament folk were like in comparison to those (including us) who can see the whole picture through the grace of Christ Jesus – they were making plastecine models to prepare us for architecture. And of course, God, in dealing with the Old Testament folk through relationship and circumscribed revelation is not just the sovereign protector of their limited understanding, but a loving Father wrapping them in the safety and security of His arms, away from thoughts of the afterlife. 

 

Now of course that too must be true of all of us, to some extent - even now there are of course things that we do not know (many things we will never know) because God knows that our knowledge of such things would be unbeneficial and would probably lift our eyes off of Him and onto something less helpful. God knows that the rational and decipherable world will reward those whose discernments emulate His plans for their betterment – that is to say, those that can appreciate and discern and live by the will of God are the ones who are truly blessed. 

 

Our apprehension of the afterlife can only really begin when we know the God of the afterlife, and I presume that had to begin by knowing Him in this life. For the folk of the Old Testament it must be the case that their knowledge of God was not sufficient for the concepts of Heaven and Hell to be introduced – presumably God did not want such concepts to be an undistinguished corollary of earthly living – He wanted them inextricable to a full and frank knowledge of His Person. I suppose if it were by some miracle possible for us to spend a few weeks worshipping God with the removal of any of our knowledge of the afterlife or the retrospective awareness of what Christ has done for us – a few weeks in which we could concentrate solely on worshipping our Heavenly Father - we might get a taste of the daily sustenance that the Jews of the Old Testament received, and inasmuch as it would be an experience created in miraculous circumstances and through which otherwise we could have no awareness, it would probably be of some temporary value to us*.

 

* That thought might be unduly conditioned by my own personal perceptions – I might be wrong about that. 

 

The reason the value could be at best a temporary value is clear for all who know that the Jewish relationships with our Heavenly Father in Old Testament times were precursors to the incarnation - God’s Son coming to live and die for us; the time when the next level of our relationship with Him would be realised by the people of the time and future generations all over the world. It ought to be noted that many of the Jews clearly missed this point about who Jesus was, and most still await their Messiah. This might also explain why so much of Judaism is secular these days, but that has not been central to our discussion here. The central point is that we know something about God that the ancient Jews could not have known - we know the price that Christ paid at Calvary and how it affects our relationship with Him; we are, if you like, the solid food to their baby milk, not by being better or more worthy or more exalted, but by living after the event at Calvary and seeing the price that God paid for the lives of everyone He created.