Do dead saints praise the Lord? The Psalmist says that they don’t. Read for yourself from Psalm 115:17-18:
The dead do not praise the LORD,
Nor do any who go down into silence;
But as for us, we will bless the LORD
From this time forth and forever.
Praise the LORD!
For those of us grew up in churches that teach about saints praising God in the afterlife, this text can come across as quite a jolt. It reads as if departed saints are just dead. No praise. No afterlife. Just dead.
To be sure, skeptics take these lines to indicate that the Psalmist has no eschatology. They would say that the Psalmist simply had no notion of heaven or of the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age. The Psalmist believed that when you die, that’s it. When your heart stops beating and you stop breathing, that’s the end of you. All that remains is the decay of your mortal coil.
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Jesus once told of a wealthy man who went on a long journey. Before the man left, he entrusted his wealth to three servants. To one he gave five units, to another just two units, and to the last he gave only one. Each received “according to his ability,” Jesus said. The servant with the [...]
